This week the GNWT announced it was making a “one-time contribution of $15.2 million to the Northwest Territories Power Corporation (NTPC)” to avoid a massive — and probably election guiding — jump in power bills.
The reason, says the GNWT, is due to low flow at the Snare and Bluefish hydroelectric facilities, thanks to the unseasonably dry spring from runaway climate change. The GNWT also says the cost of diesel fuel has increased 40 per cent since December.
In 2020, NNSL reported that NTPC serves roughly 9,000 customers. Doing some table napkin math, $15.2 million divided among 9,000 people comes out to $1688.89 per customer. NTPC must be planning to burn a lot of diesel this summer.
This week, we checked in with Klaus Dohring of Green Sun Rising. He just finished a tour of the Beaufort Delta where his company installed four solar systems in Ulukhaktok, as well as systems in Tuktoyaktuk and Sachs Harbour. However, he tells me NTPC is still limiting his solar arrays to a maximum of 15 kilowatts and his proposals for projects in the NWT are increasingly being ignored. Meanwhile, communities in Nunavut are welcoming his technology with open arms, letting him build arrays 10 times the size he’s allowed to here in the NWT.
Three guesses what expensive fuel these communities in Nunavut are not burning for power all summer long.
Even the modest systems Dohring’s allowed to build here are making an impact — the Paulatuk hamlet office is now burning six per cent of the diesel it used to burn for electricity. That is not a typo, but it is a lot of money saved for the community to put into other things — Dohring tells me every 3.5 kiloWatt hours of solar — which you can get from 10 solar panels — equates to one litre of diesel. Consider Yellowknife alone has 47 days of nonstop daylight. That’s 1128 hours of sunlight, or potentially 322 litres of diesel using the above formula — for each building. Our ongoing woes with high power bills are completely avoidable.
This is also the opportune time to replace NTPC’s infrastructure, which the utility itself says is falling apart and in desperate need of replacement. There is a $1.5 billion Green Energy fund available from the federal government right now. Organizations that can demonstrate minimum 50 per cent Indigenous ownership can access this fund until 2026 or the money runs out. A partnership between our Indigenous and Inuit governments and the GNWT could put solar on every rooftop in the territory, saving each of us thousands of dollars a year.
Preparing this editorial, I asked Dohring to do some table napkin math of his own. Specifically, what he could do with $15.2 million. He gave me three rough estimates:
“Scenario one: Three to four large solar farms, around 1 megaWatt each, avoiding about one million litres of diesel annually.
Scenario two: About 30 mid-size solar systems for communities, about 100 kiloWatts each, avoiding about 700,000 litres of diesel annually.
Scenario three: Around 300 smaller residential systems, around six kiloWatts each, avoiding about 500,000 litres of diesel annually.”
Our problem is obvious and it’s not the carbon tax. Let’s not forget — we own NTPC. What’s lacking is the political will to bring it out of the 1980s.
There is no reason why anyone in the NWT should be paying for power in summer at all, nevermind having among the highest bills in the country. Overhauling NTPC’s mandate to allow real solar power generation needs to be a priority for the GNWT.