Yellowknife North MLA Shauna Morgan says batteries may be among solutions that don’t cost billions but could help the NWT capital’s fragile power grid.
While the Taltson hydro expansion – hooking up a South Slave hydro plant to Yellowknife, across Great Slave Lake – has been brought up as a means of addressing the cost and reliability of power in the North Slave, Morgan said it might not be the only way forward.
“There is an appetite for big ideas, big solutions to all of our problems, but it’s dangerous to believe in panaceas,” she said, “especially when they’re estimated to cost several billions of dollars.”
The MLA pointed instead to an 80-megawatt battery storage system being installed in Alberta to help feed the province’s grid and provide two hours of backup power. The project is estimated to cost $120 million.
“If we just wanted 15 minutes of reserve energy to prevent a majority of the outages we currently experience, we could get a smaller 10-megawatt battery at Jackfish for maybe $10 to $20 million,” said Morgan, referring to Yellowknife’s diesel plant and main substation.
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According to Morgan, that idea was proposed by the NWT Power Corporation in an old document listing potential solutions to chronic low water levels.
Caroline Wawzonek, the minister responsible for the power corporation said the document came from 2015 and it was difficult for her to answer questions about decisions cabinet made at the time. (Wawzonek was first elected in 2019.)
Even so, she said battery storage is still being explored by NTPC. A new North Slave Resiliency Study, analyzing the best power options for the region, is expected this spring. The last one, a decade ago, found that diesel remained the best backup power option.
Some suggestions made in the same 2015 document did subsequently come to pass. For example, the document also recommended the installation of modular generators at the Jackfish power plant to increase capacity and improve efficiency and reliability.
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Those installations were completed in 2018 and 2019, Wawzonek said this week.
“The system is still reliant on this single generation facility and so again, that doesn’t necessarily answer all the challenges we have within the lack of a wider grid or redundancy in the grid,” the minister said, “but that element was taken care of.”
Answering questions from Morgan, Wawzonek said there are a number of projects under way to increase energy generation capacity, not only within the Snare hydro system that feeds Yellowknife but across the territory.
She described some of those projects as “micro-hydro capacity.” The Délı̨nę Got’ı̨nę Government has said it is examining whether small-scale hydro would work for the community.
The minister also said solar and wind capacity closer to Yellowknife is being assessed.
“With that, we do have the experience of battery systems in both Colville Lake and in Inuvik, which would be then necessary to support a smoothing out of the intermittent power that would be generated by those systems,” said Wawzonek.
“There is not one solution here, and [I’m] happy to receive further questions on it, but we will continue to look for whatever opportunities there are.”
