Post by Hugo Puflett

Hello LinkedIn! Long-time reader, first-time poster. I’m in the final week of Yale University's Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program, and I wanted to start sharing some insights and anecdotes gathered over the past year. Our capstone project is a real-world tender: a clean energy proposal for the electrification of rural Indigenous communities in Northern Ontario. Canada has around 240 remote communities still reliant on diesel for electricity and heating - roughly 170 of them Indigenous. Our team (The Pacific region gang, including Mary Grace Gabis, Steve D., Cheryl Leem and Janice Tran) was assigned a hypothetical First Nation of 2,025 people. Using census data and the Communities Energy Database, we estimated housing density, diesel consumption per capita, and the landed cost of diesel on site. We concluded that a community of this size would consume ~3 million litres of diesel annually, costing just over CAD $3.9 million. From there, we began mapping solutions: 🍳 High-efficiency wood pellet stoves for manual, low-cost resilience In Canada's NWTs, high-efficiency biomass stove programs have reduced diesel consumption for space heating by as much as 90% in pilot communities. 🔥 Community-scale ground-source heat pumps This is the premium version of a solution - less scalable, and a far more capital-intensive addition. However heating is tied to lifestyle preferences, and stoves require manual operation. Large-scale ground-source heat pump systems can automate much of the load and deliver seasonal performance coefficients (SCOP) of up to 4.5! ☀️ Utility-scale solar PV and battery storage systems to offset summer electrical loads Without detailed load shape data, it was challenging to quantify the marginal benefit of a BESS on PV generation. Instead, we scoped a conservative system and estimated costs using Lazard LCOE figures, based on offsetting a flat 20% of the community’s primary energy demand. 🧠 A bit of hindsight We likely underestimated the proportion of diesel allocated to transport demand. In some remote communities, this can reach up to 30%, much of which is tied to local vehicle use and may not be easily displaced by electrification. ‼️ The Result A combined solution would cost approximately CAD $15–17.5 million, depending on the extent of storage deployed. This system could reduce diesel reliance enough to generate annual savings of over $3 million, delivering a payback period as short as five years! Cheryl Leem led efforts to tie the solution to green financing solutions using local policy schemes and debt facilities. In a dream world, we would use OpenSolar to manage these contracts via a virtual-PPA! Big shoutout to Wataynikaneyap Power for their work grid-connecting remote First Nations communities. With Kingfisher Lake and Deer Lake now linked to Ontario’s power grid, it’s a major step toward community-led energy resilience.