Paul Lefebvre, Parliamentary Secretary to the Honourable Amarjeet Sohi, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, announced a combined $4.2-million investment January 28 for two TUGLIQ Energy Corporation projects in Nunavut and Quebec.
An investment of $283,000 will enable TUGLIQ to complete a front-end engineering and design (FEED) study to integrate compressed air energy storage with its operations, enabling increased use of wind energy at a Nunavut mine. This project will demonstrate that such a system can achieve significant reductions in diesel consumption.
The overall project targets high-penetration wind energy to displace diesel in northern smart grids, proving best-of-class compressed air storage technology for the first time in the Arctic, with wide-range applicability to other mine sites featuring mined-out caverns as a means of storing energy.
A second investment of $3.9 million in RAGLAN 2.0 will expand Nunavik’s first renewable energy production and storage centre for 16 regional mining operations and Inuit communities in this Arctic region, as well as other mining operations abroad. This project, RAGLAN 2.0, builds on a prior landmark project, RAGLAN 1.0 at the Glencore RAGLAN mine, which the proponents say, “conclusively proved the technical and operational capabilities of industrial-scale renewable energy at Northern sites, under harsh industrial and climatic conditions.”
RAGLAN 2.0 will modify the operating philosophy of the mine’s main power plant, from integrating the current heat recovery system to larger-scale variable renewable energy, larger-scale energy storage, together with a revamped spinning-reserve strategy of more than 11 diesel engines, while maintaining larger-scale smartgrid stability and volt ampere reactive’s (VARs) management under highly cyclical industrial loads. The company says such coordination among thermal, storage, fluctuating wind, and diesel generation, has never been done at this scale in Canada.
Both projects are being funded through Natural Resources Canada’s Energy Innovation Program, which received $49 million over three years to support clean energy innovation.