by Florian Stammler, Asiarpa Paviasen and Tupaarnaq Kreutzmann-Kleist
What connects dams, hydropower, green energy, agriculture, sheep farming and Inuit in Greenland?
Inuit are better known in the popular and anthropological literature as marine and terrestrial hunters and fishers , with the most intimate knowledge of Arctic sea-ice and glaciers . Moreover, their ingenious ways of adapting to the Arctic environment have become well-known all over the world – to the extent that some even may forget that inventions such as the kayak, the ulu knife or the anorak are originally Inuit.
Less readers know that Inuit have developed for exactly the last 100 years a culture of animal husbandry in South Greenland: it was on the 30th July 1924 when Otto Fredriksen became the first full-time sheep farmer in modern Greenland. 900 years before, the Norse had also practiced animal husbandry at the very same sites, and together the historical and contemporary human-animal livelihoods in South Greenland have become a recognised UNESCO world heritage site in 2017 . Several of those families who herd sheep nowadays in the area are direct descendants or further relatives of Otto Fredriksen’s family, and in many of the contemporary farmlands one can see the ruins of the Norse animal husbandry.
But not only the past that they celebrate these days with the 100th anniversary of sheep husbandry in the area is worth studying in much more detail. What is particularly striking is the spirit of innovation that people exhibit here, which we encounter continuously since we came here first with colleague Bruce Forbes some years ago. We highlighted this in a first publication. Here we present another impressive example of this innovative spirit. Several topics that most concern our planet today are intertwined in the following example: climate change, green transition, sustainable agriculture, de-colonisation and indigenous grass-roots agency. The link is through a micro-hydropower plant that is the solution for the energy supply of two sheep farms in South Greenland, with whom we are working this summer.
Sheep husbandry in South Greenland, as much of agriculture, is energy-intensive. In such remote hamlets like the sheep farms are in South Greenland, the effort of supplying fuel is significant, and any savings make a difference. Ole Paviasen, sheep farmer from Qordlortoq, also related to the original Fredriksen sheep herders, spent years of planning, thinking and innovating to make this difference. The farmer with just seven classes of high school education (!!!) looked at the river Qordlortoq falling steeply from the mountain behind their farm to the fjord, and developed with his daughter Sori a plan how to harness the falling water for their energy needs.
He had heard of the example of Issormiut – the first micro scale hydropower construction, and planned a small concrete dam in the mountain, a water pipe feeding in to a little turbine further down the river, and a cable delivering the gained electric energy to the farm house. As simple as that? In fact, serious construction is needed, tons of concrete for the dam and the pipeline support, and the skills to actually do it. Hard to believe that they did it themselves, and that it actually worked! Ole Paviasen even has the permit to blast rock himself! This came handy as the reservoir needed to be created, and the spillway down to the little turbine house. How to build the concrete dam while the water is running? With a wooden frame that would host the concrete, but not all the way to close the river just yet.
Like this, the water could still flow during construction. Only in the very end they closed the bottom and the right side of the dam to fill the reservoir. The right side, which they closed in the end of the construction, turned out to be a bit less stable.
But even a self-planned and constructed project needs finances to be completed. It took years to find the financial means to construct this innovation. Finally, a government-backed loan for 10 years offered a solution, with the suggestion that they should join forces with the neighbouring farm, Qorlortup Itinnera, where our summer fieldwork is hosted by the Kleist-Kreutzmann family. The latter nowadays benefit from this green electricity for maybe Greenland’s most sustainable tourist accommodation. The loan enabled the starting of construction in 2015 and electricity runs since 2016. Ole Paviasen was decisive to complete this dream before he turned 60 – which was on the 19 May 2016. He succeeded: green grass-roots Inuit electricity supplies the two farms since April 2016. Asked about how he acquired skills for this major project, Ole says “learning by speaking to other people”. But his daughter adds that “he really rarely goes to town or anywhere”.
Ole had planned the powerplant for 30 KW with a spillway of 40 m down. With the addition of Qorlortup Itinnera, they changed the plan to 40 KW. The unit delivers even slightly more than that in summer when the reservoir is full and the river flows abundantly. In winter the flow is less and the hydropower is not quite enough for heating the houses. Air in the supply pipe to the turbine also means a decrease in performance. That is why there are air vents in built to the system. Last year it was raining unusually much, there was too much water in spring, and the dam broke partially, on the right end where the construction had a become a little less stable than the rest. They needed to support it with sand bags. This also meant that the mechanism to turn off the water flow and let the reservoir fill up again fully does not work any more. Aaqqioq Kleist from Qorlortup Itinnera has ordered all the supplies for the repair and they plan to complete the restoration of the dam before the end of this summer.
But even in its current state, this means the two sheep farms, and also people who come as tourists and stay at Qorlortup Itinnera, can use locally produced green energy that is the result of a grass-roots Inuit innovation. Isn’t that a great example of green transition from the bottom-up? Just the opposite of the gigantic hydroelectric power projects engineered by big industry that have caused trauma among relocated local people at huge social costs, as we know of in Finnish Lapland (Portipahta and Lokka hydropower reservoirs), Arctic Norway (Alta Hydroelectric power lake), or the James Bay Project (Quebec). Hydropower plays a big role in Greenland’s energy strategy. But the government mentions mostly big hydropower projects, and so do green transition advisors . We know that the melting of the ice-sheet is a hotspot of global warming. But for the Greenlandic government this is not only a bad thing: it explicitly states the positive effect of the climate-induced meltwater for hydropower reservoir capacities . Interestingly, the same ministry is responsible for Agriculture and for Hydropower. As late as 2020, four years after the Qorlortoq started supplying the farms with green hydropower, the Greenlandic state utility energy provider mentions micro-hydropower in their strategy for the future!. In the Qorlortoq hydropower project, the agriculture and the hydropower have come together on the very local level, through the Inuit sheep farmers’ innovation. Today there are five micro hydropower plants in the country. They show not only Greenland’s path to fossil free fuel by 2030 . They show at least as much the Inuit spirit of innovation, demonstrating that green transition can happen without green colonialism and extractivist mindset that have been so heavily criticised in recent scholarly debates. Inuit innovations like the kayak, anorak and ulu have a proven record to spread worldwide, copied millions of times. Would this also work with the grassroots micro-hydropower plants?
