Open letter to Premier Darrell Pasloski:
It was good chatting with you at your constituency barbecue last week. Thanks for the hamburger.
As I mentioned to you, Dr. Mark Jaccard, who just spoke to the select committee on fracking, believes, like the vast majority of scientists, that we have to transition straight to renewable energy now.
Natural gas is only a very short bridge to renewable energy. We’re already at the end of that bridge.
We are lucky in the Yukon, we have no liquefied natural gas infrastructure. We can still make a choice.
With $42 million we can switch those aging diesels to newer high efficiency diesels. We can use the leftover money to research and develop our new smart renewable electricity grid.
We’ll build pilot projects to prove different technologies like the electric thermal storage that heats homes and businesses and stores energy from hydro, solar, and wind. The smart grid will manage all of that.
It’s going to take a while to build that next flexible hydro project, which I think is an excellent idea. For now we should start to add wind farms to the Yukon grid because this will add extra energy security to our Aishihik Lake hydro storage facility.
These modern measures that I propose will keep our diesel use to a minimum and improve the quality of our electricity grid. This is a better alternative to the $42 million single-fuel LNG-electric plant that Yukon Energy is proposing.
At all of the public sessions on the proposed LNG project the Yukon people were overwhelmingly opposed to it. It’s time to listen to Yukoners.
For the sake of our children’s future, please cancel this project and lead the Yukon on its renewable energy path.
JP Pinard
Whitehorse