Contractor screw-up delays Iqaluit hydro projects

Qulliq Energy Corp. announced May 22 that summer work at future hydro sites, including Upper Lake at Jaynes Inlet, 80 km south of Iqaluit, were cancelled when one contractor failed to meet obligations. (PHOTO QULLIQ ENERGY CORP.)

Qulliq Energy Corp. decided to cancel this summer’s work on its hydroelectric development projects for Iqaluit when one of three contractors failed to meet conditions.

Tenders issued for logistics support, geotechnical drilling and air charter services all fell through.

But Qulliq could not say which contract created the problem due to confidentiality agreements.

All requests for proposal tenders “were dependent on the other ones being awarded,” said George Hickes, Qulliq’s manager of corporate communications, but failure by one “created the domino effect where the other two contracts had to be cancelled as well.”

The Qulliq Energy Corp. planned to start a feasibility study and environmental review on two multi-million dollar hydroelectric dams near Iqaluit, hoping someone will help fund and build the two dams by 2019 and 2030.

Two hydro dams would be built, one at Jaynes Inlet, which would generate 10 megawatts of power. That would be completed by 2019.

The other dam would be at Armshow South, located just across the bay from Iqaluit a few kilometres away from the Jaynes Inlet site.

The delay is likely to affect the timeline of the projects, announced last December, which called for environmental impact assessment for Jaynes Inlet to be completed in 2014-2015, project approval in 2015-2016 and the expectation that power would come online around 2019.

“It’s really unfortunate because we were really looking forward to this project being revitalized, and this kind of puts a little cog in the wheel,” Hickes said May 24.

Work planned for the summer of 2013 will eventually be re-tendered, he said.

“Senior management’s been sitting down on this for a week trying to figure out what our alternatives were and we just came to the realization that timing doesn’t permit us to re-tender,” Hickes said, noting that time has run too short for the sealift season.

The power corporation estimates that about 30 per cent of its power generation goes to Iqaluit.

For that reason, shifting from diesel generation to hydroelectric power promises to bring huge power savings for power rates across the territory, in addition to Iqaluit, Hickes said.

“If we can offset that amount of fossil fuel use, that’s a huge impact,” he said.