Green Energy in the Great White North
They say that even in the dead of a Yellowknife winter, workers at the old Con mine on the edge of the city used to come up from the depths dressed in T-shirts and shorts due to the heat from the bedrock.
Now the N.W.T. capital is considering using that heat to extract a different kind of gold from the defunct mine — cheap, greenhouse gas-free energy to warm its buildings on frigid Arctic nights.
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Water in the bottom of the mine's Robertson shaft now simmers at up to 50 degrees. That's not hot enough to generate electricity, but Ghomshei said it's plenty hot enough to keep downtown buildings toasty warm.
By pumping hot water up from the depths and capturing that heat before it's reinjected into the mine, Ghomshei's report estimates the Con mine could provide up to 650,000 gigajoules, or 20 megawatt-hours, of heat on an ongoing, sustainable basis.
That's enough for about half of Yellowknife's 19,000 residents.
It would be a nice way to make the old mine useful to the residents of Yellowknife. When I discussed geothermal power with a friend recently, I said that there was no way anyone would dig down far enough just for the possible power and heat generation, given how deep they'd have to go. But if the hole is already dug, you might as well make use of it.
I've always said that Canada's north is the perfect place to make green energy investments. Unlike in the south, there is no major, interconnected, infrastructure to contend with. The communities are mostly isolated with their own power generation; usually diesel generators which have to be supplied by fuel shipped in during the summer. Nunavut spends 20% of its budget subsidizing fuel, and with fuel costs the way they are, one can expect that will only get worse and cut into other government services even more than it does now.
The price of green energy is quickly decreasing, and while it may still not be competitive in the south, the added costs associated with fuel transport in the north means that many of these technologies are already viable alternatives here. The few, lonely wind turbines set up some years ago as a pilot project are already capable of providing power at a better cost than the diesel generators, and the pilot project the Aussies are working on in Antarctica shows how such power can be used to produce hydrogen to power the vehicles people use, and further wean the north off fossil fuel imports.
In essence, I'm always happy when I see our governments bow to common sense and make use of some of the plentiful resources we have in the north. I just wish I'd see more of it.
