At a recent Gathering of Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), Nihtat Energy Ltd. president Grant Sullivan gave a master class on the challenges and rewards of installing solar panels in off-grid Nihtat Gwich’in communities in the Northwest Territories.

In two separate projects, Nihtat Energy – a Nihtat Gwich’in development corporation – installed solar panels to provide electricity to the Mackenzie Hotel and the Northmart grocery store in Inuvik. Now, Sullivan is working on two projects that will feed solar power into local diesel-fired grids owned by NWT Power Corp. that serve Aklavik and Inuvik.

In his presentation to the Gathering, Sullivan stressed the need for project developers to plan for delays that can quickly drain resources and upend business cases. The ICE Gathering in January drew more than 700 registrants from Indigenous communities and organizations, as well as utilities, governments and the private sector.

Remote communities across the country are pursuing opportunities in renewables that can reduce reliance on dirty, expensive, often-unreliable diesel. They’re developing capacity in energy efficiency, sustainable transport and bioenergy – projects that provide healthy communities, create wealth and jobs, and empower Indigenous people to govern.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has stepped up with significant funding for remote communities. Its Clean Energy for Rural and Remote Communities (CERRC) program has invested $220 million in 88 projects to help communities move away from using diesel by developing cleaner community-led energy projects.

In December, the Liberal government provided another $300 million to the effort. In March, NRCan announced more than $40 million for the Clarke Lake Geothermal Development Project in northeastern British Columbia, which is jointly owned by the Fort Nelson First Nation and Saulteau First Nation. Fort Nelson FN chief Sharleen Gale said in a release that her community’s persistence in pursuing the geothermal facility “demonstrates what Indigenous leadership towards net-zero project development looks like.”

Update: Monday’s federal budget announced an additional $36 million for clean energy projects in First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities.

ICE has called for Ottawa to allocate $500 million to a fund that can be used to catalyze Indigenous-led clean energy projects. Such efforts offer not only environmental benefits such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but also opportunity for real economic and social benefits that set the stage for reconciliation by partnering with Indigenous communities to develop clean energy assets that are in line with Indigenous values and affirm Indigenous Peoples as the owners and caretakers of the lands.

Indigenous communities have been significantly involved in some 197 clean energy projects in Canada that generate more than 1 megawatt of power, as well as in smaller-scale efforts.

Indigenous communities are the largest clean energy asset owners, apart from Crown and private utilities, and are a powerful force for change in the country’s transition to a clean energy future.

The projects run the gamut from Nihtat Energy’s 99-kilowatt solar system for Inuvik’s Mackenzie Hotel to a $1.9-billion Wataynikaneyap transmission project that will connect 24 Northern Ontario First Nations communities to the grid. The Watay project is jointly owned by the coalition of First Nations, Fortis Inc. and other private investors

Indigenous communities have been significantly involved in 197 clean energy projects in Canada. They are the largest clean energy asset owners,apart from the Crown and private utilities.

Originally from the Beaufort Delta region and now living in Whitehorse, Sullivan is an alumnus of ICE’s 20/20 Catalysts program. Each year, a group of Indigenous leaders get a crash course in clean energy project management and connect with like-minded people from communities across the country.

The program “was my starting point of my education how to work with utilities and the language they want to hear,” Sullivan says in a phone interview.

For the ICE Gathering, Sullivan spoke from his living room to an online audience that reached from coast to coast to coast. He spoke on a day when Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan announced that Sullivan had been awarded $800,000, under the Indigenous Off-Diesel Initiative, to carry on the next phase of his work in Inuvik.

One of the biggest challenges for his grid-connected projects was negotiating a power-purchase agreement with NWT Power, which runs the diesel-fuelled microgrids in the towns. NWT Power has been supportive but also has to ensure the reliability of its own system – and that the addition of an independent power source doesn’t undermine its own business case. Negotiating an agreement with a utility can take as long as the construction phase, Sullivan said.

“The key lesson learned is that the best-laid plans face so many delays in the project that you just don’t expect to happen,” he told listeners. “And the real impact of the delays is a loss of revenue and a loss of savings.” The key to success, he said, is building in cushions that can account for contingencies and maintaining open and honest communications with partners.

Last November, three Indigenous communities of Fort Chipewyan commissioned the Three Nations Energy (3NE) solar farm, a $7.7-million, 2.2-megawatt project that they describe as the largest solar installation in a remote community in Canada. The 6,000 photovoltaic panels – plus another 1,500 panels owned by local grid operator ATCO Group – will displace 800,000 litres of diesel, or about 25% of the community’s needs.

3NE is owned by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Mikisew Cree First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association. The project grew out of the communities’ realization that their growing populations required additional energy infrastructure and their determination to ensure they participated fully in solutions, 3NE president Jason Schulz said in an interview. Schulz also serves as executive director of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s strategic advisory services.

“Fort Chip” is a community of roughly 900 people, 225 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. It is reachable only by air or small boat in summer and over temporary ice roads in winter. The diesel it needs must be trucked in during the weeks when the ice roads are operational, a period that is, on average, getting shorter because of climate change.

Across the country, the Nunatsiavut Inuit government is partnering with Natural Forces, an independent power producer based in Nova Scotia, on a 2.3-megawatt wind and battery project that would displace up to a third of the diesel used for power in Nain, the northernmost community in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Nain project is in early stages of engineering, and with its negotiations with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro.

The capital cost of renewable energy projects in remote communities is typically far higher than in the south. Where wind can run $2 million per megawatt of installed capacity in southern Canada, the Nain development will run at least $5 million per installed megawatt, says Nick Mercer, Nunatsiavut Government’s regional energy coordinator.

Still, the wind project should pay for itself over its lifetime, with the benefit of keeping some of the revenue in the community. A key challenge: negotiating with Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, which has a mandate from government to reduce subsidies for remote communities.

Another 20/20 Catalysts alumnus, AJ Esquega, has led an effort to add a solar-based system to the existing diesel-fuelled grid at Kiashke Zaaging Anishinaabek (KZA), also known as Gull Bay First Nation, in northwestern Ontario.

Their Giizis Energy solar storage project is a game-changer. It’s 100% First Nations–owned, by the KZA, in partnership with Ontario Power Generation, the developer. KZA is the first remote community in Canada to produce renewable solar energy and store it in batteries, which connect directly with the diesel system to reduce the amount of diesel fuel used.

Billed as the country’s largest fully integrated remote renewable-energy storage microgrid, the system was commissioned in the summer of 2019 and has been running since. The full asset transfer to Gull Bay is scheduled to be signed off in early March.

Esquega says that participating in 20/20 Catalysts helped prepare him for the realities of project management in a remote community. These capacity-building initiatives ensure Indigenous people continue to lead Canada’s transition to a more equitable, zero-carbon economy. With Ottawa’s support, we can catalyze more investment in planet-powered projects for a genuinely sustainable clean energy future.

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy.

Terri Lynn Morrison is director of strategic partnerships and communications at Indigenous Clean Energy and a Mi’gmaq from Listuguj, Quebec.

A version of this article appears in the Spring Issue of Corporate Knights Magazine as part of our Indigenous Economy Rising cover series. 

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As our truck bumped along a gravel path above the former powerhouse, I spotted what looked like a derelict car tire. We stopped the vehicle and got out. It was an adult snapping turtle. Perhaps 30 centimetres in diameter, this was no wee pet shop critter. It snapped open its eagle beak, hissing at us. We were travelling with staffers from Ontario Power Generation, the solar project’s largest equity partner. One of them grabbed the back of the reptile’s oval shell, gently lifted it, and carried it to the side of the road.

Continuing along the crackling gravel, I saw something thrust itself through tall grasses ahead of us. A deer galloped up the hillside, tail erect. Then a second one emerged. In the distance rose a buck’s five-point rack.

Nanticoke stopped burning coal in 2013. Three years later, OPG and its Indigenous partners — Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — gained permission to construct a 44-megawatt solar array of 192,000 panels. It’s OPG’s first ever solar facility.

To visit Nanticoke on this summer day in 2019 is to encounter the age of coal at the very moment of its unravelling. The building that contained the aging powerhouse was so stripped down, I could look through it and observe the lake. It felt like I was witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, which signaled the end of communism in the late 1980s.

The last remaining buildings of the old Nanticoke coal plant (right) will be dismantled by September.

The abundance of wildlife returning to the site — rare ribbon snakes and Jefferson salamanders also live here — reflects a broader societal transformation. On this patch of Lake Erie shore south of Hamilton, industry and nature are making peace. The shining panels resembled the undulating surface of a lake.

As executive director of Physicians for the Environment from 2004 to 2015, I worked many years for coal power’s elimination. In conjunction with other advocates, I organized face-to-face meetings so physicians could tell Ontario’s environment minister what smog does to human lungs. One of our doctors said there were days the air was so toxic her patients couldn’t leave home.

Nanticoke once generated 15% of Ontario’s electricity. The last section of the old plant — which resembles an amusement park closed for the season — will be dismantled by September. All that remains is maintenance of the grass that grows beneath the panels. Who could have foreseen that animals would make homes in the vegetation between solar panels on the former coal-plant site? Staff tell me it needs to be tamed so birds don’t nest in it, which could cause the solar array to be obscured and fouled. It’s marvelous problems such as these that give me hope. OPG is looking to solve it through ecological means; the weeding may be done by sheep.

The transition is also an act of economic reconciliation. About a third of the workers who built the solar array are from Six Nations, just a 30-minute drive from the site. The project creates emissions-free power as it employs local Indigenous people.

Matt Jamieson, CEO/president of Six Nations’ Development Corporation, tells me they invested here for several reasons. “First and foremost, it aligns with our core values, which is ensuring we do the right thing for Mother Earth,” he says. As well, projects like Nanticoke Solar support autonomy. “One reason we created the Six Nations Development Corporation was to become experts in partnerships, meet our own needs and get economic clout to determine our future — so we wouldn’t be reliant on government.”

Six Nations’ 15 % equity stake in the project also makes financial sense. “It’s a 20-year project, which is attractive. We have a high degree of confidence that we’ll get a good return, and the risks are pretty low,” Jamieson explains. The contract promises the Six Nations people at least $10 million.

Most of that will go into Six Nations’ Economic Development Trust, helping to purchase such things as fire trucks and to provide housing and elder care. Renewable energy is a long-term solution so it supports residents’ long-term needs. Everyone can see its virtue: The sun produces electricity, which generates revenue, which funds public services.

Tabitha Curley, Six Nations Development Corporations’ communications manager, summarizes the process beautifully. She sees a spiritual dimension: “Ultimately our interests are to harness our Creator’s capital to benefit the community.”

The snapping turtle is a kind of fossil. It struts across the road with the claws and spiked tail of a dinosaur. So, some fossils are magnificent. But here at Nanticoke the noxious ones have been phased out.

Gideon Forman is a climate change policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation.

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“We’re in survival mode,” declares Joy Cramer, a member of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, a long-time aboriginal advocate and, as of last January, the director of Indigenous programs at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. According to Cramer, Canada’s dark history of residential school abuse has meant that Indigenous people “are trying to survive after decades and decades of what we’re now saying is attempted genocide and genocidal activities towards us as people.”

Some business schools, candid about failing to attract Indigenous students, have responded with new credentials, culturally relevant course content and flexible delivery options for a fast-growing population on- and off-reserve. Beedie introduced an executive Master of Business Administration in Indigenous Business and Leadership in 2012 for senior administrators of band council governments, mid-career managers with non-Indigenous corporate or government employers and other professionals. The program, offered every two years for 25 to 30 students, accepts only non-Indigenous managers with demonstrated cultural competency.

With topics covering Indigenous business, economic development and government, the specialty executive degree is the only one of its kind in North America. The impetus for the new credential, says program founder and Beedie professor Mark Selman, was two-fold: the “alarming” absence of aboriginal students from existing EMBA programs and the realization, in discussions with band leaders, of their skills mismatch when dealing with resource companies.

“Indigenous leaders had a lot of experience with negotiation but they didn’t have a lot of the basic business skills that you would expect for somebody making decisions at that scale,” says Selman.

Designed to help mid-career professionals hone their management skills, the program includes face-to-face classroom sessions in Vancouver over 30 to 35 days a year as well as online learning.

Since its inception, the program has added Indigenous content and faculty, says Cramer, but acknowledges the $55,000 tuition fee is a barrier for some candidates despite corporate and donor scholarship support.

She aims to boost the program’s national profile so that, by 2021, classes would be held in Vancouver and Toronto every other year, and notes other plans to expand research, add Indigenous-focused case studies and introduce a PhD program.

Like Beedie, the University of Lethbridge’s Dhillon School of Business has taken an evolutionary approach to program development since introducing a certificate for mature Indigenous students 35 years ago.

In 2002, the school offered a degree program that was developed by Indigenous scholars to address on-reserve governance issues. After an academic review and consultations with elders and others, the program was refreshed late last year with separate streams for governance and businesses including start-ups.

“We broadened and changed the curriculum so if students are more interested in entrepreneurship on- and off-reserve they can choose that as well,” says Andrea Amelinckx, Dhillon director of international programs and First Nation governance.

The Indigenous Governance and Business Management program, which currently has 20 students, provides an Indigenous perspective on project management, leadership, taxation, entrepreneurship and self-governance. The school’s certificate and post-graduate diploma programs, as well as six minor degrees, deliver the material in other formats.

Dhillon assistant professor Don McIntyre, an Anishinaabe Ojibway from Timiskiming First Nation, was instrumental in redesigning the program to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing. Students learn industry standards of time, resources and scope for project management but also the “wise practices” of Indigenous communities such as respect for culture.

“If you are up in the Nass Valley [of British Columbia], there is a time during the fall when all work stops because everyone is going fishing,” says McIntyre. “That is a cultural imperative; they have it for ceremony, for food, for sustainability and all of these pieces. Everyone from the territory knows that you can’t tell the salmon to wait.”

With an elders program, an advisory council and mentoring in place, Dhillon is looking to broaden recruitment by showing middle school Indigenous students that business management is a culturally relevant career.

Over the next three or four years, Amelinckx hopes to double enrolment in the bachelor program to about 50 students while also adding students in the course minors.

Meanwhile, a new undergraduate business degree with an Indigenous perspective is under development by an affiliated college of the University of Waterloo, in spite of the fact that it has no business school.

St. Paul’s University College plans to offer a Bachelor of Indigenous Entrepreneurship in 2021, and will partner with the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (whose president, Jean Paul Gladu, is the current college chancellor) to offer student co-op learning opportunities and mentorships.

“Indigenous students oftentimes view business and business programs as something for mainstream Canadians and not something that is for them,” says Lori Campbell, director of the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre at St. Paul’s and a Cree-Métis from Saskatchewan.

“For Indigenous students, the uptake on mainstream business school isn’t very high,” she says. “That’s a concern for us in Indigenous communities and a concern for us nationally and for the economy.”

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