There is this project in Hinton, Alberta I’m interested in called the Latitude 53 Project. It’s a geothermal plant attached to a vertical farming and fish farming setup. I also read an article about Dutch advancements in vertical farming technology that has allowed it to become the second largest exporter of food by value in the world.
If you look at a geothermal potential map, you will see that there is a lot of geothermal potential in the SW Northwest Territories.
spoiler
If you married all these technologies together, you could turn that region of the NWT into an agricultural powerhouse that could provide more than enough cheap fresh produce and seafood protein to the Canadian north. Extend the highway in that area, or better yet, build a high speed rail network across Canada with an arm travelling north through Calgary and Edmonton and into this region, and you could pump the country full of cheap locally grown food.
I like this idea, I hope someone puts the research into it to make it happen.
I can see one of the challenges being building the infrastructure to get there. That’s a lot of roads and rail that needs to be built. And with a limited construction season, it won’t be easy either.
But it’s time we get it done. Like the article said, we need to assert our sovereignty over the north, or someone else will.