Community Energy Plans: Technical analysis meets community vision
In many communities across the Canadian Arctic, there is a growing interest in reassessing current energy use and transitioning to more reliable, affordable, and cleaner fuel sources. Last week, we explored the broader strategies needed to address energy insecurity in remote communities. This week, we're focusing on the local-level considerations essential for developing a Community Energy Plan (CEP) tailored to support that transition within a specific community. While commonalities exist, it's vital to be as detailed as possible when planning at the community level.
A CEP is a plan that is navigated through a community-led process aimed at evaluating the feasibility of transitioning from diesel fuel, typically used, to renewable energy sources. To effectively chart this path, several key areas require involvement and investigation:
Community Vision: The CEP process is driven by community members who set their unique energy goals and priorities. This typically involves extensive community engagement and desktop research to understand the community’s energy baseline. Critical information includes community profiles, governance, environmental management, building efficiency, calculated energy use per household, and more. Beyond the data, it’s essential to contextualize it with community members' perceptions of their energy use, their vision for future use, and their views on important aspects of energy use, such as heating, appliance usage, and growing community infrastructure. Additionally, considering economic and population growth projections that will drive future energy needs is crucial.
Current Energy Use Analysis: Any transitional solution must begin with a thorough understanding of current energy use. Analyzing existing generation systems and their usage will ground the analysis and provide a baseline to build to the community's energy vision. This could include data on the nameplate capacities of current generators, their age, operating capacity, peak demand times, and historical and current electricity rates.
Technical Review: Transitioning to renewable resources requires a detailed technical review that accounts for multiple variables. These include the types of renewable energies available in the area (such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, hydrokinetic, or bioenergy), technical assessments, and the feasibility of these options for the community. This involves evaluating whether the community has sufficient renewable resources to support their future energy vision, conducting economic analyses—considering both capital expenditures (capex) and operational expenditures (opex)—to determine competitiveness compared to diesel, and assessing limitations and benefits.
Ranking and Selecting Energy Options: The final step in a CEP is ranking the energy options to select the preferred transition solutions. This methodology combines community preferences (qualitative) with technical variables (quantitative). Key technical factors to consider include capital cost, levelized cost of energy, ability to meet the entire energy demand, resource availability and variability, job creation potential, environmental impact, construction risk, and overall project risk.
Developing a CEP will guide the decision-making process and help narrow the focus of subsequent efforts. Several organizations, such as Indigenous Clean Energy and Tarquti Energy, are actively supporting northern communities in localized energy transitions and community energy planning. For a comprehensive, community-first energy planning guide, refer to the Arctic Council’s Arctic Community Energy Planning and Implementation Toolkit.