Sparks will fly next week as hundreds of area residents meet for a hearing on the Heartland Transmission Project.
The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) opens its public hearing on the Heartland Transmission Project next Monday at the Edmonton Expo Centre. The project, if approved, would see proponents AltaLink and Epcor string a 500-kilovolt double-circuit power line through Sturgeon County past either Sherwood Park or Morinville to hook upgraders near Fort Saskatchewan to power plants near Lake Wabamun.
A three-member AUC panel will spend about five weeks hearing testimony from groups for and against the project, after which it will issue a ruling. That ruling will determine if the line will be built, the route it will take and whether or not part of it will be run underground or along less obtrusive monopole towers.
At least 25 groups have registered to speak at the hearing, says AUC spokesperson Jim Law, including Sturgeon County, Strathcona County and Responsible Electricity Transmission for Albertans (RETA). They've set aside room for several hundred people and will have a live video feed set up in an overflow room.
This will be a quasi-judicial hearing, Law says, and participants will be asked to behave as if they were in a courtroom. "Placards, signs and props are not allowed in the hearing room," he notes, and all phones and recording devices must be turned off.
RETA has lined up nine expert witnesses to make its case against the line, says board member John Kristensen, and expects to file hundreds of pages of evidence. "Our main focus of our submission is on undergrounding," he says, but they will also question the need to build the line.
This line will have a maximum capacity of about 6,000 megawatts, Kristensen says, or about half the current capacity of the province. "For this short line to have that capacity, it's goofy."
For and against
The Heartland Project has been in the works since at least 2007. Back then, the Alberta Electric System Operator called for new lines to be built to the industrial heartland region to power nine proposed bitumen upgraders and growing populations. Eight of those upgraders are now on hold.
The number of possible routes for the line has similarly dropped to two from four. In their application to the commission, AltaLink and Epcor indicated that they preferred to build the line above ground and have it run past Sherwood Park along the Anthony Henday utility corridor.
Opposition to the line has been fierce, with groups questioning the need for the line and its impact on health, property values and aesthetics. Some 500 people rallied at the Alberta Legislature on March 19 to protest the project, Kristensen says.
RETA will argue in favour of burying the line whenever it runs by schools, hospitals, or populated regions such as Sherwood Park, Kristensen says. The group believes this could be done for about $52 million — "a rounding error" in a project this big, he says. The group will argue that Epcor and AltaLink have inflated the cost of undergrounding four to 20 times in order to portray it as cost-prohibitive. "We're going to hopefully fell that cost giant at the AUC hearings."
Sessions cancelled
The main hearing will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays and from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Fridays, Law says.
The AUC had originally planned six community sessions to let residents address the panel if they couldn't make it to the hearing, Law says, but has cancelled the Spruce Grove, Fort Saskatchewan, Morinville, Bon Accord and south Edmonton ones since just two people signed up at each. Those people, plus 14 others, will instead speak at the Sherwood Park session on April 20.
The hearing starts on April 11. Visit www.auc.ab.ca for details.
