Yukon Energy Perspectives

Yukon Energy Perspectives 

Yukon Energy Corporation hosted a comprehensive, broad public energy consultation and ‘teach in’ back in March. The process is continued with a series of events, each dedicated to a particular subject such as biomass power plants, Liquid Natural Gas etc.

There is a reasonably widespread understanding that within less than half a decade we need to add a little less of half on top of the electrical energy that is generated now. For some the gravity of it goes in one ear and out the other while there are also people who take the impacts of a possible shortfall seriously. Nothing materializes without an intact flow of energy, not food, not education, not transportation, nor livelihood or housing. The most dramatic push for power generation growth of any jurisdiction I can think of is here now. Residential use makes up about one third and industrial uses about two thirds of the projected demand increase.

YEC president David Morrison informed the attendants of last week’s biomass energy workshop that the planning work is carried out with a priority mandate for renewable technology as much as possible. 

One of the tentative YEC proposals aims at a wind farm project on Ferry Hill that could provide close to a quarter of the required annual energy increase, under 10 percent of total needs.  
This is well within a typical grid tolerance to make adjustments for the fluctuating wind power characteristic. Also there will be good winter performance when hydro output is reduced. After years of pilot work with the Haeckel Hill turbines Ferry Hill would be an important step for affordable Yukon sourced power. Spin offs of especially such a wind perspective would include an incentive to engineer for better grid stability and efficiency overall. It could include an up to date policy that allows citizens, electrical truck and car owners with bi-directional charge set ups and generally Independent Power Providers to sell energy back to the grid when it has demand.

A tentative proposal by YEC for a substantial biomass plant power generation generated a lively discussion at the dedicated workshop among the community stakeholders. A few smaller and pilot plants would spread jobs and other development benefits across the territory. Such a limited scope would require to make use of heat for buildings or greenhouses co-generated with electricity to achieve economically viable kWh cost. Midsize plants of a capacity that is sufficient for one unit to match the future Whistle Bend draw or allow to bring a new mine online can have a high efficiency just generating electricity. The significance of the Yukon Energy Corporation’s wood biomass proposal is that in combination with a Ferry Hill wind farm it offers a way out of alternative natural gas development at Eagle Plain. And it does so at competitive cost and with more realistic time frames when compared with larger geo-thermal or new hydro projects while similarly approaching a carbon neutral standard.


By comparison with many US jurisdictions, for example, it is fortunate that Yukon biomass power potential can compensate for the failure to not have developed over time sufficient non hydro renewable energy avenues. It’s been two generations of inaction in terms of a diverse energy industry since the 1973 oil shock got people worried for the first time. 
But the ongoing monolithic energy context of hydro and fossil fuel energy had not exactly been thought stimulating. From there, with some huffing and puffing, it appears that in Yukon a meaningful energy dialogue is narrowing between wood biomass and natural gas development options. 

The conversation in our community has just begun to explore some of the involved questions.

One is about how much of fire killed, beetle killed, highway maintenance/fire smart sourced fuel wood can be sustainably utilized. ‘Dead’ wood inhabits much of the boreal life and life cycle and much of it needs to stay right there. With this in mind stringent sustainability standards in a Northern boreal environment in Scandinavian jurisdictions are met with extraction intensities greater in orders of magnitude than what is considered here. Change in Yukon forestry practices towards selective use, well adapted and scaled equipment and away from clearing sections and soil disruption and compression is overdue anyways. Then because of a respectful vision, Yukon trees do grow back.
However, there are a few more real incentives to think it through and adapt annual allowable cuts and land use plans toward this end. This will happen when the alternative of natural gas development and natural gas power plants is considered a bit more comprehensively.

Natural gas consists mostly of methane, over 20 years or even 50 years it creates several times the diesel equivalency of global warming impact. With the adoption of such a relentless fossil fuel vision Yukon looses its standing in climate negotiations. The idea of ‘clean’ natural gas originated from valid concerns about a range of air pollutants that are higher in gasoline, diesel or coal combustion.
Natural gas greenhouse impact is a different matter and undergoes a profound change in perception as we speak. A natural gas branch land industry requiring big capital equipment expenses from us would stay for generations. The calculation that one could protract the methane break down of the natural gas emissions over a century, and then end up with a similar or slightly smaller green house effect when compared to diesel and gasoline is wrong. In fact it denies already expanding troubles like permafrost thawing or ocean acidification. Events that are tied into feed back loops which are derailing in response to green house emissions through the next five to fifteen years.
Possibly even federal transfer payments could be affected if Yukon gives up a sense of self preservation in the climate and energy conversation. 
Further, the development of LNG export to Southern markets could needlessly undermine local energy security as under existing rules of proportional energy sharing Canada cannot retreat from energy export levels to the US which under stress take preference over domestic needs.
As temporary fuel supplement for existing diesel plants, LNG from existing Southern sources can have a useful purpose.

The core of Yukon’s energy infrastructure are public assets that like roads and highways are understood as part of the commons. This understanding has geographical and practical limitations in reaching 100 percent of the community but in principal everybody has access. The commons concept not only connects Indigenous, European, Asian and other heritage roots but from it common good and ecological responsibility extend. The contention by some who are not happy with existing mining oversight and permitting procedures such as YESAB, who don’t want to extend energy infrastructure to new mines by way of quasi alternative or alienated regulation, breaks this bond. More helpful will be to ask for an energy dedicated green fund contribution from large scale users who’s life span is too short to compensate the public for the related capital equipment burden. 

Pipe Dreams -- Feds take over

Pipe Dreams -- Feds take over

Last week the federal government announced that from now on the Northern Pipeline Agency in Ottawa is exclusively in charge of all things Alaska Gas Pipeline in Yukon. Comments, concerns are to be addressed to them and everybody else in their concern or mandate regarding the pipeline might as well go home. That includes the Yukon Government, First Nation Governments, Yukon Environmental Assessment Board, Aboriginal Pipeline Coalition and Yukon Energy Corporation, to name a few.

A stunning turn of events that knocks the wind out everybody, the community seems speechless. Well almost everybody, executive orders of this kind, I thought, were foreshadowed in the June 2009 TransCanada Pipelines/Exxon Mobile partnership agreement. Almost immediately I had undertaken an effort to scrutinize the deal and my findings were published in the Whitehorse Star in the same month.

In a nutshell TransCanada needed Exxon as an American partner to plow through some of the Canadian realities on the ground that I listed above. Reason being that a very effective tool to override lawful government and its legislation, NAFTA chapter 11 can only be levied across international borders and address a federal or national government.

In the Abitibi Bowater chapter 11 case foreign claim on ownership of Canadian bulk water was agreed upon and settled by Canada with $ 130 000 000.00 in August 2010; one of the larger NAFTA chapter 11 settlements or penalties. 

Rather than paying up arbitration panel penalties or settlements and then go collecting, in that case to NewFoundland and Labrador, the federal government now acted preemptively to control everything under their own roof through the Northern Pipeline Agency in Ottawa. In this way it can add the chapter 11 pressure into the sausage making, or should I say pipeline, already on a threat level and continue to keep a lid on the publicity of NAFTA stories.

However, these kind of totalitarian implications of “Fossil Fuel Extreme” on the depletion leg of its reserve use curve don’t arrive quite accidentally in Yukon. Renewable non hydro development is weak and with that community resilience against such political take over attempts. Didn’t we have government devolution? Ottawa’s orders couldn’t have come with a worse timing taking the momentum away of what renewable and democratic energy initiative we do have.

There are other problems that make us vulnerable to the climate crime of these new natural gas developments of the Eagle Plain reserves and the Alaska Gas Pipeline. On the outcome the methane emissions through one generation’s time will have several times the global warming impact of even equivalent diesel or gasoline emissions. New natural gas development scenarios are only possible because there is more reality denial, more separation from our life circumstances than just sticking the head in the sand of the climate crisis.

Critics of greenhouse emissions typically bring forth arguments with a perhaps unintentional but very effective counter-gang dynamic. It means to end up acting as phony opposition that underneath of stated ecological concerns supports what it criticizes, but also counters constructive alternatives.

Worth mentioning are beliefs in the fantasy of climate conferences and related emission trade and carbon tax schemes. Global Thinking and Local Postponing involves pretending the climate problem is one of legal or administrative standards, such as banning land mines or supporting children’s rights to an education and how to go about it. The replacement of the biggest monolithic infrastructure hardware that ever existed, the fossil fuel energy behemoth, with renewable energy technologies is fundamentally different. No new technology, like computers or trains for example, was ever introduced by conferences or introduction quota. If players like countries or corporations in the emissions trade schemes exceed minimum contributions they sell credit to under achievers. The claim of aiming beyond minima is false because a lowest common denominator standard below a ceiling is incentivized. In fact profits in emission trade derivative speculation depend on blocking renewable energy. Rating agencies of a kind that is well known since the financial melt down in 2008 assign carbon credits to activities like rain forest devastation in Indonesia. This country with little industries but giant slash burns is now the third largest green house gas emitter after the US and China. 

Incentivizing green house emissions and blocking renewable energy development is also true for the carbon tax idea. It can be collected from people as long as they are not allowed to sell renewable energy to the grid or access fast charge outlets for plug in hybrid or electric cars.

On the other hand good things happen very quickly in close to 50 countries and jurisdictions, rich and poor, that have quietly enacted renewable energy legislation for the purpose of creating energy markets. Quietly, as not to attract friction with so called ‘trade’ agreements. Its a logical process because the fossil and nuclear energy sectors have become freeloaders in terms of free use of public infrastructures such as global military protections, huge cash handouts that serve no real R & D purposes and externalized destruction costs exceeding the wealth of nations. This will not change over night but measures like legalizing grid access for renewables, local fleet procurement of electric vehicles etc. levels the marketplace somewhat. The fossil fuel industry has the financial security of a two centuries contract, give the renewable providers a contract for a few years. The effects are dramatic, in China wind power grew thirty fold in four years, much faster than planned after renewable energy legislation was passed in 2005. A similar process is underway in Ontario, in Brazil in 2011 wind energy became for the first time cheaper than fossil energy based on conventional, non inclusive calculation.

So what is the problem? 

A growing climate denial drum beat in North America is only part of an even broader intellectual illness that has locked itself into the abstract theory of neoliberal economics which is joined at the hip to the fossil fuel dogma. It is a warlike thought structure and it does create a climate of conformism. Part of this orthodoxy is to observe taboos like the one that forbids to mention anti-democratically enacted protectionism like NAFTA chapter 6 which restricts Canada’s freedom to trade energy.

The controversial spectre of natural gas fracturing in Yukon gains momentum. Nobody introduced a meaningful problem frame that would include the incomparably heavy climate impact of natural gas emissions in general. Or the need for solidarity and dialogue with poor countries who are being injured with the implied distortion of renewable energy as economic burden. Or that the Eagle Plain development in conjunction with the Alaska Gas Pipeline, the latter seems to be okayed now between Washington and Ottawa, could suck us dry so fast we would not know what hit us. Nobody pointed out that North Slope gas aside, six trillion cubic feet from Eagle Plain could supply the Alaska pipeline for five to six years while all our own energy security considerations may have been stopped or sidelined. It’s worth mentioning because gas reserves, conventional or shale, go empty much, much faster than projected these days. Look at the Barnett Shale disappointment in Texas.