Dome Road Solar IPP (Independent Power Plant) came about in partnership with the City of Dawson who will be leasing us a former municipal landfill site for the purposes of generating solar energy. We’re so pleased to be putting an otherwise unusable lot to work for our community. The 199kW AC power plant will connect into the Yukon power grid, through an Energy Purchase Agreement with another great partner, Yukon Energy. Generation capacity: 280 MWH/year.

The project aims to offset our community’s carbon footprint through production of renewable energy. While Dawson like much of the Yukon benefits from hydro electricity, we also rely on a diesel generation plant to provide power in times of high demand or in times of power outage. We hope that moving towards solar power produced in our local area will mean less need for the diesel generator sets to turn on, and increase our self-sufficiency over time.

The site identified is a former garbage dump and land treatment facility, but soils testing in summer 2020 indicated the site is suitable to allow an installation such as ours. Using this municipal brownfield offers a perfect opportunity to repurpose the site for solar power generation without having to clear forest or other wild habitat.

Thank you to local & Yukon contractors Grenon Enterprises (taming the giant dirt mountains & making the site usable), Graf Enviro Services (clearing power lines), Yukon Energy (new power poles, lines, transformers, & flexible project partners), Backcountry Construction (fencing), Solvest (project design/engineering/construction)! Special appreciation to Yukon CIBC for gap financing. We’re getting there…

We gratefully acknowledge the funding contributions of Government of Canada https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca
Arctic Energy Fund
Northern REACHE program
Government of Yukon: https://yukon.ca/en/innovative-renewable-energy-initiative
& City of Dawson

Video Photo credits: KDO and Solvest
Video Music Credit: ‘Summer’ by Julian Avila