Enbridge’s Weyburn area wind farm isn’t a breeze with residents

The fate of a proposed Saskatchewan wind farm is up in the air right now.

The Weyburn wind farm, or as it’s known by the company trying to develop it, the “Seven Stars Energy Project,” is a proposed project by Alberta company Enbridge Inc. that plans to build a series of wind turbines to provide clean electricity to the SaskPower grid.

If the project is successful, they will create a 200 MW wind farm that can power more than 100,000 homes in Saskatchewan.

But recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the project among people who live in the area.

The project is expected to be built in the Rural Municipality of Weyburn No. 67 and the Rural Municipality of Griffin No. 66, and some locals currently living in those areas are not happy.

Resident Kim Brady said community members have serious issues with the project. Brady explained there is a high density of acreages around Weyburn, even if the city population isn’t huge.

“Our concern is noise, flashing strobe lights at night, traffic, and the blades themselves when the sun bounces off of them,” said Brady, adding it causes a flashing.

“We talked to quite a few people in some of the other places around Saskatchewan and Alberta who’ve had these developments and let’s just say it’s impossible to leave your windows open at night; it’s like a constant hum,” said Brady.

The Enbridge company has held a few meetings with the community recently, but according to Brady, they had an open house that didn’t go well.

“They weren’t prepared for the number of people that were going to show up, and they weren’t prepared for the number of very upset people who showed up. They had a small room; they didn’t have any chairs. The room filled up, and there were a bunch of angry people. It was so full that it spilled out into the hallway of the hotel, and people wanted answers — they really couldn’t answer a lot of the questions,” said Brady.

As of 2024, there are nine wind farm facilities in the province. There are two in Gull Lake, one near Moosomin, one near Morse, one near Grenfell, one near Riverhurst, one near Herbert, and one near Assiniboia. The Centennial Wind Power Facility in Swift Current was actually the first wind farm in Canada to have a capacity of at least 100 MW upon its completion in 2006.

Alex McNichol, director of power development in Canada for Enbridge said he believes the problems with community concern stem from a lack of communication with residents.

“What we’ve been hearing from the community is that they have questions, they have concerns about the project,” said McNichol, highlighting they’ve only had a month and a half since acquiring the project.

McNichol said the open house was “to introduce ourselves to the community and start that process of engaging and finding out, what were the questions, what were the comments, what were the concerns, and leaning into well, how can we address some of those or how can we mitigate some of the concerns?”

Enbridge said they plan to host other community gatherings in the coming weeks to try and address a lot of the issues brought forward by the public.

If approved, Enbridge hopes to begin constructing the project by next year and have it completed in 2027.