A first-of-its-kind effort to gain a detailed picture of the energy aspirations of small, rural and remote communities across northern BC has sparked new conversations that will help shape the next decade of clean energy development in the province.
A group photo from the regional dialogue in Terrace, BC on March 10, 2025. (Credit: Aaron Whitfield, Red Bike Media)
The community-led conversations are part of the Northern Regional Energy Dialogues (NRED) a five-year Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) project developed in partnership with the University of Victoria (UVic) and University of Northern BC (UNBC), with support from the Northern British Columbia Climate Action Network (NorthCAN).
Led by UVic researchers Tamara Krawchenko and Kara Shaw, and Sinead Earley from UNBC, the NRED team has already sat down with communities spread across 1,100 km of northern terrain in the last eight weeks.
This month the project begins scaling up with a new series of regional dialogues that will connect dozens of communities and First Nations to think together about their shared issues and aspirations, with the aim of strengthening community resilience, expanding energy ecosystems and bolstering economic security across the region.
"Our plan is to create an open platform for community voices across this significant geographical area to share their energy needs, wants and plans because nothing like that has ever been done before," Sinead Earley explains. "This will create a rich picture of the breadth of energy needs across the regional north, which we hope we can use to help these communities overcome some of the specific challenges they're facing."
Bridging deep divisions
Understanding the lay of the land in Kitimat at a community conversation held on Jan. 30, 2025. (Credit: Devin Wall, Spruce Tree Media)
Although the conversations are informal and the project is humble in its design, NRED's dialogues buck a decades-long trend of excluding northern communities and First Nations from energy planning and policy development, which is typically concentrated in the southern urban centres of the province.
"We just don't have the population up here, so we don't have the representation in government. The short-form history is: fewer people, less of a voice," Earley says. "But the north is where resource development, hydro power, critical minerals and fossil fuels are located, which for decades have been siphoned away from the area."
This long-standing dynamic has created deep tensions, says project co-lead Kara Shaw, which she hopes can be at least partially addressed through these community-level dialogues.
"Our project aims to counter the decades-long dynamic in BC where urban areas have dictated energy projects to rural areas but aren't responsive to rural needs," she says. "There are a lot of strong ideas and desires for change in the north. We want to help find the support communities need to make those changes happen."
Take for example a community conversation that took place in Kitimat on Jan. 30, facilitated by NRED co-lead Tamara Krawchenko and hosted in partnership with the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
At the table sat representatives from the municipal government, a local trade union, and industry, transportation and community groups, alongside a number of people from the general public. Together they reflected upon the district's current energy infrastructure, industrial landscape and natural resources, and discussed energy-related opportunities and barriers to future development.
"The event reinforced a lot of things we are hearing in the other conversations. There's an asymmetry between big industry and their energy needs versus what community members want to see," Krawchenko says. "The group had a lot of interest in renewables that strengthen communities by supporting a more diversified and resilient economy not just the industrial economy. They want new sources of energy that create new opportunities and reduce costs."
Differences in common
A key component of the NRED project is to understand the unique needs of small, rural and remote communities across the north, which are frequently distinct even from one another's.
In many conversations, common themes emerge that have become something of a refrain over the decades: small populations typically mean a small tax base, little representation in higher levels of government, dwindling resources, low staffing capacity and poor retention of staff, for example.
Each community has its own set of challenges. (Credit: Aaron Whitfield, Red Bike Media)
"Some of the challenges that communities are sharing with us are challenges they've been talking about for a long time, but have mostly gone unheard. We're trying to redress that through the regional dialogues by building new cross-community connections and finding regional solutions that address these common issues," Earley says.
For every challenge they share in common, though, there's another that is wholly unique to each community due to the complex constellations of social, political, economic and environmental factors that defy easy classification.
The particular challenges of a rural town will differ from a First Nation of a similar size, for instance; and the needs of a remote in-land township will differ from another nearby on the coast, which will differ from a neighboring island community living off-grid.
"We want to deeply understand the needs of these communities so that we can champion their voices to policy makers in the capital and address issues that serve their interests," Krawchenko explains. "Community members are knowledgeable about their communities and have lots of great ideas, which is why it's so important that we get out to meet with and listen to them."
Living in a materials world
The reality for most northern populations is that their economic well-being is deeply entwined with the material resource extraction industries that surround them, which are increasingly impacted by global forces.
Where one community is devastated by algal blooms that wipe out their fisheries, another booms from increased demand for their critical minerals or oil and gas.
Cutting across all of them though is the fallout of climate change, which is adding fuel to the wildfires of global geopolitics.
"We're in an age where you can't separate climate change from political instability," Shaw explains. "Add in things like Trump's tariffs and the already-existing economic uncertainties that were making rural communities vulnerable are just kind of on steroids now."
For Sarah Korn, NRED's community coordinator, helping to build northern rural community resilience in the face of such uncertainty is both a professional and a personal concern.
"I've listened to the experiences of local government staff in small communities across the north working beyond their capacities, wearing every hat in the department and navigating a changing climate while trying to adapt to the policies and directives prescribed by the south," she shares. "And I've seen firsthand energy insecurity, vulnerability to extreme and changing weather, and the need for climate and energy policy solutions that also address community needs."
In the area where Korn lives an unincorporated community in the Cariboo region houses are typically heated by woodstove or propane, which must be trucked in from the nearest city some 320 km away and can cost up to $1,200 per refill. As a result, it's common for her to hear stories of propane deliveries stalled by freezing conditions and neighbours left with only their ovens to use for heat.
It's no surprise, then, that her own aspirations for the NRED project are so clear.
"I would like to see northerners at the table designing energy solutions that bring economic and social benefits to rural and remote communities," Korn says with great clarity and conviction.
Called to action
As the NRED project advances, the researchers behind it are keenly aware that the people they are speaking with want to see action and implementation, not just more talk.
"Having concrete outcomes from these conversations is very important to us and a key goal for our project," Krawchenko says. "We share the take-aways with the people who participate in them, policymakers in the south, and our network in ACET, which partners with small communities to co-create forward-looking, equitable and resilient clean energy solutions."
Earley notes how critical it is for these projects to be co-created by the communities, which keeps both expertise and ownership in-house.
"Many small communities have to rely on external consultants who come in, lead a renewable energy project, then leave. But if the new challenges emerge, the consultants have already been paid, so they don't come back," she says. "This is one reason it's important that this expertise is embedded within the community through training programs that send their people to technical or trade school so that they can build energy efficient homes or run their own solar projects, for instance."
Hyper-local solutions like these, that fill in the gaps at the ground level, can make a regional impact that takes on a global significance, says Shaw.
"Climate change is a global problem that's landing everywhere but differently in different places. We're only going to solve this problem by figuring out community-scale solutions in one place and then another place and then linking those solutions together. That's where we have to take action."
