Chief Peter Beatty of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation says leaders from Southend and officials from SaskPower recently held productive discussions on examining why that northern community is experiencing high electricity consumption rates.
Beatty suggested hiring a community power meter reader to get accurate consumption rates for bills.
He says the in a one-year period, the First Nation paid $700,000 for electricity for the community school.
“The total of the power bills that the Band paid for that one building was over $700,000 for one year. I said for that amount of money, you could hire one person all year to do one reading for that community once a month,” Beatty explained.
SaskPower says it will conduct a billing and consumption analysis of Southend rate payers.
Beatty says a recent study suggests residents in Southend consume two to three times more electricity than other northern communities.
“There has to be some way to level this out in terms of the amount of power being used. That’s what I really want to get at is why is it that our units on the reserve use so much more power than a unit that’s in the urban area,” asks Beatty? “I think those extremely high power bills, the high power usage there has to be an explanation a credible explanation.”
Yet SaskPower says the high power bills could be due to irregular meter reading, causing a catch up a few times a year.