If you find yourself in rural Yukon, chances are high you’re in a community powered by diesel. Communities here aren’t connected to a large electricity grid like Whitehorse, or most southern centres, but some are working to gradually wean themselves off fossil fuels nonetheless.

 Yukon First Nations appear to be leading the charge, increasingly turning to renewable energy in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while becoming more energy independent. There’s a solar farm in Old Crow, Yukon’s northernmost community, and a proposed wind project by Kluane First Nation. 

Now, the largest solar project the territory has ever seen — proposed by White River First Nation — has received a green light from the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board. 

Once fully operational, the array of solar panels will be capable of generating enough electricity to replace 350,000 litres of diesel per year — or 60 per cent of the fuel required to meet the community’s power needs, said Chris Cowx, the general manager of Copper Niisuu Limited Partnership, the First Nation’s development corporation.

He said it’s high time to stop using diesel — full stop. 

“You got a noisy, you know, miserable diesel plant blasting away and putting out noxious fumes all day. None of these things are preferable,” Cowx said.

“The fact that we run all of these northern communities almost invariably off of diesel for decades needs to change. That’s not environmentally responsible. It’s not healthy for the communities, and, frankly, it’s not very practical.”

How can Canada’s North get off diesel?

 $15-million solar project would produce 1.9 megawatts of electricity

The $15-million project, primarily funded by the federal government, covers an area of about seven hectares — roughly 10 soccer fields. The array will be built 1.5 kilometres west of Beaver Creek and made up of seven rows of photovoltaic solar panels capable of generating 1.9 megawatts of power (an eighth row could be added eventually). There’s also a battery that can store four megawatts of electricity — enough to power one home in Yukon for a third of a year. 

Cowx said that 31,000 tonnes of emissions would be cut over the project’s 25-year life: this includes diesel refinement and transportation emissions.

Sunlight this far north skirts the horizon during the summer months, so the solar panels will swivel toward the sun to maximize how much they can soak up, Cowx said.

The roughly 100 residents of Beaver Creek, located near the Alaska border above 62 degrees north, could eventually make money off the project through the Yukon government’s independent power producer program. The program enables communities and residents to sell the utility wind, solar and biomass energy they’ve produced for use in its grid. In this case, power bills for individuals wouldn’t change as the solar panels feed into the local grid, but the First Nation would receive the revenue rather than the utility.

Andrew Hall, the CEO of Yukon Energy, recently told The Narwhal the government is in the process of doubling how much the cottage industry can produce by providing financial and technical support to First Nations and municipalities.

Cowx said electricity would be sold to ATCO electric, the community’s power distributor, as soon as Beaver Creek’s solar farm is up-and-running, but couldn’t say how exactly much money could flow back to the community.

“It should crack nicely into the six figures per year,” he said.

Construction is to move ahead at the end of June to avoid the sharp-tailed grouse mating season, Cowx said. “We’re just working out who’s going to be doing the construction and sorting out the land ownership as well.”

Community also has plans for biomass plant

Beaver Creek’s plans to cut diesel usage don’t end with solar voltaics. The First Nation wants to cut its fossil fuel appetite by as much as 90 per cent with the eventual introduction of a biomass plant and district heating system that would supply buildings via a network of pipes.

Yukon is a land of extremes. In the summer, the territory is inundated with sunlight. Then the darkness comes, with the sun rising around 10 a.m. in the depths of winter. The hope is the power generated through biomass would compensate for the lack of light hitting the community’s solar panels at certain times, Cowx said.

“The diesel plant, with a little luck, will be nothing more than a backup,” he said.

 The community is in the process of speaking with forestry experts and companies that do brush clearing to see how much wood fuel is available to power a biomass facility. The plan is to start with powering one or two buildings using biomass, and then expand over the next decade, Cowx said. 

These plans are subject to negotiations with the Yukon government’s property management division, he said. Once the solar farm is established, biomass would be phased in.

What happens next?

The Yukon government is in the process of reviewing the evaluation report by the assessment board — the territorial government is the deciding body, with the power to accept or reject the assessment board’s recommendation or provide terms and conditions for it. 

One hitch is that White River First Nation still has unsettled land claims. It’s one of only three First Nations that aren’t self-governing in Yukon, with 11 that are. This means White River is still beholden to the Indian Act and has less jurisdiction over certain affairs. Because of this, additional consultation between the Yukon government and the First Nation could occur beyond the 30-day evaluation period generally given to such projects, said Colin McDowell, director of lands management, a branch of Energy, Mines and Resources. In sum: it could take a bit longer than usual.

Asked if there could be any changes to the recommendations, McDowell said, “We wouldn’t want to telegraph where we’re going with this necessarily until the end.

A lease still needs to be established for the solar project site, among other things, which the Yukon government would need to sign off on.

“That’s gonna take some time,” McDowell said.

Completion of Old Crow solar farm delayed by coronavirus travel restrictions

Meanwhile, Old Crow’s solar project is nearing completion, meaning Yukon’s only fly-in community is about to rely less on diesel generators — some of which date back to  the 1970s. Vuntut Gwitchin Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm said the project would displace 189,000 litres of diesel per year. Over its decades-long life cycle, this would equate to a 1,270-tonne reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, including those that come from flying diesel fuel into the community. 

“What we are doing is we are Indigenizing economies, we are Indigenizing contemporary systems,” Tizya-Tramm said, adding that the technology dovetails with traditional principles of environmental stewardship. “I’m really a strong believer that these are simply tools and we may look at them as tools of colonial modern culture, but it does not mean that they can’t be adapted.”

While Tizya-Tramm said Old Crow’s array is the largest of its kind in the circumpolar North, generating 940 kilowatts per year, it’s still smaller than what’s proposed for Beaver Creek. Nonetheless, once online, the system will meet one-quarter of Old Crow’s energy demands per year.

The First Nation already has a purchase agreement in place with ATCO Electric Yukon. Through that agreement, Tizya-Tramm said the solar array will generate roughly $250,000 per year, which will flow back to the community.

But, like so many plans in place before the global pandemic hit, Old Crow’s are temporarily on hold. The solar farm was supposed to be completed on June 21, until that was derailed by COVID-19. The microgrid controller and 616-kilowatt battery have yet to be shipped to the community, Tizya-Tramm said, and, because of travel restrictions, it’s unclear when they will arrive.

“Our solar project caught the COVID virus,” he said.

 The current plan is to have the solar farm up-and-running in September — without these components, which Tizya-Tramm said aren’t essential. While the system won’t be fully-operational, it will still be able to generate supplemental energy for the community.

“We still feel that it’s really important to get it going this year,” he said. “We don’t want to let these setbacks take this opportunity away from us.”

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YELLOWKNIFE — It’s an expensive and sad reality that the universal sound of the North isn’t the howling of sled dogs, the mesmerizing joy of throat singing, the squeaking of boots on supercooled snow. The real sound — the one that’s consistent from Burwash Landing, Yukon, to Pond Inlet, Nunavut — is the clattering rumble of the diesel generators keeping the lights on.

They power every off-grid community in Nunavut, Nunavik, the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Labrador without exception — and most northern communities are off-grid. Diesel generators even keep the lights on in some of the larger centres, such as Iqaluit. Some communities have supplemented diesel with alternatives such as solar or wind, and others have plans to do so, but the pattern remains: up here, diesel is king.

That means nearly every electron flowing through every lightbulb in Pangnirtung, every BTU of electric heat in Norman Wells and every Netflix binge in Kuujjuaq has to be shipped in by truck, barge or plane.

In Paulatuk, N.W.T., this summer, the annual diesel barge never arrived when extreme fall ice conditions shut down marine traffic through the area.

“The community was running out,” recalls Aaron Ruben, who works in the hamlet office.

The territorial government stepped in to fly 600,000 litres of diesel to the community of 265 people to keep the generators running. Moving that fuel, plus some other supplies, cost $1.75 million over dozens of flights. It was either that or Paulatuk would go dark.

“I’m not sure what would have been the next step,” Ruben says.

The next step when the Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung’s diesel generator caught fire in April 2015 — with temperatures dropping as low as -17 degrees Celsius — was that residents were advised to gather in the school gym to stay warm. Rotating outages lasted for days, during which people had just enough power to warm their homes before the power would cut off again. Hospital patients were evacuated to Iqaluit.

The machine that caught fire was among the many outdated diesel generators plaguing the territory. The Qulliq Energy Corporation, which supplies power to Nunavut’s communities, says 13 of its 25 generators are already beyond their expected lifespans.

“[Qulliq]’s operating cash flow is…not sufficient to fund the replacement of the older power plants,” it said in a report in 2017. Instead of being able to look ahead, the utility is treading water. The $54 million it spends each year on diesel is keeping it from investing in anything new — even new diesel plants.

The energy corporation burns 55 million litres of diesel each year to provide power to 38,000 people.

The situation has become sufficiently expensive and unsustainable that the federal government has stepped in with funding for a multi-pronged approach to reduce the North’s dependence on diesel. But it’s a complicated problem, and some of the proposed solutions revert back to old habits.

Map of remote communities in Canada that are dependent on diesel. Source: Waterloo Global Science Initiative.

New solutions or old habits?

The Northwest Territories and Yukon have energy grids that include large-scale hydro dams. In Yukon, fast population growth and increased energy demand from electric heating means the utility, Yukon Energy, is scrambling to bring in new power.

Its solution? Diesel and liquefied natural gas (LNG) generators.

“Maybe 10 months of the year now we’re burning LNG,”  explains Cody Reaume, energy analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society.

That isn’t much of a solution, according to Craig Scott, executive director of Ecology North, a non-profit that works on issues like climate change, waste reduction, water quality and food sovereignty.

“It’s not much better than burning diesel,” he says, “because there’s huge methane fugitive emissions from fracking and pipelines.”

In the Northwest Territories, the cornerstone of the plan to reduce diesel is expanding an already controversial dam, and building transmission lines to the diamond mines northeast of Yellowknife.

Inside an empty fuel container at Yellowknife’s tank farm. Photo: Pat Kane

A problem worse than carbon

The reality of the North is this: it’s cold, it’s far from the rest of the country and its people are spread out over an area that makes up half of Canada. It has the highest cost of living of any part of the country. That cost extends to industry, which pays the same high prices for fuel and groceries as everyone else. That makes it harder to turn a profit, which hinders growth.

These factors conspire to create an extremely energy-intensive society, without a lot of clean or affordable options for electricity, transportation and heat. But this system is a relic of a previous generation, when other options were not available and the majority of the problems that come with diesel were not fully understood.

Diesel generators are spitting out greenhouse gases 24/7, contributing to climate change in a place that is seeing the most dramatic impacts of global warming anywhere on the planet — but they represent a minor contribution to the overall picture. Despite the carbon intensity per person (about twice the national average), the share of Canada’s emissions coming from the North is a tiny fraction of the country’s total; in 2015 all three territories produced 2.3 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, just a third of a percentage point of Canada’s 722 megatonnes.

To put it in perspective, when stacked against Canada’s oil and gas industry’s emissions over a year, industry would produce more than the territories by lunchtime on January 4th.

But greenhouse gases aren’t the only problem with diesel generators.

Environment Canada lists dozens of chemicals known to be released in the burning of diesel, including mercury, formaldehyde and sulphur dioxide. In Iqaluit alone, diesel is responsible for producing about 290 litres of formaldehyde each year.

Diesel exhaust has been unambiguously labelled as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

“Diesel engine exhaust causes lung cancer in humans,” Dr. Christopher Portier wrote in a statement from the UN International Agency for Research on Cancer. “Given the additional health impacts from diesel particulates, exposure to this mixture of chemicals should be reduced worldwide.“

A dizzying patchwork of federal programs is incentivizing people, businesses and communities to reduce their reliance on diesel. It’s a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms that together represent billions of dollars being thrown at the problem.

“Money is starting to flow,” says Dave Lovekin, director of the Pembina Institute’s work on renewables in remote communities.

But Lovekin says much of the money is not being deployed in a way that encourages Indigenous participation or solicits local knowledge.

“I think one area that is lacking is policies from governments and utilities that support Indigenous inclusion in developing these projects,” he says. “There’s a lot more work needed to work with and advocate and push for better policies that Indigenous communities can participate in.”

Wind farm at Diavik diamond mine in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Diavik Diamond Mine

Diesel spills often unreported, unknown

Governments are trying to reduce diesel use, in large part due to their desire to lower emissions. But a lot of that diesel never even makes it to the generators; instead, it spills out into the environment from storage tanks, or from the trucks, pipelines and ships that deliver it to the communities.

More than 9.1 million litres of diesel has been spilled in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut since the 1970s. More than half of the leaks are from trucks and storage tanks.

In Yukon, those numbers are vague at best. The government knows a lot of diesel has ended up in the environment, but has a hard time pinning down the exact number due to historically lax reporting. Looking at what records are available, government analysts came up with a total of at least 219,000 litres, but say that is definitely an underestimate.

“A large amount of the fuel spilled over the last 40 years is unreported, and frankly unknown,” says Cedric Schilder, environmental protection analyst for the Yukon government. “There was a whole period of time where it was pretty cowboy.”

All the diesel in Yukon needs to be trucked in one load at a time; there are no ports or pipelines connecting the territory to the south.

So it’s not surprising that when it does make it to its destination, diesel produces the most expensive power in Canada.

Sky-high electricity prices

The average electricity price in Canada is about 11 cents per kWh. Northwest Territories and Nunavut customers can expect to pay at least three times that.

In Kugaaruk, Nunavut, the price for a residential customer is currently $1.12 per kWh — more than 10 times the national average. Those prices are subsidized; the average unsubsidized diesel price across Canada, according to a 2015 engineering journal article, is $1.30 per kWh.

That’s hamstringing housing agencies whose budgets are eaten up by the cost of heating. Power and fuel alone cost the Nunavut Housing Corporation about a quarter of its operating budget in 2016-2017.

By comparison, the B.C. public housing corporation spent less than one per cent of its billion-dollar budget on total utility costs that year.

Heating makes up the lion’s share of northern energy use overall, and doesn’t require fancy new technology. Scott of Ecology North is unsurprised that this relatively simple change gets less attention than electricity.

“The focus is on electricity because it’s easy,” he says. “People can see it.”

But efficiency retrofits to homes and businesses, and switching to wood or wood pellet stoves, can be as effective as switching energy systems.

Without those kinds of retrofits and changes, heating can be expensive enough that some families are forced to do without — and living in a cold home can increase the risk of physical and mental health problems. According to an editorial from the British Medical Journal, the risk of respiratory illness doubles among kids living in cold homes, while risk of cardiovascular disease and arthritis grow among adults. Adolescents see a fivefold increase in mental illness.

“It’s probably the most pressing issue facing many off-grid communities,” says Nick Mercer, PhD Candidate in the department of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo.

Mines run on ‘phenomenal’ amounts of diesel

All of this — the high cost of electricity, the billowing emissions, the uncertainty of delivery and the likelihood of spills — is causing even mining companies to think twice about working in the North.

Agnico Eagle has two mines near Baker Lake, Nunavut; one, the Meadowbank mine, is in full production while the other, Meliadine, is under construction. Together the two mines need 130 million litres of diesel fuel per year, at a cost of about a dollar per litre. Eighty million of those litres are burned annually to generate electricity.

It’s a “phenomenal” amount of fuel, the company’s vice president of Nunavut operations, Dominic Girard, tells The Narwhal. Agnico Eagle buys nearly two and a half times as much diesel each year than the government of Nunavut, which owns the power corporation.

The company is planning to install wind turbines at the Meliadine mine that would cut those needs down. The turbines wouldn’t eliminate the need for diesel entirely — only about 15 per cent of it — but that would still amount to millions of dollars saved per year.

The first three of 12 giant wind mill blades, each 35 metres long, are prepared for the trip to Diavik diamond mine. The German-made blades will power a quartet of wind generators, the first such installation at a mine in Canada. Photo: Diavik Diamond Mine

A wind turbine is installed at Diavik diamond mine. Photo: Diavik Diamond Mine

Other mines have already taken up that challenge. Diavik and Raglan mines both employ wind power in the North to offset their diesel demands, a model Girard says Agnico is looking at in developing its own project, but with a twist: he wants them to be owned by the local Inuit community. The details of that arrangement haven’t been worked out, but he says it could be mutually beneficial.

“We’re not an energy producer — we’re a miner,” he says, adding turbines could be in place by 2021.

The turn to local, Indigenous ownership in energy projects may be just what’s needed to help many remote communities kick diesel once and for all.

Indigenous-owned projects illustrate path forward

The small Arctic hamlet of Old Crow, Yukon, plugged in its first solar panels in 2009. Producing about a fifth of one home’s energy requirements, or 3.3 kW, it was a modest start.

That modesty is all gone now.

Old Crow has ramped up its commitment to solar and will soon be producing as much as 940 kW — enough to offset 24 per cent of its diesel use over the year — and completely shut down the generator during much of the summer. In one community, some of the time, there can be quiet.

“We burn a lot of fuel up here per capita and we’re trying to reduce that,” William Josie, director of natural resources for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told The Narwhal’s Matt Jacques in March 2017.

“Anything that affects our community, we want to have control over. That’s our goal with this project, is to have ownership over the facility.”

Meet the First Nation Above the Arctic Circle That Just Went Solar

Similarly, Burwash Landing, Yukon, is building its own $2.4 million wind installation that will displace a fifth of its diesel needs.

In Nunavik, a joint venture between the Makivik Corporation and the Fédération des Coopératives du Nouveau-Québec was founded in 2017 to deliver renewables to its communities, where 100 per cent of the electricity is currently provided by diesel.

On the doorstep of the oilsands, in Fort Chipewyan, Alta., a solar project received a $3.3 million provincial grant in early February. The new panels and batteries will increase the community’s solar electricity production more than sixfold, and provide a quarter of its energy. It will be Canada’s biggest solar project in a remote community.

But in the North, these small-scale, locally owned projects are the exception. Lovekin, of the Pembina Institute, says that may start to change with new policies.

“One shift that we’re seeing is government starting to open power up to independent power producers,” he says. Yukon, for example, recently introduced an independent power producer policy that includes remote communities. Nunavut is exploring independent power production options as are other provinces

“Good things are happening,” Lovekin says.

Across the mountains, however, the government is pushing for an expansion of a 60-year-old facility. The lynchpin of the Northwest Territories’ plan to reduce diesel use is expanding the Taltson River dam.

The hydropower station north of Fort Smith has been credibly blamed for inspiring the territorial government in the 1960s to force out the community of Rocher River, which today sits abandoned at the edge of a degraded river.

Adding a new power generator, triple the size of the current one, makes up 44 per cent of the territory’s planned carbon reductions under the Pan-Canadian Framework.

In Nunavut, large-scale also appears to be the favoured approach, but that hasn’t caught on. A two-part hydro plan in the works for Iqaluit since 2005 (with $10 million spent so far) has ground to a halt due to a lack of further funding.

A wind turbine at Diavik diamond mine in the Northwest Territories. Photo: Diavik Diamond Mine

‘Not all technology will work at minus 40’

Pamela Gross grew up in and around Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, where she is now the mayor. The hamlet had four small wind turbines installed in 1987, when she was just a child.

“I remember them as a kid,” she says. “We had a few of them, then some of them started falling over.”

The four turbines lasted just four years. Another wind turbine was installed in the community a few years later, larger than the first four. It was torn apart in a blizzard just eight years after it was installed.

The realities of extreme weather are slowing progress toward distributed, small-scale power projects everywhere in the North.

Wind power is not alone in facing challenges particular to the climate. Small-scale hydroelectricity, which has been deployed successfully in off-grid communities in B.C., runs into problems with ice buildup in frigid northern waters.

“If that can be overcome, then micro-hydro can be feasible for many northern communities,” says Robert Cooke, a technology officer with the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, which has been looking at how best to get distributed energy systems working in the North.

Eight Nunavut communities have been studied for micro-hydro potential. Costs are high, but in Arviat, for example, a government analysis determined that a $9.8 million micro-hydro site could more than meet the entire community’s peak energy needs.

A plan to replace diesel with a wind-powered microgrid in Iqaluit (including batteries to store energy) recently won the CanInfra Challenge, a competition for infrastructure solutions. Its proponents said a high upfront cost would save $378 million over 20 years, including carbon tax costs, in that one community alone. The model, they suggested, would be scalable to other remote communities as well.

Ultimately, though, the climate determines what works and what doesn’t.

“Not all technology will work at minus 40,” says Cooke.

Just getting the materials to where they’ll be installed is a challenge. When Diavik installed its wind turbines — custom-designed to withstand temperatures up to -40 Celsius — at the Lac de Gras mine, the blades were the largest objects ever to be hauled in along the long ice road connecting Yellowknife to the mine. It took 60 truckloads, using purpose-built trailers, to bring all the materials to the site.

Construction of the turbines at Meliadine and Meadowbank will be planned around the barge season. One year the foundations will arrive; the next, the turbines themselves. If complications arise — for example, if heavy sea ice or bad weather slows the delivery — the entire project could be set back a year or more.

There have been successes so far despite the headwinds. In Colville Lake, a Northwest Territories hamlet of around 150 people, solar cells work well enough that in the long days of summer — when peak energy demand is lower and the sun is shining brightly — the diesel generator can be switched off entirely now and then.

“Community members talk about how important that project had been,” says Cooke — not just for energy savings but for empowerment of a more personal nature.

He says people felt as though they themselves were invested in the success of the project, lending it a greater significance than if the project had been decided upon and followed through solely by outsiders.

That approach also makes projects more likely to succeed long-term. In remote places, Cooke says building capacity so that locals can operate and maintain the infrastructure is just as important as building the actual turbines or solar panels.

The cost savings can be significant, too; the wind proposal that won the CanInfra Challenge estimated a project in Iqaluit — even at a cost of more than $230 million — would pay itself off within a decade and then the community will save nearly $30 million a year compared to the status quo.

Self-sufficiency has always been part of the northern way of life. Diesel, with its long supply chain and high cost, runs directly contrary to that spirit. That’s where Cooke says alternatives have an edge — and why, with careful planning and a lot of work, they may finally be able to edge out fossil fuels.

“On a basic level, if you look at wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy, it’s sustainable and very much in line with traditional values.”

*Thank you to data scientist Joshua Cook for the help crunching spill database numbers.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

There have been delays, exemptions, backtracking and threats of lawsuits — but the Pan-Canadian Framework is ever so slowly inching the country towards a low-carbon future.

Unfortunately, the same can’t exactly be said about the country’s 292 off-grid communities, most of which are Indigenous. Roughly 86 per cent of off-grid communities are primarily dependent on diesel for generating electricity.

The federal government recently allocated $220 million over six years to help such communities transition to renewables, a marked increase from the $9 million doled out over the past decade. But calculations indicate that it’s not nearly enough to deal with the 450 megawatts of installed diesel in Canada.

“It’s really a drop in the bucket,” said Nicholas Mercer, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo and expert on off-grid diesel-reliant communities. “Over six years, that works out to less than five megawatts per year, and that’s only if you’re investing in infrastructure.”

Mercer said the current trajectory will only address around six per cent of annual demand, potentially leaving hundreds of communities dependent on diesel. And that’s a hugely concerning possibility for environmental, social and economic reasons.

Nunavut pays $60 million a year in diesel subsidies

The one and only upside to diesel generation is that it has extremely cheap upfront costs.

Mercer said that diesel in an off-grid community costs around $1,500 per installed kilowatt, whereas a solar or wind installation ranges between $7,000 and $8,000. That means that a 100-kilowatt diesel generator comes at about $150,000, compared to $700,000 or $800,000 for the same capacity from renewables.

That can be a significant benefit in a cash-strapped community — but it’s the only one, and it dooms communities to a string of downsides.

Diesel fuel costs a ton of money for communities. While the average Canadian consumer pays between seven and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour, the unsubsidized cost of diesel is about $1.30. As a result, governments have to heavily subsidize communities. A recently published report from the World Wildlife Fund Canada found that the Government of Nunavut pays $60.5 million every year in diesel subsidies.

The Pembina Institute reports that Canada’s off-grid communities collectively consume between 90 million and 120 million litres of diesel on an annual basis. That’s enough diesel to run all of Toronto’s Go Train system for five and a half years.

While related greenhouse emissions aren’t huge — after all, the communities and electricity demands are fairly small — the use of diesel results in a per-capita electricity carbon footprint that’s over double the national average.

There’s also enormous risk of diesel spills. Recent investigative work by Christopher Pollon indicated that 2015 saw 830 diesel spills in five provinces — and those are only the ones we know about. Attawapiskat First Nation in Northern Ontario is still cleaning up a spill of almost 30,000 litres of diesel from 1979. These can lead to a wide range of human health effects, including cancer.

Finally, there are the social impacts. Diesel generators tend to be old and unreliable, leading to frequent power outages; Mercer said that Pikangikum First Nation in Northern Ontario loses about 20 per cent of classroom education time because of outages. Many are also faced with “load restriction,” which occurs when peak demand reaches 75 per cent of generation capacity and severely restricts potential jobs and growth.

“You can’t build new homes and connect them to the grid, you can’t add new businesses to create opportunity for the community, you can’t invest in infrastructure upgrades,” Mercer said. “You can’t do anything that will increase load. This is a major issue in Canada.”

Capacity training key for remote communities

Dave Lovekin, senior analyst for Pembina Institute specializing in renewable policies for remote communities, said the design of the new funding is also important because it specifically carves out money for capacity training, something which had previously only been lumped together with the overall program. This means that communities will be able to receive money specifically for training and education so that local residents can fix, maintain and order spare parts themselves.

Judith Sayers, president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said that Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations near Tofino serve as a great example of this in action — they built two small-scale hydro projects in partnership with the Barkley Group and are now working on a third on their own.

“They’ve built enough capacity that they have enough confidence to do this one on their own,” she said in an interview. “That’s what we want to see, right?”

As chief of Hupacasath First Nation, Sayers oversaw the construction of the 6.5 megawatt China Creek run-of-river hydro project. Unlike many First Nations which were only accepting royalty agreements, Hupacasath retained a majority ownership stake in the project and sell excess electricity to BC Hydro.

Approval of Site C dampens potential for Indigenous-owned renewables

Experts said that kind of Indigenous participation and ownership of renewable projects is a crucial part of success.

But Mercer noted that both the state and private sector can often view Indigenous communities as “testing grounds” for technologies or the “low-hanging fruit” of greenhouse gas reductions, which can come across as forcing projects on a community and undermining political self-determination.

“Often, communities are bombarded with consultants and companies that come and say ‘hey, have we got the technology solution for you,’” Lovekin added. “Communities are often over capacity and have a tough time getting past the sales pitch and determining which technology will actually work. It’s a valid concern and communities need more support in this regard to lead instead of dealing with consultation fatigue.”

In British Columbia, there’s yet another obstacle. Sayers said that since the provincial NDP government gave the go-ahead to the Site C dam, BC Hydro has quit taking any applications for new renewable projects that would sell power to the grid. So while First Nations can still build projects that help them transition away from diesel and become grid-independent, they’ll lose out on a lot of potential jobs and revenue due to not being able to sell excess electricity.

“There are so many First Nations that want to develop clean energy,” Sayers said. “Because the government has started to build Site C, they no longer need clean energy. It’s a barrier right now to do anything in an economic way. There’s none. There’s no opportunity.”

The BC Utilities Commission’s final report on Site C concluded that a mixture of alternative energy sources such as wind, geothermal and solar could generate the sufficient amounts of electricity at lower rates for residents.

Still need policy support and new funding

As with many of the government’s climate policies, experts are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Lovekin said he’ll be watching to see what other funding announcements come, noting that more money for projects may be available via the Arctic Energy Fund and Canada Infrastructure Bank.

But he suggests that policies are generally missing to support the funding.

“Actual policy to mandate a certain target of renewables or a production incentive is something we’d like to see,” he said. “Right now, what the federal government has announced are programs to support diesel transition, but no specific policy. We’d like to see a combination of both.”

Contrary to what many people might think, there’s really no major technological challenges impeding the ability for remote communities to transition to renewables: solutions are all available and can be tweaked to particular locations. The only issues are lack of upfront capital and community capacity — both of which could be resolved with far more federal investments.

“When you start looking at some of the other countries and their challenges, we should be able to do this with the kind of technology and money we have available in our country,” Sayers said.

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Part one of a two-part series from The Tyee. Read part two: Clean Power Remains a Major Challenge for Remote First Nations. 

Cameron Hill will never forget the cold October night in 1975 when a diesel generating plant breakdown cut all power to Hartley Bay's homes and water treatment. Completely isolated 140 kilometres south of Prince Rupert on British Columbia's north coast, the village and home community of the Gitga'at First Nation (pronounced "Git-Gat") was completely on its own.

"Six weeks later, the power was still out," says Hill, 47, now the school principal and a 20-year Gitga'at band councillor. More than anything else, he remembers watching his family's winter supply of salmon, halibut, moose and berries defrost and spoil in their multiple freezers.

The great blackout was a defining moment for Hartley Bay. Within three years, a plan emerged to build a small hydro project to replace their unreliable, dirty and expensive diesel, which like everything else, they can't source themselves and must be shipped four hours from Prince Rupert.

So it's amazing that, nearly four decades on, the community vision for clean energy remains in limbo. It certainly hasn't been for lack of effort: the Gitga'at have successfully navigated the complexities of multiple government bureaucracies, lined up millions in loans and grants, and were even awarded an energy purchase agreement in 2014. But it has not been enough. The hydro project is stalled, forcing Gitga'at leaders like Hill to face another generation burning the same dirty fuel.

"My mom and dad fought to have hydro," says Hill, who remains one of the community's biggest hydro champions. "Now, my generation is fighting for it, too."

Stuck with Dirty Diesel

Hartley Bay is just one of an estimated 175 remote communities across Canada that must burn diesel fuel to generate electricity. Most are aboriginal hamlets where energy poverty is deeply intertwined with access to clean water, food security and limited economic opportunity. Diesel is dirty, toxic and volatile in price, and many First Nations must move it in by expensive and often seasonal modes of transport, whether by truck, ocean-going ship, rail or even air. Spills are commonplace across the North.

But despite available technology and much talk about ramping up clean energy to avoid catastrophic climate change, aboriginal communities still face enormous barriers in escaping their energy dependence on fossil fuels.

Hartley Bay was one of the first remote B.C. coastal communities to get "electrified" by diesel in 1928, a project funded by the Gitga'at themselves. On a Tyee visit to the community in January 2016, elder and Hereditary Chief Ernie Hill Jr., Cam's father, recounted his mother's experience at a 1928 feast to celebrate the first electric light. It was otherworldly technology to most, he said. Some marvelled at how oil could be fed through transmission wires that were so thin, and one visitor to the community cut a light bulb from a wire, in hopes of taking the light home.

The original 1928 diesel generator still stands. Photo: Christopher Pollon.

That was then. For the 180 Gitga'at who live in Hartley Bay today, life on diesel has become untenable: the cost of generation is on the rise, and brown outs and power surges are a common occurrence. Christmas Day in 2012 saw most of the village men huddled around the generator, trying to fix a cooling system in time to get their turkeys in the oven.

Bills from BC Hydro, which operates and maintains the diesel plant and charges the locals for usage, remain a bone of contention. Despite the installation of smart meters in 2013, inexplicable discrepancies exist in power bills, neighbours complain. Meanwhile, over 500,000 litres of diesel must be shipped in by barge each year, putting local waters at risk. In 2008, a faulty gauge on a storage tank caused 10,000 litres to spill into the ocean.

While the imperative to get off diesel has been mostly economic over the years, awareness of the greenhouse emissions their power plant pumps out — at least 2,000 tonnes a year — strikes close to home.

"Hydro makes business and environmental sense," says Cameron Hill. "Especially coming from a people who still live off the land and don't want to contribute to climate change."

A Vision for Hydro

Hydro also makes a lot of sense in a place where almost five metres of rain falls each year.

Hartley Bay is so wet that buildings must be constructed on wooden stilts driven deep into the swampy edges of the sea. To get anywhere in the village, you must navigate a system of wooden boardwalks built above the spongy muskeg. "Our Elders have said, we must take advantage of what God gave us," recounted Cam Hill. "And that's water."

House on stilts in Hartley Bay. Photo: Christopher Pollon.

Ernie Hill recalls that the federal Department of Indian Affairs briefly viewed getting Hartley Bay off diesel as a priority — during the oil "price shocks" of the early 1970s that saw price spikes and shortages. But after a pre-feasibility plan in 1978, the federal government ultimately balked at the $1-million price tag as oil prices settled back down.

Successive chiefs and councils never lost interest, however. The "run-of-lake" design currently envisioned would see a small dam built on a lake above the village to ensure there's always enough water to make power. A pipe would channel the water down to a powerhouse where it would turn generators before being released back into the Gabion river, which bisects the village and flows out to sea.

The vision guarantees energy security for the community: the diesel plant will be maintained and at the ready, but only as a backup if the hydro plant goes down.

The Gabion River. Photo: Christopher Pollon.

A Health Issue, too

Among the first things I noticed about the Hills' spacious bungalow — other than lots of guns and a pirate flag flying out front — was that the wood stove is always on.

BC Hydro's mantra of putting on a sweater and turning down the heat is not an option here: without steady heat, mould would devour the houses of Hartley Bay, and worse. The local clinic has historically reported high incidences of bronchial, nose, throat and ear problems such as Otitis media in children, that are thought to be linked to exposure to mould.

The Hills buy wood pellets by the tonne from a company in Prince Rupert, made from pine trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. Others rely on heaters that burn diesel and heating oil, as expensive and prone to spill as the stuff used at the power plant. But keeping the mould away has its own dangers. Days before I arrived, a house in the village burned to the ground when a damaged plug-in space heater was left unattended.

And therein lies one barrier to getting Hartley Bay its hydro. Fixing and replacing housing on the reserve has to take priority over the new power plant, and there are only so many financial and human resources to handle so many projects. (At least 10 new houses are being built on the reserve this year alone, costing millions.)

A mould-damaged house sits vacant. Photo: Christopher Pollon.

And like many other First Nations, successive Gitga'at band councils have found themselves in perennial crisis management mode, dealing with capital demands as they come up. A hepatitis A outbreak in Hartley Bay in 1997 necessitated a costly revamp of the community's water treatment plant. A new sewage treatment plant looms on the horizon — another $1 million.

Unequal Contest

With fewer than 200 people (another 450 Gitga'at live off-reserve), the community has also been forced to navigate a maze of government jurisdictions and funding bodies in pursuit of its clean energy vision.

That experience is widely shared in off-grid Canadian reserve hamlets, says Liane Inglis, who wrote her 2012 Simon Fraser University thesis on the barriers to clean energy development in remote B.C. communities.

First Nations like Hartley Bay must not only work within their own complex governments (including the often grey jurisdictional zone between elected band councils and hereditary chiefs), but are forced simultaneously to interact with the federal Aboriginal Affairs department, provincial ministries and BC Hydro. The effort can easily overwhelm capacity, she concluded.

Hartley Bay moved forward where it could. Beginning in 2010, it participated in BC Hydro's Remote Community Electrification Program (the program was suspended in early 2015). That led to an agreement by which the Crown utility would buy all the hydro the project generates — and then sell it back to the reserve residents who consume it. Once the project's debt is paid off, the revenues will flow to the First Nation.

For the hydro project to move forward, the Gitga'at needed a buyer for their energy, and through their energy purchase agreement BC Hydro became that buyer. Before that could happen however, the village's aging transmission infrastructure needed a costly and time-intensive upgrade to meet BC Hydro standards.

Some might say that getting this far is an achievement in itself for Hartley Bay. The progress, as I'll report tomorrow, has a lot to do with an unlikely combination of events from outside the tight-knit community: the arrivals of a clean energy champion — and an agent from a pipeline company.

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