One thing that I’ve picked up about Northerners since moving up here is we’re incredibly reactive as opposed to proactive.
Ongoing bellyaching from Yellowknife about the energy transition, carbon taxes and pretty much everything else has demonstrated the source of all our problems: we wait for the rest of Canada to make decisions for us, then we complain because we had little input and the decision is inevitably the wrong one.
As we wait for someone to fix the North for us and drop an economy in our lap, we’re wasting valuable time developing what is clearly a required service for the entire country.
Inuvik town councillor Tony Devlin suggested this a little over a year ago, but it’s a good enough idea that people need to be reminded of it. We are sitting in the best place in North America to do cold-weather testing.
The recent cold snap shows it’s clear products coming off the production line — particularly ones that are going to be essential parts of our infrastructure — need cold-weather testing.
Over the weekend, frigid temperatures led to a malfunction in Northland Utilities electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in Yellowknife. Interestingly enough, back in my home province of Alberta, where the emergency broadcast system was used to tell people to turn off their space heaters and unplug their block heaters due to a lack of available power, I have gotten confirmation from friends and contacts at minimum five Teslas, one EV that’s over 10 years old and at least one heat pump were all operating just fine in temperatures that caused traditional internal combustion engines to freeze solid.
As mentioned last week, a Tesla continues to drive around Yukon unabated and may be making a second trip up the Dempster before long — without the benefit of the power charging stations owned by Northland Utilities in Yellowknife.
Obviously, not all green technology is created equal and we here in the North are missing out on a massive economic opportunity to test these products in the most extreme of Canadian winters.
Rather than adopt the “blame Ottawa for all my bad decisions” mentality — as our incoming government appears to be taking, at least out of the gate — we should be inviting manufacturers to build and test their products here. I’m sure Elon Musk’s ego would love to see images and videos of Cybertrucks making their way to the Arctic Ocean coast — probably enough he would even donate a few. Similarly, the charging station snafu last weekend would have been avoided if we had bothered to test them before committing them to public infrastructure.
The list goes on — Inuvik’s High Point wind project is being touted as an energy and climate saver, but we really should be emphasizing it’s one of the northernmost structures of its type and we should be offering data on its performance as a commodity to the wind power market. Solar seems to do outrageously well in the North. Why are we not inviting solar companies to build their top-performing arrays here to demonstrate how effective their products are?
A lot of this doesn’t even necessarily need any new major bureaucracy to manage it either. Northerners are already actively cold-testing new products on a daily basis, just by ordering something off the internet and bringing it up here. Perhaps something as simple as an online portal to report product performance, along with some sort of incentive to do the reporting, would be enough to track most consumer goods.
Northerners are much like the rest of Canadians in that we love to complain and don’t like to fix problems, because then we have to find new things to complain about. Hence, we make blanket dismissals like “this product will never work up here” without ever actually testing it. Then, when someone drives his Tesla up the Dempster in the dead of winter without proper infrastructure, our brains can’t handle it.
Might I suggest rather than complaining, we try some capitalism for a change and meet the challenges presented by climate change and the energy transition head-on.
Because if we ignore this economic opportunity, you can bet I’m not going to let you blame Ottawa for it.