Major Survey About to Start to Gauge Yukoners’ Views on Electricity

As most people know, Yukon Energy is in the process of updating our 2016 Resource Plan, a document that outlines how to meet Yukon's electricity needs for the next 20 years (2016 to 2035).

A critical part of our resource planning work is to gather your input, so we can create a plan that reflects Yukoners' values in terms of the territory's electricity future.  Keeping in mind that all energy options have impacts and require trade-offs, we want to understand how you would rank the importance of affordability (keeping your power rates low), reliability (keeping the lights on), and a number of social and environmental factors such as protecting the environment and wildlife, respecting traditional lifestyles and heritage resources, supporting economic growth and jobs, and ensuring cultural and community well-being.

We have hired the Yukon Bureau of Statistics to conduct a phone survey, which will start as early as this week-end and will run over the next few weeks. The Bureau will survey up to 5,000 people in both Whitehorse and the communities, using a statistically sound method that will allow them to collect the opinions of a representative sample of Yukoners. The questionnaire should take about 10 minutes to complete. If you are one of those who receives a call, please take the time to do the survey.

Your answers will be confidential and the Bureau of Stats will not share any of your personal information, not even with Yukon Energy.

Once the Bureau of Stats has collected and compiled all the results, it will provide us with a report that we will make public - likely sometime in the summer.

In terms of how we will use the information, it will be one of several factors we will take into account when selecting what we believe are the best energy options for Yukon over the next 20-years. The other factors include:

Electricity cost
Reliability
Environmental impacts
Socio-economic impacts

All things being equal, we will give more weight to any potential projects that appear to have the general support of Yukoners based on the survey results.