Erwin Heuck, P. Eng.

Managing Director

Background

I graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Industrial Systems Engineering from the U of R, and subsequently spent the next 28 years working at SaskEnergy/TransGas.

Uniquely, I spent the entirety of my career in planning, starting in the Operations Planning and ultimately directing both the Operations and Facility Planning groups as the manager of System Planning before retiring in 2018 as the Director of the Facility Planning group.   The bulk of my career has been understanding the operation and services of the $3B natural gas crown utility network.

This understanding allowed me to play a key role in developing and recommending new service offerings, understanding franchise issues and barriers to service, and engaging key industrial customers by supporting the customer dialogue process and key discussions tied to overall system capacity, service and supply risk.

I’m fortunate and uniquely positioned in that my utility network energy planning experience, the strategic planning sessions that I helped initiate and plan with SaskPower as a sister crown, have been invaluable in providing me with a very strategic and high level understanding and view of Saskatchewan’s crown utility energy service challenges and opportunities.

After my retirement in 2018, I developed an interest in the community-scale energy space as an area of new technology and innovation.  The December 2018 Rime frost event with electrical (and heating, fueling etc.) service loss to over 1/3 of the province was a key moment in my understanding of the fundamental lack of resilience in our energy service.  

Founding DEA Saskatchewan

In September of 2019, and with a dozen solar vendors as initial members, I founded the Distributed Energy Association of Saskatchewan, to specifically:

1. Advance non-utility scale energy generation, sharing and storage at the Distribution level, driven by the four D’s of disruption to traditional energy service (ie Decentralize, Decarbonize, Digitize and Decolonize).
2. Promote a planned and purposeful energy transition through collaboration between the technology providers and the Crown utilities in providing solutions to communities through a partner/project/pivot model of energy service transition.
3. Secure Federal & Provincial support for community scale, efficient, sustainable and renewable and non-renewable energy services and support transformational change through networking, information sharing and Distributed Energy competency and capacity building.

I firmly believe that it’s the right time and, at 3 customers per km of electrical infrastructure, Saskatchewan is definitely the right place to develop a meaningful distributed energy service that will drive efficiency, emissions reductions, resiliency and most of all collaboration and participation into our Provinces’ energy service.

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