Wind for the win
Wind-powered microgrid proposal for Nunavut earns St. John’s trio top spot in national infrastructure competition
There has been no shortage of talk about the expected power rates in this province in the years to come, and while they’ll be exorbitantly high compared to what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians currently pay, they’ll still pale in comparison to those in Nunavut.
As the only place in Canada that depends entirely on dieselgenerated electricity to power their homes and businesses, rates can be as much as 10 times the Canadian average.
The financial burden goes beyond what the residents of the nation’s most northern territory are shouldering and extends to Canadian taxpayers who are subsidizing power generation to the tune of $36.5 million annually.
A trio of like-minded individuals from St. John’s — Marine Institute research scientist Dr. Brett Favaro, business analyst and St. John’s city councillor Dave Lane and entrepreneur Brandon Copeland — came up with a potentially gamechanging solution to this untenable situation and earlier this week took home top spot at the Caninfra Challenge, a pitch competition aimed at seeking transformational ideas to solve Canada’s infrastructure problems and revolutionize the country.
“While climate change, I believe, is a moral imperative and there’s ecological reasons and environmental reasons, the foundation of our pitch was people and cost,” Favaro explains.
“This isn’t altruism. If we do this, if we invest in this as a country, people will save money, taxpayers will save money.”
Their project — dubbed Icegrid — proposes replacing the diesel generating plants in Nunavut, starting in the capital of Iqaluit, with microgrids fueled exclusively by reliable, sustainable and renewable wind power that can be stored in an array of warehoused batteries connected to the existing electricity distribution network.
The resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions obviously makes for a strong environmental case, but the financial case makes the project even more compelling.
Based on their calculations and “really conservative estimates,” Favaro and company suggest the upfront cost of about $233 million for the turbines and batteries could be repaid in eight years thanks to operating and maintenance costs of roughly $2.3 million annually, compared to the $30.4 million it costs to keep the diesel generators going now.
That figure, Favaro says, could climb to over $33 million once federally mandated carbon pricing comes into effect in 2019.
Favaro points to the Site C hydroelectric dam underway in British Columbia, a project with a payback period of 71 years, and says even if their estimates are off by a factor of five, Icegrid still makes more sense.
“We have deemed as a society that it is acceptable to fund a mega-project that takes 71 years to pay for itself,” he said. “If that is the case, then presumably it should also be the case that an eight-year payback is an acceptable amount or even more than that, particularly given that there’s no way to forecast it where it doesn’t pay for itself after a while.
“Every version of this is cheaper than diesel.”
Whereas maintaining the current diesel model would cost $662 million over 20 years (under a carbon pricing model), Icegrid’s total cost would be $284 million — a saving of $378 million.
Savings like those, they suggest, will create more sustainable local economies, leading to improved growth and a greater quality of life, which in turn will bring more families, businesses and amenities to the area.
“I think that Icegrid is not just a technological model, I think it’s a model about how to think about projects, because it’s very, very community focused,” Favaro says.
And it needn’t be strictly a solution for remote northern communities. The Icegrid team says the project is scalable to a municipality of any size, even those on the grid as it helps utility companies balance their load requirements.
“If we can do it in Iqaluit, in the north, in a cold, challenging climate, we can do it anywhere and I think that’s part of what enticed us,” Favaro says. “This is like the moon landing of clean energy. This would be such a powerful symbol and would refute forever people trying to say we can’t do this, we can’t afford it.”
The Caninfra win comes with a $50,000 prize, a good chunk of which the Icegrid trio will donate to a charity. The bigger prize, from their perspective, is event organizer Boston Consulting Group’s commitment to help the communities interested in adopting the winning platform connect with government and funding avenues.
“This part had to be about us because it’s a pitch competition and we had to pitch. Now this platform is there,” Favaro said. “The lowest level of this, the sort of simplest version, is that the communities that are applying for funding to do renewables feel empowered to go big and can cite our win as an example.”