Small Town Week, Episode 5: How the new Six Nations energy storage facility could change Ontario’s grid

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So far this week we have covered problems facing small communities from housing to the economy to healthcare and more. There are plenty of places where rural Canada is struggling. Hey, it’s no different than urban Canada, really. And the existential threat we all face is also the same, a global climate crisis that grows deeper every day, that is pushing us rapidly towards renewable energy. In some communities, this is viewed as a threat, nearly as dire as the climate crisis itself. But in other places, like a First Nation in Southern Ontario, it is a solution to the needs of a province. It is a chance to turn the tide of our increasing demand for power and to move away from reliance on fossil fuels. It is a framework for a whole new level of cooperation between First nations, corporations, and different levels of government. Here is how one energy project near an Ontario First Nation could revolutionize our national energy grid.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Fatima Syed is an Ontario reporter with The Narwhal. Hello Fatima.

Fatima Syed Hi Jordan. It’s good to be back.

Jordan Heath Rawlings It’s always nice to talk with a climate reporter about good news. So I will cut right to it. First of all, just take us there, tell, tell me about the Six Nations of the Grand River. Where is it? who and how many people live there?

Fatima Syed So, it’s a 30 minute drive from Hamilton, which for your non Ontario listeners, is about an hour from Toronto on a good day when there’s no traffic.

Jordan Heath Rawlings There aren’t many good days, but…

Fatima Syed Hamilton, of course is, is an industry hub. It’s, you know, there’s a huge steel industry there, a huge aggregate industry, which is basically the industry that gives us all the materials we need to build things and, and that’s where, you know, close to it, is the six nations of the Grand River. This is home to the largest first nation population in Canada. The only reserve in North America where all six Iroquois nations live together just on the banks of the Grand River. And what’s really cool is this community has created, a corporation to manage economic opportunities on behalf of their people. So they’ve created the Six Nations Development Corporation, and what they’ve been doing for many years now is investing in energy projects to help their community become, you know, self-sufficient and, help the wider community in the province become energy efficient. And they have invested in some of the largest wind and solar power plants in the region. And, and they’re doing really cool things. And one of those cool things, of course, is what we’re talking about. So this is home to the largest First Nation population in Canada. Over 25,000 people live here.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And they’re living right next door to, what you call in your piece an energy corridor. Can you just explain what that is?

Fatima Syed Yeah, I mean, I don’t, I don’t think this is like a technic different that’s in the horizon. It basically, you see these steel frames and these wires just above you out of reach, but when you’re, when you’re driving down from Hamilton, past Six Nations, and then you go 30 minutes further, you’re suddenly in just this land that is completely devoid of, human residence, but not human activity because all you can see like literally everything the light touches is energy. you’ve got the grid, you’ve got the wires, you’ve got wind turbines

Jordan Heath Rawlings And we’re talking about those, gigantic towers that conduct and, and bring wires to any, you know, residential, or business communities nearby.

Fatima Syed Exactly, yeah. And then you’ve got transformers, which are these little like blocks of like metal contraptions, that, you know, so connect the grid to our communities. And you’ve got industry, you’ve got an imperial oil facility, you’ve got steel industries, you’ve got, you know, just, just so many facilities, just, you know, part of the manufacturing process in the province. And that’s what it is. It’s an energy corridor. This is where power is collected and transferred and moved. And everything’s happening here.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And when was it built? And it’s so close to the Six Nations of the Grand River. Were they involved in building it? Did they have a say?

Fatima Syed So this is really hard to timestamp because of course the grid is built over time. We started building Ontario’s grid in the early 19 hundreds. And, and of course back then as, as we have learned over years and years of reporting and learning, Indigenous communities were not properly consulted or involved in the process of construction of anything, including the grid. But that’s changing In the last several years, you know, the energy industry has sort, sort of been awakened, if that’s the right word, to the idea of reconciliation and to contend with their role in not properly consulting with Indigenous communities and First Nation leadership on where energy projects are are built and how they’re built and who helps with the building and so forth. And again, for the longest time, Indigenous communities weren’t even connected to the grid. That’s actually a very recent phenomenon where just now we are starting to see very remote First Nations get connected to the grid and actually get electricity and move away from diesel, which was sort of the source of their power. So it’s a very long, complicated history that I, I’m not doing justice at all. But at the core of it is the idea that, you know, the energy industry and Indigenous nations were not exactly, working together. This was, this was not a collaboration or cooperation or, or even just a, you know, formal, you know, conversation. It, it was absent. It was, it, it didn’t exist. And, and over the last several years that has been changing. In very, very interesting ways.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And so the project that now we have the background out of the way and and are going to discuss is probably, the biggest and, and hopefully at least maybe the best example of how this is changing. So maybe just explain, what exactly the, the Oneida Energy Storage Project is?

Fatima Syed Yeah, so, so before I even get into that, I think a brief explainer on what energy storage is, because energy is, is such a, fascinating thing, but it’s very complex and it’s something we don’t think about a lot, right? Like when you turn on a switch or, put your kettle on in the morning, or even just run your tv, you don’t really think about where the power is coming from. In Ontario, it’s coming from a wide variety of sources. That includes nuclear, it includes water, it includes solar and wind, and varying mixes of that. And I’m not gonna get into specifics. This is it just like a, you know, Cliff Notes version. But the way that it’s worked for years and years and years is we would, you know, use those sources, turn them into electricity, and then immediately send it down these wires to our homes. Everything that we burned into energy was immediately sent off. The concept of storing it, didn’t really exist until recently when technology evolved and people, and we suddenly got batteries, right? Like the same batteries that are in our phones, in our laptops. There was a conversation about how batteries could be made bigger and could possibly supply power to homes, to apartments, to cities, and, and that’s sort of emerged in Australia and Europe and the United States, not so much in Canada. Enter Six Nations…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Okay. I wanna ask very quickly about this, because a lot of people, might recognize this problem. There is a very popular, conservative talking point about wind and solar energy in particular. That’s like, well, what are you gonna do if it’s cloudy outside? Or if the wind’s not blowing, you’re not gonna be able to turn on your tv. This is, at scale, the solution to that sort of silly criticism, right? I just wanna make sure that we’re talking about the right stuff.

Fatima Syed No, and it’s a great question because the, the way that things have worked, we have wasted a lot of energy because we haven’t exactly saved it, right? So whenever we produce energy, we would send it down the lines and if it wasn’t used, it was just wasted. If we could sell it, we could sell it. But otherwise it’s just disappears into, into the ether. What energy storage is proposing to do is reduce that wastage. Cause if you think about it, we don’t need huge amounts of energy at all parts of the day. Right? So when we’re sleeping, for example. We don’t, we’re not really using that much energy, but at night is when the wind blows the hardest and the turbines are turning. So what do we do with that energy instead of turning those turbines off? Which I’ve, I’ve learned recently is actually a very expensive endeavour because it requires a lot of manpower and it’s time, intensive. So instead of turning the turbines off at night, you leave them running and you can collect that energy and store it into one of these batteries. Or, or into some, you know, a storage technology of some kind. And then in the morning when you wake up, flip on the switch on the battery and that battery will send that stored energy down to your house. So when you start your kettle, it’s there, and that way you’re not wasting the energy, you’re still collecting it, and you’re, you’re using it in the most efficient way possible. That’s what an Oneida is proposing in a very large scale. This is Canada’s largest energy storage project. It could power a city the size of Oshawa, which at the moment has a population of over 400,000 people. And it could transform the way the grid works. The way we receive our energy and also just the way energy is managed and shaped.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So this is the biggest project of its kind in Canada. How does it compare, in terms of what we see around the world and I guess, how reliable is this technology? How certain are we that we can do it at this scale?

Fatima Syed So energy storage does work. You know, there is proof in in the countries that have already set us up. Which, which I mentioned pre just, you know, a little while ago, Australia and parts of Europe, particularly in California where they use a lot of energy storage because they have a lot of solar farms and wind farms. But it is still a new technology. And as with any new thing, there are a lot of questions. You know, batteries require lithium. Where do we get lithium? In Ontario you know, the, the lithium mines are, on Indigenous land, and it’s a very heated and contentious issue right now where Indigenous communities are saying that those mines cannot be accessed without their permission. You, you’ll learn more if you read, my colleague Emma MacIntosh’s stories that it’s sort of created a very tense, back and forth between the Ontario government and, and these First Nations about how best to, to do that. And then the second thing is, you know, how many batteries do we need? How much storage capacity do we actually need to power all of Canada if this is the future? And do we have the wherewithal and the funding and so forth to do it? Oneida is being built in partnership with Tesla, for example. That makes me question like, do we need, you know, help from, from other places to, to get this done? Or can Ontario figure this out? By learning through Oneida. And then the next one is maybe a fully Ontario project. So yeah, the technology is cool, it’s innovative, it’s disruptive to use all the tech bro terms. It’s exciting. It could be, you know, the way we get to our climate goals, but there are a lot of questions still to be answered. What’s really cool though, and, and you know, I’ve been reporting on energy for many years now, and in Ontario, energy is always political. It’s always political. Everyone has, you know, varying thoughts. One, what works, what doesn’t work? Do we need gas? Do we need nuclear? It’s, it’s such a debate in this province. No one has anything bad to say about Oneida, which is really interesting to me. Everyone loves this project, and the reason is that the approach it’s taken is, fascinating and has set a precedent that I think will be very long lasting, and that’s the fact that this is being built by a First Nation.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I wanna talk about that in particular before we move on to discuss more about the project, just maybe if you could, explain just how involved the First Nation is. You write that this is, one of the largest attempts to put in practice, the 92nd recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So, you know, what is that recommendation? How does it apply here?

Fatima Syed As we all know, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made dozens of recommendations to help Canadian society make amends for the way Indigenous Peoples were treated and to, you know, build a better future. And one of the ones that we don’t talk about enough is the recommendations for corporate Canada. The 92nd second recommendation says that corporate Canada needs to partner genuinely and meaningfully with Indigenous peoples in all economic development projects. Which, you know, we talked at the top about how Indigenous peoples have been excluded. This project has centered that, more than any other that I’ve seen, and that’s because it’s, it was created completely in partnership with Six Nations, you know, Six Nations, was thinking about energy storage and you know, how to, how to go about it and figure it out. And at the same time, so was this company called NR Store? Which was brand new. It was created by a very cool woman, Annette Verschuren, who used to be the president of Home Depot, Canada for many years and created Michael’s, the arts and crafts chain. And she realized in all her worldly travels that the world wasn’t very good at storing energy. Both of these people came together and basically said, let’s do this. And spent the next six years creating this project, thinking about how it would benefit Six Nations first, pitching it to every single person in the energy industry, working through anything that could go wrong, working through all the concerns that could possibly come up and did it. They convinced government and the industry, both of which at least in Canada, are very averse to trying new things who go for this and to give it a shot. You know, I spoke to, to someone in the energy industry who helps, you know, create energy policies. And the way he, he described it to me is there was, there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no reason to say no. It came in, I, the, the phrase he used was, it came in fully bake. And the sheer amount of effort that went into it, you know, they just, both Matt Jamieson, who’s the head of six Nations Development Corporation and Annette Verschuren of NR store, both f them say that they had dozens of meetings with industry and with government to, you know, help them see the merits of it, to educate them on, on the possibilities of this project.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, you mentioned earlier there were questions from government and, that Doug Ford’s, governments have not always been quick to approve projects like this. So I, I also wanna ask you, how did they convince them and how close did this project come to just not happening at all?

Fatima Syed There were many challenges because as this project was being developed at the pandemic happened, the price of lithium increased by like a couple hundred percent. I think it was like 400 something percent that the price of lithium increased by. The Ford government, of course, was cutting policies that could enable clean energy projects. Like this one, if you remember in their first term, they cut everything from cap and trade to renewable energy projects, to many other similar things. I think, you know, it was part luck and part also just sheer determination to get this done. Because when the pandemic happened, Ontario’s energy demands and Canada’s energy demands broadly increased drastically. And suddenly the projections were showing that we did not have enough supply to contend with that. And you know, the government started talking about increasing natural gas, which it has done as what they say is a temporary measure until they figure things out. But that increase sort of gave this project. A reason to exist too, because it was like, well, you gotta try things that might work. And energy storage might be a way to help us, so that we can reduce our wastage and every watt of energy that is produced by an Ontario facility can be used in the best way possible and can go to residents and businesses and and so forth. And it worked. You know, in recent weeks and months, most of the new projects that have been announced in Ontario have been energy storage, and they are being announced in partnership with First Nations. Oneida is sort of created this domino effect where, because it’s the first and it’s so good on paper. And the people involved are, are so determined. It’s sort of become the first in a constellation of projects that is changing the way energy is being thought about, shaped, and shared across the country. It’s kind of anchoring our, our energy policy right now. Every minister brings it up, whether it’s federal or Ontario. Everyone in the energy industry is talking about this one, kinda become like a beacon almost of, of hope that maybe something new will change our future in, in the best way. And that’s all because of the people involved truly.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, it’s so nice, as I mentioned, to have, a positive climate story to discuss and potential solutions as opposed to just more, disasters. But before you go, I wanna look ahead a bit. What do we know about, how this will ramp up? When it’ll ramp up? And you mentioned our increased demand for energy. How high is that gonna go? I know, last month we just passed 40 million Canadians, so you know, we, we ain’t slowing down here.

Fatima Syed Yeah. So this is the thing, right? Population growth is increasing. Cities are developing faster. Ontario wants to build more houses. Our energy demands are just gonna keep increasing. Oneida is set to be up and running by 2025. So in, in two years, if all goes well, the supply chain, you know, delivers all the parts and pieces that they need, then it’ll be up by then. But that’s just one project, right. We’ve got seven other energy projects that have been announced since of varying scales, Oneida’s still pretty big. And we’ve got an increase in natural gas, which you know, makes everyone a little nervous because natural gas is right, gonna increase our pollution and that’s gonna slow down our ability to get to our net zero goals, which we desperately need to do because we are still in a climate emergency. So, there’s a lot of things in the air right now, but I think my big takeaway from learning about this project and, and what I hope readers and and listeners will take away is we have to start talking about it more, right? The numbers are a little daunting. Our energy needs are expected to triple over the next decade. They’re already pretty high, so we need to start thinking about where we’re getting our power, where do we want to get our power from and, and who do we want defining that. I think so often the grid is so scary to look at because it’s massive and it feels like you can’t really do anything about it. It’s just there. But what Oneida has proven and what other, you know, there are some other cool energy projects like I wrote about, Five Nations Energy, which is this little company up on James Bay that basically fought the government to connect, the Indigenous communities along James Bay to the grid. So there’s all these people doing all these cool things to try and literally take power back in their hands and, and have a say about where we get our energy in and who gives it to us and how it gets to us. I think we have to start taking an interest because light doesn’t come from nowhere. Power doesn’t just magically appear in our houses. So we gotta start talking about it. And, and I’m hoping that projects like this will really get Ontarians interested in, in having a robust conversation about energy and, and power. And where we go from here. We do have to move away from burning fossil fuels. And right now Ontario’s grid is 92% emissions free, which means that 92% of our power comes from clean energy. You know, the government likes to say we’re the cleanest grid in the world. We can get to a hundred. We can always do better. And if we’re increasing natural gas, we might have to start thinking about these things sooner, right? So, I don’t know. Let’s talk energy anytime you want to. Let’s, I, I, I’d love to talk. I’m the daughter of an electrical engineer and the sister of an electrical engineer. We love talking about power in my household. I hope we can transfer that to every household in Ontario.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, it looks like we’re all gonna have to learn. Fatima, thank you so much for walking us through this. It’s a, it’s fascinating project and, and fingers crossed it gets up and running and works.

Fatima Syed Thanks for letting me nerd out with you, Jordan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Fatima Syed reporting for The Narwhal. That was The Big Story. That was Small Town Week. Our first attempt to get exclusively outside of Canada’s big cities and tell the stories that matter to communities that don’t often get a lot of national attention. Our commitment to telling those stories doesn’t end here. It never has, we’ve told lots of them in the past, just not for a straight week. You live in a small community that has an interesting story to tell. We would love to hear from you. You can find us, as you may know by now @TheBigStoryFpn on Twitter by emailing us the address is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca and by just calling us 416-935-5935. Leave us a voicemail, let us know what we should be covering. Joseph Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is the show’s other producer. Ryan Clarke leads our sound design team. And Saman Dara edited the episodes for this week you’ve just been listening to. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. I am out of here for a week. We will talk again on July 24th.