Power line

[drill7]

Are any of you affected by the new 500kV power line Altalink is building from Epcor's Gennesse power plant to Langden, east of Calgary. One of the proposed lines, the east line, runs about half mile west of me. The west line proposal is about 6 miles away. It won't affect me directly, but I will be able to see it.
I'm just wondering weather I should put a bunch of time and energy into protesting it when it will probably go in anyway.

[wd40]

Forget it move to Wyoming, I can see at the houses around Chestimere Lake and my protests fell on deaf ears.

[cakadu]

Yes, drill7, directly affected by it. If it goes the one way, it will mean two high voltage lines about 600 feet away from us. If it goes the other way, then we will be smack dab between two high voltage lines, with absolutely no desire to become canaries for the power companies.

I doubt that it will be stopped, so protesting it from that standpoint will be somewhat counter productive, not to mention they expect people to come at them with the "not in my backyard" scenario. Don't get me wrong, we don't want it at all, but it has got the green light to this point, will make some folks a PILE of money and it is a matter of where it will go, not if it will go. There are public hearings that are going to take place sometime next year - if you're affected, you'll be notified of the hearings - and there is also going to be an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) undertaken. The comment period on the Terms of Reference for the EIA closed on December 15th and there is no indication as to when the results of the EIA will be available to the public

The best solution that I can see is to not come at them with both barrels blazing, but have them build the "model" powerline and make it as state of the art as possible, with as little footprint being left as there can be. Let's face it, they have way bigger guns and a lot more ammunition than all of us put together will ever have. That isn't to say that you don't try and do something about it, quite the contrary. You just do it from a more productive standpoint.

[cowman]

I wonder why they didn't take this line further west onto crown land? The Alberta government is always ready to give big business a sweet heart deal...might have been easier than dealing with private landholders?
I suspect though they figure they can bulldoze it through and it won't cost that much because the land rates will be set at a fairly cheap rate? Big business can always count on the Tory government to look out for their interests in Alberta? If some ordinary citizen stands up and says NO, they will squash him like a bug!