Power on their terms: how Inukjuak built its own energy system against the odds

Pituvik Sarvaq Energie Inc. director Eric Atagotaaluk looking onto the land as he prepares for a hunting trip. (Photo by Lina Forero)

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In 2024, Inukjuak did something few thought possible. In a fly-in Inuit village nearly 1,500 kilometres north of Montreal, where construction seasons are short, and every shipment must cross sea or sky, the community began producing its own electricity.

The hydroelectric facility it now operates was not imposed from outside — it was imagined, built and ultimately owned by the community itself. In a region where infrastructure often stalls under the weight of distance and cost, many describe its completion as a miracle.

Nunavik, the vast northern region of Quebec where Inukjuak is located, subjects every infrastructure project — from constructing a house to creating larger buildings — to a logistical gauntlet. Transportation windows are narrow, costs balloon quickly and delays compound. For a small community to deliver a large-scale energy project under those conditions was never supposed to work — yet it did.

The Innavik run-of-river facility took nearly 20 years to realize. By completion, between 200,000 and 300,000 cubic metres of rock had been excavated, and around 15,000 cubic metres of concrete were poured. But before the first blast of dynamite or the first truckload of cement arrived, the real work was bureaucratic. How did it happen?

Owning the idea

Before a single machine started working on the facility, the team behind the project went through 12 years of bureaucratic logistics. In 2006, the Pituvik Landholding Corporation, a community-led company that promotes development in Inukjuak, began exploring the feasibility of a clean-energy project.

“Hydro-Québec has been analysing our river since the 1960s,” said Eric Atagotaaluk, director of Pituvik Sarvaq Energie Inc., the sister corporation responsible for developing Innavik. “We knew eventually that if someone was going to develop a hydro facility on our river, we wanted to be the ones to participate, develop and own the project.”

Alongside their clean-energy advisor and the founding executive director of Indigenous Clean Energy, Chris Henderson, Pituvik had to choose among four projects. In 2009, they selected the location where Innavik now stands and began feasibility studies and environmental assessments.

Before anything else, however, the community itself had to agree.

During that time, the community held a referendum on whether to build a nearby hydroelectric project. “Hydro had a very bad reputation when we started this process; community members were really reluctant,” said Atagotaaluk, especially given Innavik’s proximity to important fishing areas. Community concerns ran deep.

To address them, Henderson spent weeks at the community radio station, the primary source of local information, broadcasting six days a week for five weeks and taking live calls.

The referendum passed with 83 per cent approval.

A long fight for approval

Community backing did not translate into institutional support.

Between 2009 and 2015, the project went through what Henderson called “a very painful process” of negotiations with the Quebec government and Hydro-Québec. He himself spoke to three different premiers during that time and faced consistent resistance.

“If they had agreed to do it when we proposed it, this project would be so financially successful it would be absolutely crazy,” added Henderson.

When the project began construction in 2020, it was valued at $90 million and is projected to generate $50 million for the community over 50 years. “The income that the community would have realised in this project would probably be four to five times what they do now.” Had it been approved a decade earlier, Henderson estimates, the cost would have been roughly half as much and the returns four to five times higher.

At the time, Pituvik and Henderson lacked the financial means to develop the project independently. They made more than two dozen visits to Montreal and Quebec City to meet with the government and the Crown corporation. Hydro-Québec remained firm; they did not want to partner with Pituvik because it was too expensive.

“We are a small local community corporation with little finances,” said Atagotaaluk. “People were insecure if we were going to work on this alone; it was hard for us to manage such a large project and finance it alone.”

It was an ambitious project, and they needed an ambitious partner. Eventually, Pituvik found a partner in Innergex, a Quebec-based clean energy development corporation with projects worldwide. Henderson was the bridge between the two corporations, “I said to them, look, I am a maudit Anglais, I am not Quebecois, we need some horsepower because we can’t penetrate this monolith of Hydro-Quebec and the Quebec government.”

Innergex had the expertise to obtain government authorizations and secure the appropriate financing. “That is when the ball really got rolling,” said Atagotaaluk.

By 2015, with key bureaucratic hurdles cleared, construction would begin four years later.

“We worked closely with residents to address their concerns about the construction of the power plant and spillway on the main river,” said Innergex spokesperson Jade Lachapelle. “This approach made it possible to build a project that respects the community while ensuring the technical and environmental success of Innavik.”

Where distance dictates everything

Every piece of material, heavy equipment and qualified personnel needed to be imported to Inukjuak for this project to succeed. In most cases, that meant coordinating with the two sealift companies serving Nunavik and Nunavut — NEAS and Desgagnés — whose ships operate within limited seasonal windows.

These two companies also have to bring essential cargo to most communities in Nunavik and Nunavut. Taking up a whole ship just for Innavik would be both expensive and a heavy burden for the two companies.

Some employees came from eastern regions of Quebec, such as Gaspésie. For them to match with the schedule of the only airline in Nunavik, Air Inuit, was also a logistical burden that needed to be avoided.

CRT Construction, a Québec-based engineering and construction company, took on the task. “The whole aspect of controlling the supply chain became extremely important,” said CRT Construction’s vice-president Jean-François Turgeon.

They decided to acquire a cargo ship and a private plane to circumvent Nunavik’s physical barriers. “My father is still involved, and it was his audacity,” said Turgeon. “He really is a visionary; not many entrepreneurs would have made this decision.”

The boat remains the company’s most expensive asset.

“Our first reflex was, will we be able to successfully deliver the project with those constraints?” said Turgeon. The sealifts require extensive planning since booking reservations for space on the boats in the summer begin in January of the same year.

To miss that window would be to lose vital time during the construction season, forcing CRT to miss deadlines set by permits they obtained, which could have pushed the project’s completion by years.

Air transportation was also necessary, specifically for workers to travel north. Instead of having employees wait for Air Inuit flights, which first go to Kuujjuaraapik and Umiujaq before reaching Inukjuak, they left on a private plane from the Saint-Hubert airport on Montreal’s South Shore and arrived at their destination within five hours.

Even with those two assets, logistics remained a constant burden. “Logistics consumes everybody, every day,” said Henderson. “25-30 per cent of the time of the project was just logistics.”

Recounting a previous project he worked on in Northern Ontario, Henderson said he had exchanged over 7,000 emails advising people about logistical problems. “I have not [counted the emails] with this project because I am scared of what the number would be,” he admitted.

Every day, a new problem emerged, and ten more would follow suit, all accentuated by Nunavik’s unique difficulties.

“The fact that this thing was built is literally a miracle,” said Henderson.

The real miracle

“Innavik demonstrates that it is entirely possible to build large-scale infrastructure in the North, even in the face of challenges such as remoteness and permafrost,” said Lachapelle. That is thanks to “rigorous planning and the commitment of local teams and Innergex.”

Atagotaaluk remained president of Pituvik throughout the development phase. “If we had too many changes within the board, I don’t think this project would have continued,” he admitted.

He believes the burden of reeducating board members on the complex knowledge of the hydroelectric project that the team at Pituvik gathered over the years would have staunched the flame that pushed them to the finish line.

More than anything, Henderson said, the project endured because people were emotionally invested. “They had to say passionately, ‘yes, we are going to do this, we are going to get over the hurdles no matter what.”

“Logically, we should have stopped somewhere before 2015,” he said. “But the belief in each other, and the belief in what the project could be, is what kept us going.”

Innavik is now the northernmost hydroelectric facility of its kind, built without precedent. For Henderson, it represents something larger.

“In an era defined by climate change and clean energy,” he said, “Inuit communities are expressing their vision in an entirely new way.”