SaskPower has announced that they are expanding their shortlist for the upcoming Wind Power Project. 

"This is part of our commitment to build our capacity of renewable energy so we're at 50% renewable by 2030," explains SaskPower spokesperson, Jonathan Tremblay.

"We're doing that in chunks, so this is the first 200 megawatt chunk that went to market last year. We first went through a request for qualifications phase so that proponents know that we want to know if you're qualified to delivery such a project, and a lot of people bid." 

"We had originally wanted to limit ourselves to eight qualified bidders however, we found that there were more than eight who were actually very qualified to deliver so we actually increased that to 15 this week."

"Having 15 instead of eight, also means that we will have a bigger basin of qualified bids to choose from which should allow us to bring up some timelines and cut maybe three months off this requests for proposals phase so that that should end March 1st, next year and then we'll be able to pick a successful bidder and start building that wind farm."

Moving that timeline up also means they can start earlier on the plan for the next 200 megawatt wind power project. 

"Because to get to 50%, we have to increase our wind power capacity by about 700% so we need to be putting out these tenders every few years and we're doing the same on the solar power side."

SaskPower was not surprised with the response they received from the wind project. 

"Wind power has been growing over the past two decades especially in North America and we definitely knew before we started that there were a lot of proponents across Canada that would be bidding. We've been in close contact with the Canadian Wind Energy Association that also told us there would be a lot of interest. So it's very interesting to see the competitive bids that are going to be coming together so we can pick the very best one for value for our customers."

The site build will be up the individual bidders where they choose to build the wind farm. All proposals will have to be submitted to the Ministry of Environment for permits and approval. 

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