When you are a homeowner in any community in the NWT, and you are paying $1.75 per litre for imported heating oil, and you are paying the highest rates for electricity in all of Canada, this title doesn’t make life feel any more affordable. No doubt about that.
Every community in the NWT in 2023 has felt the pain of diesel use, both for heating and for electrical production. The two major hydro grids are in rough shape: one for low water and the other for repairs. The total cost for this condition will be an extra $30 million to the system. Even though the GNWT subsidizes diesel fuel 15 different ways (not a bit of exaggeration), these costs are getting ridiculous.
What’s the choice? We can reduce usage — a lot of that work has been going ahead for the past two decades. The Arctic Energy Alliance has invested our money in many ways to promote conservation and the results are measurable, but in the end, limited. To get costs down in the long-term, we need to take advantage of the energy forms that we have at our disposal.
The NWT has done well on biomass. We have replaced imported diesel with imported wood pellets in many large buildings and some homes. The cost is much better, but the efforts to create local product have failed completely. Perhaps it is time to consider wood chips from our devastated forests. In the future, we need to manage the forests we have left.
A wood chip district heating system might fit in well at a place like the Yellowknife Airport. When it comes to firewood, there is a need is to establish reliable and affordable supplies in all communities that have this resource. We have tank farms and a petroleum products branch of the GNWT, but no wood lots, and no organization of a very useful resource that we own.
Solar photovoltaics is now the least expensive new energy form in the world. In the NWT, we have decent solar resources, with Yellowknife having 90 per cent of the potential energy of Edmonton. Our investment in solar, however, has been insignificant. Fort Chipewyan, a community of 1,200 people that relies on diesel generators, has twice the installed solar of the whole NWT. We have the most restrictive policies when it comes to this energy form in Canada.
By trying to protect the electrical market for our utility companies, we have left ourselves far behind. Yes, to be effective we will need to invest in energy storage. Batteries have become much more affordable in the past decade since our installation in Colville Lake. The combined cost of solar and battery storage is much lower per kilowatt hour (kWh) than the fuel cost of diesel generators.
Great opportunities exist in all our communities for investment by businesses, Indigenous governments or home owners. A new approach is so badly needed by our legislature, which has all the tools to do so.
Wind power has very good potential, but different than solar in that its scale must be much larger. Successful wind farms, like the one at Diavik, require large customer bases. I have been provided the production data from Diavik for that farm. It certainly represents the single most cost-effective new generation in the NWT over that the last 10 years. It is a good example of remote energy generation that is all-season, off grid and industrial scale.
To be more effective, it does requires stored energy backup. For future mine sites, that could be accomplished with batteries or on-site production of electrolytic hydrogen.
The alternatives are there for the reduction of fossil fuels in the NWT. If we replace the high-cost imported fuel that has a severe environmental cost with local renewables as best as possible, we add to the NWT economy and take away from the hundreds of millions we give to the Strathcona refinery in Alberta.
—Dennis Bevington is the former MP for the Western Arctic (now NWT) and is a renewable energy advocate.