Social value of renewable energy in remote northern Indigenous communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Renewable energy (RE) is at the forefront of Canada’s strategy to achieve a net-zero electricity grid by 2035. The development of RE projects is also promoted as a means to deliver energy services in rural and remote Indigenous communities across the North. Although RE projects have the potential to contribute to sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and economic reconciliation, the social value of RE to Indigenous communities is often overlooked and poorly understood. This article advances themes for understanding and approaching RE developments to better assess their social value. It does so based on the analysis of lessons from RE research in northern Canada and Alaska. We demonstrate that RE projects can create outcomes that are value generating or value eroding and that such outcomes are often couched in the context of supporting or detracting from self-determination. Techno-human variables, from community vision and capacity to policy environments and local RE ownership, serve to enable or inhibit the realization of value-generating outcomes from RE. Finally, we identify several pathways to creation from RE, including relationships and collaborative leadership, knowledge and skills-development, Indigenous-led policies that decrease energy bureaucracy and manage benefits distribution, and regulations and structures that safeguard ecologies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".