A place at the renewables table

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What happens when the urgent need to build more clean energy capacity collides with resource availability in ancestral territory of First Nation communities?

This was a question Boralex Inc. and the Innu Nation had to answer when assessing the opportunity to build a 200 MW wind project on traditional lands in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, Canada.

Fortunately, the Government of Quebec provides a framework for energy development that gives Indigenous groups a seat at the table as equity owners and active participants in the consultation process. While this provides certainty for developers and investors who are eager to capitalize on attractive renewable energy projects in Canada, they also face challenges around ensuring responsible development and operations grounded in rigorous human rights due diligence and comprehensive community engagement.

The Project

Parc éolien Apuiat is a 200 MW wind farm developed in northern Canada and is a partnership between renewable energy developer Boralex and the Innu Nation.

In the Innu language “apuiat” means oar, symbolizing moving forward together, and this project reflects Innu’s ambitions for their collective future. The Apuiat wind farm was the Innu Nation’s first project developed on their traditional land in the province of Quebec.

The partnership between Boralex and the Innu Nation provides a framework to ensure the community ultimately benefits from the renewable energy project:

• Revenue from the project as equity partners
• Payment to the Innu host community for the land where the wind farm is located
• Access to the land during hunting season
• Approvement policy that promotes economic opportunities to Innu workforce and businesses
• A robust communication and community engagement plan, including a grievance redressal mechanism
• The creation of a wind turbine maintenance training program for the Innus.

DNV's Role and Contributions

DNV undertook an assessment of the wind project, conducting human rights due diligence to evaluate the project’s processes. It considered environmental, social, labor, indigenous stakeholder engagement, and project compliance to the Equator Principles.

The assessment reviewed compliance with International Labor Organization (ILO), child and forced labour regulations as well as the specific requirements for engagement and ensuring an equitable energy transition for indigenous communities. The community engagement process included free, prior and informed consent, tracking frequency and modes of engagement with the communities, addressing their needs and potential impacts during construction (such as access to their traditional lands, monitoring environmental impact on the land, etc.) and provisions for longer-term jobs.

This equity partnership fortified the ability of the Innu community to mandate the benefits for the community in the long term and allow them to participate as asset owners rather than impacted parties.

The Apuiat wind farm is being completed in compliance with the Equator Principles, in the spirit of respect and partnership. Importantly, DNV’s human rights due diligence provided critical validation for the investor and financing community that the Apuiat wind farm is a low-risk, responsibly developed and operated project.

For Canada, the opportunity to provide First Nations with economic autonomy and agency through renewables is immense. There are still 178 remote Indigenous and northern communities not connected to the electricity grid and are reliant on biomass, trucked-in natural gas or diesel generators. As the energy transition progresses and projects are sited on traditional Indigenous and tribal lands throughout the world, the approach taken by Boralex, and the Innu Nation should serve as a beacon for other renewable energy infrastructure projects.

To learn how DNV can bring your ESG to life visit DNV.com/ESG 

10/29/2024 7:23:00 AM