New plank to reconciliation?

First Nation sees green energy project as a path to a prosperous future, but there are many hurdles

Aboard the W.H. Wheeler, Captain Francis Lavalley navigates the familiar waters of Georgian Bay with his rubber boots on the wheel.

At 61 years old, he has been setting nets since before Indigenous fishing rights were respected and he had to play cat-and-mouse with the authorities.

“It’s my inherent right to do what I do because of my father and forefathers. I don’t live in a teepee. Fishing

is the tradition I partake in,” he said, gesturing through the cabin windows toward the rising ridge of the Niagara Escarpment.

Despite the plentiful Whitefish and Perch, the people of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation do not share the wealth that’s evident in the million-dollar waterfront cottages that dot the shoreline. Employment opportunities are few and far between, Lavalley says, and fishing has barely provided enough for him to survive.

A proposed clean energy storage

project, however, promises lasting jobs and a share in the revenues for the local First Nations — if it can ever get built.

Obtaining Indigenous consent is supposed to be a prerequisite for major energy or resource projects. But what that means in practice is muddy. As a result, infrastructure projects have become very hard to get off the ground across Canada, with a lack of First Nations consent blamed for project delays and cancellations from the Ring of Fire mines in Ontario to the Northern Gateway pipeline in B.C.

The quiet progress made on the Ontario Pumped Storage project 180 kilometres north of Toronto shows a promising path forward that goes beyond seeking Indigenous consent to forging a long-term partnership. It’s an approach that avoids past practices of buying-off First Nations with one-off community projects and short-term construction jobs and instead brings them in as design consultants and equity partners.

And it could add a new plank to reconciliation, one that bridges clean energy and Indigenous prosperity.

“We’ve got a way here in Canada historically of thinking about these large-scale projects from a transactional point of view,” said Niilo Edwards, executive director of the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, an organization that advises Indigenous governments on development projects. “Our members in particular really view it as a relationship-based partnership. And that’s a different way of thinking about business.”

This kind of partnership does more than increase a project’s chances of coming to fruition, Edwards says, it also makes them better by including local Indigenous knowledge that hasn’t typically been taken into account.

In Meaford, the initial design was radically altered after suggestions by the Saugeen Ojibway Nation Environment Office and will now have minimal impact on the environment while providing maximum benefit to the community, said Ogimaa Greg Nadjiwon, chief of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, one of the two distinct nations that make up the Saugeen Ojibway Nation.

“The Saugeen territory is home to the biggest nuclear power project in the country,” he said, referring to the nearby Bruce Power plant. “These nuke plants produce 30 per cent of Ontario’s energy and at the band, our equity is next to none.”

With this new project, he said, his people stand to secure their share of the benefits of development.

“This is going to be our place at the table, our way to have our own source of funding so that we can have better health care in our nations.”

While Nawash and its sister nation, the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation, have not yet given their formal consent to proceed, they’re far from the only hurdle the project faces.

Locals and cottagers have organized opposition to the project, saying the damage it will bring to the local environment outweighs the carbon reduction benefit for the climate.

The biggest obstacle, however, might be economics, as the province’s electricity system operator has twice studied the project and both times rejected it for being too expensive, despite a stated need for energy storage to help decarbonize the grid.

In this small community on the shores of Georgian Bay, the transformational project hangs in the balance. At stake is not only wealth for the people of Saugeen and Nawash and clean power for Ontario’s grid, but a potential road map for economic Indigenous reconciliation.

How pumped hydro storage works

Unlike a wind or solar farm, the pumped hydro project in Meaford wouldn’t generate any new electricity. Instead, it would use surplus power generated by wind at night to pump water from Georgian Bay up 150 metres to a reservoir at the top of the Niagara Escarpment. Then during the day, when that power is needed, the water would be released back into the bay, turning turbines and generating electricity along the way.

It’s a giant battery that takes unpredictable and intermittent wind and solar power and makes them available 24-7. This “dispatchability” is the key to being able to add more renewable energy to the grid, say energy analysts, and will lessen or even eliminate the need for gas plants.

Ontario, despite being the province with the most installed wind and solar by far, still only gets eight per cent of its electricity from wind and less than one per cent from solar. This is below the global average of 13 per cent and far behind some northern European countries that produce more than one third of their energy from the wind and sun.

Unlike the large batteries being built across the province, which only have several hundred megawatts and four hours of capacity, the pumped storage project in Meaford will be able to release 1,000 megawatts of power for 11 hours — enough to power one million homes for that period of time. All this while avoiding the ethical and environmental morass that accompanies the critical minerals needed for batteries.

Pumped storage is actually an old technology that’s been in use for more than 100 years. Ontario has been pumping water into a reservoir at the top of Niagara Falls at the Sir Adam Beck Pump Generating Station since 1957. And while the water batteries were not central to Ontario’s power grid for the last half century, they could be a big part for the next 50 years.

Reducing and eliminating carbon emissions to lessen the impacts of climate change will require switching from fossil fuels to electricity for almost everything — from cars to heating to heavy industry. Not only will we need more electricity — an estimated 60 per cent more by 2050 — but that power itself needs to be generated without producing emissions.

Those considerations have created new interest and all of a sudden, pumped storage is back in vogue, with hundreds of new projects proposed worldwide.

Green energy and storage projects are particularly attractive for First Nations because they align with Indigenous values of stewardship of the land, said Reggie George, executive director of partnerships at Three Fires Group, an Indigenous investment corporation.

“Being in the spirit of our nation and creating generational wealth is very important to us,” said George, a member of Kettle Point First Nation. “We’ve been keepers of the land for many, many centuries before colonialism came in.”

The sheer amount of green energy that needs to be built is a once-in-acentury opportunity, where Indigenous participation is being valued for the first time.

“First Nations have never really had an opportunity like this. There was never a time in the ’70s or the ’80s where First Nations could have brought bonus points to energy projects or could go to the federal or provincial government and get loan guarantees,” he said. “Now we’ve got the Truth and Reconciliation Report. We’ve got the green energy revolution. We’ve got the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program. It’s kind of created a perfect storm for First Nations.”

The latest wave of Indigenous partnerships in the clean energy sector have incorporated between 15 and 50 per cent Indigenous ownership and they are now required for new projects in B.C. and encouraged in Ontario, said James Jenkins, executive director of Indigenous Clean Energy.

“Beyond the financial benefit, they allow First Nations to sit sideby-side with proponents to work through issues that would have been more difficult in an adversarial environment,” he said.

The Meaford project proponent, TC Energy — formerly known as TransCanada — is better known for pipelines and gas plants than green energy. But John Mikkelsen, the director of power business development, says the company divested from Ontario gas plants in 2019 and has pivoted to different kinds of projects in the energy sector.

“We really thought that the future was going to be something different. So we started looking at what Ontario was going to need going forward,” he said. “We did our own math and said, wow, we’re going to need a lot of storage.”

Meaford was an “ideal” site, he said, because of the proximity of water to natural elevation and the fact that it’s not too far from the GTA, where much of the power is needed. Instead of taking the “traditional approach” of developing the project and seeking Indigenous support after the fact, Mikkelsen asked: “Why don’t we just go, right away, just talk to them about this opportunity and bring them in as a partner?”

After an initial meeting in 2019, the company did the unexpected and made a public commitment to not proceed without the support of the two nations. That, Mikkelsen said, went a long way to building trust.

Since then, TC Energy has been meeting with the chiefs of Saugeen and Nawash weekly, and holding calls between the meetings. Public meetings have been held in both communities and the company has sponsored trips to other pumped storage projects in the U.S. for band members. While no formal deal has been signed, many who were initially skeptical have started to see the benefits of the project.

“Eight years ago, if you would have asked if I would have been partnering up and have a relationship with TransCanada, Nawash and Saugeen Nation, I would have said you’re crazy,” said Nawash Chief Nadjiwon. “But we talked and it happened the way a project should happen. We were involved since day one. And they agreed: no project without our consent. And they agreed that this project wouldn’t be started until all the concerns around impacts are addressed.”

A local hurdle

Tom Buck says his family has been driving up from Michigan for over 100 years. The Georgian Bay area offers lapping waters in the summer and the slopes of nearby Blue Mountain in the winter, although the bucolic peace is shattered by the sound of the tanks firing at the military training base just outside town, which can rattle windows more than 15 kilometres away.

Notwithstanding the explosions, Buck and the local resident group he runs believe the pumped storage project will disturb the fragile local environment.

With more than 40,000 signatures on an online petition, Save Georgian Bay is now “committed to stopping” the pumped storage project and has been drumming up support in neighbouring communities.

The group has a lengthy list of concerns, ranging from 30 species at risk to worries the dam will not hold and waters will inundate the houses below. There’s a reason, they say, no one has built pumped storage since the last project was completed in Michigan in the 1970s.

“We started studying the project at Ludington, Mich., and honestly, we were rather horrified,” he said. “There has been a significant fish kill and it’s contributed to quite a bit of turbidity on the Lake Michigan shoreline.”

The group commissioned its own “environmental strategic assessment” that identified risks to the Niagara Escarpment, which is a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, including the destruction of 500 acres of forested land.

There’s also a lack of trust that TC Energy will do the right thing, as they have a track record of pipeline leaks and misleading the public, Buck said, pointing to a recent $3.5million fine levied on the company for overbilling the Ontario electricity system by $9 million.

What’s more, decades of mortar and howitzer fire has left an untold number of unexploded ordinance (UXOs) and toxic chemicals buried on the project site, which will require five to 10 years of removal and remediation efforts, according to a Department of National Defense document the group obtained via freedom of information legislation and shared with the Star.

“TransCanada has limited to no experience working in an area with UXOs,” states the document. “Their current estimate sees three years of planning and four years of construction. They have not factored in the UXO problem.”

Save Georgian Bay says it supports efforts to combat climate change with renewable energy and electricity storage but believes the pumped storage project in Meaford is not the best way to decarbonize the grid.

“By throwing around buzzwords like ‘green’ and ‘net-zero’ TC Energy hopes to distract from the very real shortcomings of their proposal,” the group stated in a recent report.

Asked about the group’s concerns, TC Energy’s Mikkelsen says the project won’t go forward without a full federal environmental assessment process, where many of these concerns will be addressed by an independent third party.

Over the last several months, Save Georgian Bay has taken its concerns on the road, making presentations to cities and towns along the shore of Georgian Bay. So far, they’ve received support from four municipalities. But they haven’t yet reached out to the Saugeen and Nawash First Nations.

“I would very much like to be able to sit down and gather their understanding of the project and how they see it helping and providing gains for their community,” Buck said. “They’re on the to-do list.”

Weighing the cost versus benefit

Shane Chegahno started Makwa Development Corp. with former Nawash chief Scott Lee as a way to create private-sector economic opportunity for the people of Saugeen and Nawash. In a former roller rink, the company makes metal fittings so precise they’re certified to be used in nuclear facilities.

“Our approach to business is not traditional corporate Canada. We think with our hearts,” he said. “It’s about our people and it’s about creating opportunity and allowing Indigenous people to have a choice.”

As the original stewards of the land, Chegahno says they do their homework before agreeing to work on a project because it has to align with their values.

“The pumped storage project is wonderful because we’re not impacting the land in a negative way. We’re utilizing water. We’re not impacting that water. It’s getting pumped up to a reservoir and let go back into the bay.”

Makwa has played a pivotal role in developing the design of the pumped storage facility in a way that addresses the nations’ concerns and fulfils TC Energy’s technical standards. Working with biologists at the Saugeen Environment Office and engineering consultants, the original design has been altered in ways that took into account traditional knowledge from the elders and modern scientific studies.

For example, what was initially going to be a single intake/output pipe four metres in diameter will now be 20 underwater structures, each 10 metres wide.

“We had to make them bigger so that we can release the flow slower, and when the turbines are actually working to bring in the water, that they’re not sucking in young fish. That’s very important to the Saugeen Ojibway Nation.”

The initial mesh covering the underwater openings had four-inch openings, but there was a worry that fry would still slip through. The new mesh is so tight, there’s only 1/4-inch between wires.

“It’s a collaborative process. It really is. And hats off to TC Energy. They’ve approached this project probably not in the traditional manner and that’s because they’re listening to the community and they’re hearing it,” said Chegahno.

In 2022, Meaford Mayor Ross Kentner was elected saying he opposed the pumped storage project. Today, he says the town can’t afford to let this opportunity pass it by.

With aging infrastructure and a surging population, Kentner says Meaford needs a community benefits agreement that will provide much needed capital to prepare for the future.

“My epiphany came when I realized that this is more apt to happen than not … (because) we need to produce as much new hydro power in the next 25 years as we brought on stream in the last 100 years.”

Pumped storage, with its large capacity and long runtime, is particularly well suited to replacing gas plants and, according to an analysis by energy consultants Power Advisory, it can do so for 30 per cent less than the contracted price the newest gas plants will be paid.

The provincial government highlighted the Meaford project in its plan for growing the electricity grid over the next 25 years, calling it “pivotal to ensuring our grid is as efficient as possible.”

However, Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which is the sole provider of electricity contracts in the province, has expressed skepticism about the project, submitting two reports to then-energy minister Todd Smith that both found the project was more expensive than the alternatives.

Smith sent the IESO back to the drawing board with instructions to do a wider analysis of the “broader societal and economic benefits” of the project.

Meanwhile, the IESO has put out a planning document targeting the acquisition of up to 1,000 megawatts of “long lead-time long-duration storage” by 2034, describing the Meaford pumped storage project without actually mentioning its name.

A way to ‘walk in the two worlds’

Chief Nadjiwon says combining modern clean technology with Indigenous knowledge is a model that could provide a better future for his people.

“When I first became chief, one of the hardest things I had to learn to understand is how we could walk in the two worlds. Maintain who we are as a people and be involved as active participants in the economy. This project does that,” he said. “I’m proud that we made the decision to stay involved in this project and I’ll be proud to have my name attached to a net zero project that’s going to address all of Ontario’s needs to energize in the future.”

While the Saugeen and Nawash Nations have not yet given their formal consent, the goodwill built up over four years of working together is evident on both sides.

“As equity owners, Saugeen Ojibway Nation would be entitled to a significant share of the Project’s revenues, thus offering the potential for meaningful, long-term economic benefits,” wrote Sara Beasley, a TC Energy spokesperson, in an email.

Back aboard the W.H. Wheeler, Captain Lavalley points at the forested hillside where the pumped storage project might one day be built. He describes the despair that has plagued his community, the lack of jobs and opportunity and the influx of drugs.

“I lost two nieces to addiction,” he said. “If something was in place, they could have beaten it.

“If this goes right, I can see a wellness centre on the reserve for the addicted, homes for the elders, a cafeteria for the children. I can see colleges and universities on our land for our people, banks and loans for us too.”

Then he pulls a handwritten note from his coat pocket and hands it to a reporter, explaining that he wanted to put his thoughts down in writing.

“I dream of a sun, where hope keeps shining down on everyone,” he wrote. “And I think this may be the hope that my people need.”

‘‘ Eight years ago, if you would have asked if I would have been partnering up and have a relationship with TransCanada, Nawash and Saugeen Nation, I would have said you’re crazy.

OGIMAA GREG NADJIWON CHIEF OF THE CHIPPEWAS OF NAWASH UNCEDED FIRST NATION