How northern communities can make bioenergy work

What do northern communities need to make bioenergy projects successful?

That was a key question addressed during the Arctic Bioenergy Summit and Tour in Yellowknife earlier this week.

Hosted by the Arctic Energy Alliance and Wood Pellet Association of Canada, the event began with a day-long tour of buildings in Yellowknife that use biomass heating systems followed by a two-day conference at the Chateau Nova Hotel.

“We’re the lead jurisdiction in Canada in terms of adoption of biomass for space heating and wood pellets,” Mark Heyck, executive director of the Arctic Energy Alliance, told Cabin Radio during the final day of the conference.

“We want to continue that conversation, see where the future of that fuel source is going here in the Northwest Territories, but also learn from other jurisdictions in Canada and around the circumpolar world about what they’re working on.”

Speakers at the summit said using bioenergy can reduce energy costs and emissions, utilize local resources, provide an alternative use for waste, create training and job opportunities, and give communities more control over how their energy is produced and used.

They said collaboration, community engagement and building local capacity are key to making those projects work.

Dehcho wood stove program

Jason Collard, chief executive officer of Gonezu Energy Inc, highlighted the success of the Dehcho Wood Stove Program, which he said was the brainchild of Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation Chief Kele Antoine.

So far, Collard said, 189 high-efficiency wood stoves have been installed in homes across the region at no cost to homeowners. He said that has led to savings of around $2,000 per home.

By this time next year, Collard said 300 wood stoves will have been installed in Dehcho homes.

The project has included training and hiring local people to install and maintain the wood stoves.

“Every capacity development project should have a capital or installation component,” he said, “and every installation should have a capacity development component tied to it.”

Collard stressed it’s important to be creative as northern communities can face unique challenges and often rely on southern suppliers for goods.

He gave the example that, due to the lack of central storage warehouses or traditional loading docks in the Dehcho, Gonezu used sea cans for the wood stove project. He said communities could turn the sea cans into greenhouses or repurpose them for other uses in the future.

Collard said the wood stove project also required education, behavioural change and communicating with people in a way that is accessible and meaningful. He noted that manufacturing specifications and operations standards for equipment are often based on a southern climate understanding.

“It’s been a big learning process because the process of stockpiling large amounts of wood, letting it season and dry, is not a traditional way of harvesting,” he said.

“It poses some challenges, but we’re learning it and we’re getting somewhere with it, and we’ve got a lot of happy people because of the wood stoves we’ve put in.”

Collard said he believes sharing knowledge is key to advancing renewable energy solutions across the North.

“We have to support each other … share from our lessons, be OK with our failures as they’re called, our challenges, learn more from them.”

Other speakers at the conference discussed successful biomass projects in the NWT such as the wood chip boiler system at Bannockland Inn in Fort Simpson and a community wood stove project in the Tłı̨chǫ region.

Biomass in Alaska and Yukon

Tim Kalke, Sustainable Energy for Galena Alaska Inc’s general manager, shared insights from a biomass project in the isolated community of Galena in the interior of Alaska.

He said the previous system that distributed heat to around 14 buildings in the community consumed more than 940,000 litres of diesel a year.

Kalke said it took partnerships and leadership to switch to a biomass boiler heating system and develop a locally sourced biomass supply.

“It’s not just tools making these projects successful. It’s about people, it’s about your team,” he said.

“We’re very lucky in Galena to have a number of people who call that place home, whose roots go deep there and they want to do what they can do to stay in the community – to not have to travel away to earn wages and then come back.

“To leverage that knowledge and to leverage that passion, that’s a huge element of making a biomass project successful, or any project successful for that matter.”

Kalke stressed to leaders the importance of supporting their local workforce.

“I promise you there is the knowledge and the capacity in these small communities to pull off big projects,” he said.

“It just takes an element of developing relationships, developing trust. I don’t care about certifications and all these other things, right? I promise you, those people who call the place home, they know how to do it, and they really like operating big heavy equipment.”

Geoffrey Cartwright, community energy coordinator with the Teslin Tlingit Council in Yukon, said community leadership and engagement were critical to the community’s bioenergy journey.

“When we’re looking at doing projects the very first question becomes, how do we do community consultation? How do we do engagement? How do we do community education around: I’m going to put heat meters onto every home?” he said.

Cartwright said wildfires have made the importance clear of managing forests in the North, adding that responsibly cutting down trees has the added benefit of providing fuel for biomass heating systems.

“There is enough fuel in the Northwest Territories and Yukon that we could responsibly be running chip boilers to heat every home and every business,” he said.

“But it will require a complete reimagining of what our economy looks like and how we’re going to approach it. And that is going to take leadership from our governments – territorial, federal, municipal, Indigenous – and community champions to really try and grasp this problem and do something awesome.”

What’s next?

Like many speakers at the conference, Heyck told Cabin Radio capacity building is needed to advance bioenergy in the North.

“You can have the greatest technology in the world, but if you don’t have the people with the expertise and experience on the ground to actually operate and maintain that technology, you’re not going to get very far,” he said.

Following the conference, the Arctic Energy Alliance hosted a biomass boiler operator training course. Heyck said the organization would like to be able to offer such training on a more consistent basis.

Beyond capacity building, Heyck said, as the NWT imports wood pellets from the south, “there’s a clear appetite” for communities to look at economic development opportunities to produce their own fuel.

“We’re in a period right now where we’re staring at the eventual closing of the diamond mines, with Diavik being the first one, and people are starting to talk about what is the economy going to look like in the Northwest Territories going forward,” he said.

“This is one small aspect, I think, of how we might be able to use some renewable resources here in the NWT to benefit our own residents and businesses.”