Partnering to Power a Transit Hub in Northern Canada
This autumn, ORPC has been advancing a project to harness the Mackenzie River—one of North America’s largest free-flowing rivers—to power a key travel facility along a major route to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
ORPC’s field team traveled to Fort Providence in October as part of ongoing efforts led by the Métis-owned Big River Service Centre to assess the river’s suitability for a future RivGen® system deployment. Staff deployed a bottom-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) with support from local contractors to measure flow speeds and better understand the behavior of river ice. The work builds on a characterization study performed last summer by the Canadian Hydrokinetic Turbine Test Centre.
ORPC Canada’s Director of Development, Fabienne Joly, also met with academic, Indigenous and industry partners, along with, government officials and a local utility for a stakeholder roundtable in Yellowknife to outline the phased approach of the effort.
A future deployment would help the Big River facility along Highway 3 generate electricity from the Mackenzie River and reduce its reliance on diesel power, moving toward greater energy sovereignty. For ORPC, this marks an important step toward expanding access to reliable, clean energy across Canada’s northern communities.