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In Qaanaaq, Greenland, residents live between the vast Greenland ice sheet and the cold waters of Baffin Bay. © Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post
In Qaanaag in Greenland it is very cold and dark for a long time - the energy costs are enormous. Renewable energies should now help.
QAANAAQ, Greenland - Out on the ice, Toku Oshima often says, “there is no time.” There is no calendar, just the migrations of sea creatures. No clock but the rhythm of the tides. She can hunt and fish in the same way as her parents and their parents before them: she travels by dog sled and sleeps in a wooden hut she built with her own hands. In the rugged mountains and frozen fjords that surround Greenland's northernmost city, ancient customs are still alive.
But these traditions are under threat. Human-caused climate change has disrupted weather patterns and thrown animals' rhythms out of sync with ice and sun. Residents must hunt and fish for a living and therefore cannot afford the imported oil that keeps their homes warm and lit during the long Arctic night. The high cost of electricity and heating has forced some people to abandon their traditional livelihoods or leave the city entirely.
Qaanaaq residents should be able to heat their homes without sacrificing their culture, Oshima said. To do this, however, they must separate themselves from the cause of the dual challenge of climate change and energy security: fossil fuels.
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Renewable energies are to come to one of the most remote places in the world
Together with scientists and engineers from Dartmouth College, Oshima is working to bring renewable energy to one of the most remote places on Earth. Using local wind and solar energy can reduce the cost of living in Qaanaaq and ease financial pressure on residents who are already living on the edge of subsistence. And it can help the city do its part to curb the pollution that threatens its existence.
The project is still in its infancy, as Oshima's partners at Dartmouth are still developing the equipment they hope to install. To thrive in such an isolated and harsh environment, they rely on the expertise of those who have thrived in this landscape for generations. Each prototype is developed specifically for the conditions in Qaanaaq and tested by the residents themselves.
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Dartmouth College engineer Mary Albert, who co-leads the project in the US, sees it as a potential model for sustainability efforts around the world. “It’s knowledge generation,” she said, “so that they can continue to live where they want to live and how they want to live.”
For Oshima, the initiative is her “gift to the next generation” - an investment in the future of Qaanaaq that makes room for the traditions of the past. “If we want to retain more people, we have to use more energy,” she said. “It’s our culture. We’re trying to preserve our culture.”
Almost 1,600 kilometers from the North Pole – “like the end of the world”
"Qaanaaq is less than 1,000 miles (1,609 km) from the North Pole and can sometimes feel like the end of the world," said Oshima. About 650 people live in the hamlet with its colorful wooden houses on a narrow stretch of barren land between the vast Greenland ice sheet and the icy waters of Baffin Bay. There are no roads connecting Qaanaaq to the rest of the country. Visitors, food and other essential items can only be brought by plane, which operates twice a week.
The town existed only 71 years ago, when residents were forcibly relocated from their ancestral village on a southern fjord to make room for a U.S. air base. Still, there is a unique spirit in Qaanaaq, says Oshima: “We have ocean views, we have mountains. You never feel like someone is pushing you down.
Villagers fish along a crack in the sea ice. © Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post
Oshima is something of an unofficial leader of the city. As a skilled craftswoman, trained electrician and one of the few women with a hunting license, she enjoys equal respect among men and women. To the children of Qaanaaq, she is “Aunt Toku” who provides them with sweets, fishing trips and sewing lessons. She shows them how to spot cracks in the ice and predict the weather. She teaches them to clean the meat and hair from the seal skins and reminds them: “If you want it to be beautiful, you must try hard and be patient.”
Oshima tries to awaken the children's ambition, hoping that they will look to her - a woman with modern skills who upholds the traditions of her ancestors - and imagine a greater future for themselves. “I want to show what is possible,” she says.
But the options available to the people of Qaanaaq are becoming increasingly limited. Climate change - coupled with stricter regulations and restrictions on animal exports - is threatening their traditional livelihood of hunting seals, walruses and narwhals, residents say. Strong winds and rough waves are increasingly breaking up the sea ice that hunters need for their activities. The sea, which is too warm, remains unfrozen until weeks after the long polar night sets in, making the conditions too dark and dangerous for hunters.
Dwindling income from hunting cannot keep up with the prices of residents' modern needs, such as cell phones and groceries. “Everything costs now,” says Adolf Simigaq, vice president of the local hunters’ association. Especially electricity. All electricity in Qaanaaq comes from a diesel generator, and most houses are heated with oil. The fuel is delivered once a year, during the brief summer window when sea ice melts and ships can come ashore.
Energy requirements are enormous because of the limited sunlight
Although Denmark heavily subsidizes supplies under the territory's self-government agreement, energy demands are enormous because of the intense cold and long periods without sunlight. Many families spend more on heating and electricity than on food.
“There are very few of us left,” says Sofus Alataq, a union member. Most young adults in Qaanaaq seek work in the city or move south to work in one of Greenland's larger, more accessible communities. Some residents were forced to kill their sled dogs because they could no longer afford to feed them.
The consequences of this change will extend beyond Qaanaaq, says Alataq. Almost nowhere else in Greenland - or in the entire Arctic - do people still hunt in kayaks and fall asleep to the ancient chorus of sled dogs who yip and howl in the long polar night. If these traditions cannot survive here, he fears, they could disappear from the earth.
This concern was also on Oshima's mind as she listened to a Dartmouth College professor named Mary Albert speak at a 2015 conference. Above all, the lecture confirmed what Oshima already knew: that rising temperatures in the Arctic are irrevocably changing her homeland.
Renewable energies are becoming increasingly affordable
But Albert also had good news. Renewable energy sources are becoming more affordable, she said. The scientist described how solar panels in her Vermont home curb pollution and reduce electricity costs. That got Oshima thinking: Could Albert come to Qaanaaq and help bring renewable energy to the city?
Albert's first impulse was to reject Oshima's request. She was a snow and ice researcher - not an energy systems expert. “But then I thought, ‘What an excuse. You're an engineer,'” Albert remembers. "They're not asking you to help them invent the next thin-film solar cells - they want practical things."
A few months later, Albert set out on the arduous and expensive multi-day journey from Vermont to Qaanaaq. As she drove from house to house, she heard from residents about how reliance on fossil fuels leaves them vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and dependent on government subsidies that may not always be available. They wanted a cheap and stable source of energy that would allow them to secure modern comforts while preserving their ancient traditions.
Oshima appreciated Albert's desire to make a difference - unlike other Arctic explorers who took advantage of community members' knowledge of the landscape and wildlife without offering anything in return. “They want to help, not just look,” she said. “We cannot do anything in Qaanaaq alone,” she added. “We have to find allies somehow.”
Shortly after her visit, Albert managed to secure $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation and assembled a team of fellow Dartmouth researchers who could develop a strategy for Qaanaaq's needs. They called their initiative “Qulleq,” an Inuktun word for the soapstone lamps that Greenlanders used to light their homes. The team soon realized that transitioning away from fossil fuels would be a difficult task for Qaanaaq. Ice can affect the functioning of wind turbines, and batteries drain quickly in the cold.
Remoteness of Qaanaaq is an obstacle
The remoteness of Qaanaaq posed another obstacle. The Dartmouth team could only visit Qaanaaq twice a year, and there were no trained technicians in the city to service broken equipment in the meantime. If an appliance broke, residents might have to wait a full year for summer delivery ships to deliver a replacement.
Oshima told a cautionary tale from Qeqertat, a nearby village where Greenland's state-owned energy company Nukissiorfiit was trying to install solar panels. The system was designed just like systems in temperate latitudes, relying on inverters that converted the panels' direct current into alternating current that could flow into people's homes. But when the vulnerable inverters failed after a few years, residents had neither the money nor the equipment to replace them.
"You can't just put anything down and say, 'We'll use this where we live,'" Albert said. “You really have to listen carefully to the needs of the residents. "By sitting with residents in their homes, the team identified one of its first targets: the houses themselves. Most were built with kits designed for Danish, not Greenlandic, weather - making them absolute energy scavengers," he said Albert.
So graduate student Alyssa Pantaleo teamed up with Oshima's husband, carpenter Kim Petersen, to develop better-insulated alternatives. They created a modular design that can be easily built from materials that fit into a single shipping container. Petersen hopes to begin building affordable homes for Qaanaaq's fishermen next year.
A team of Dartmouth researchers is helping the community find alternative and renewable energy sources and reduce energy costs. One project deals with building houses to better insulate the houses. © Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post
Next, Qulleq researchers examined how Qaanaaq could meet its summer electricity needs with solar energy, allowing it to turn off its diesel generators for half the year. They found that the switch could save Nukissiorfiit between $10,000 and $200,000 annually, and the electric utility is now in discussions with Pantaleo about implementing the team's recommendations.
Unlike most scientific projects that focus on a specific question or solving a single problem, the Qulleq team takes an all-inclusive approach, including existing technologies as well as others they dream up. said Albert.
A researcher is working on adapting solar air heaters to work with Pantaleo's model home. The devices have few moving parts, Albert said, and although they only work when the sun is shining, the heat they produce is “completely free.”
Simple turbine converts wind energy directly into heat
Another former master's student is developing a simple turbine that can convert wind energy directly into heat for people's homes. A variant of this design, installed on two homes last year, survived the Arctic winter while providing about 400 watts of energy - enough to heat a small room.
“It’s small, but it’s a proof of concept,” Albert said. She is now helping Petersen apply for funding from the Greenlandic government to build a larger wind turbine that he wants to use to power the planned modular houses.
Some of the project's innovations come from Oshima herself. Although she has no formal training as an engineer, a lifetime of experience making the most of Qaanaaq's limited resources has instilled in her a knack for invention. “When you're at the end of the world, you have to fix a lot of things without help,” says Oshima.
One of many examples: a fish dryer that she built from materials she found at the garbage dump. If other fishermen had such a dryer, she told Albert, they could fillet and process their catches in town - and thus charge more for their catches.
So the two designed a new, mobile version of the device that runs on solar power. Qaanaaq fishermen will put the first prototype on the ice this spring. Sitting in the entrance of her own tiny fishing hut, surrounded by the white silence of sea ice, Oshima hopes that the project will ensure the survival of people in this frozen and isolated corner of the planet for generations to come. “It’s not just for me,” she said. “It’s for the Arctic. It is for all cold and dark areas.”
To the authors
Sarah Kaplan
is a climate reporter covering humanity's response to a warming world. She previously reported on earth science and the universe.
Bonnie Jo Mount
is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist at The Washington Post. She fell in love with photography after learning to print black and white photos at the age of ten. She has worked as an editor, instructor and photojournalist. She has been working for the post office since 2008.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 9, 2024 at “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.