Nukik Corporation's Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin: First Arctic Electricity Developer on the Grid

Nunavut is 20% of Canada's landmass. It has no roads, no transmission lines and no physical connection to the rest of the nation. Every watt of electricity powering its homes, hospitals, schools and two major gold mines runs on diesel and almost all of that diesel is imported from foreign countries. Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin, CEO of Nukik Corporation, is working to change that.In this episode of Drumbeats, Anne-Raphaëlle explains the scope of the challenge, the commercial architecture of the solution, and why she believes Canada's Arctic represents one of the most compelling regulated infrastructure opportunities available to institutional investors today.Nukik Corporation was established in 2021 by the Kivalliq Inuit Association, making it 100% Inuit-owned. Its flagship project - the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Linkis a $3 billion, 1,000-kilometre transmission line that would connect the Kivalliq region's communities, government and mining operations to the continental grid for the first time. Anne-Raphaëlle joined as CEO in 2022, bringing a career spanning environmental law, natural resources management and over a decade in the hydropower sector across Canada and West Africa.In this first part of a two-episode conversation, Mark Magnacca, Rob Brant and Anne-Raphaëlle cover:Why Nunavut's 25 communities were settled artificially during Canada's Arctic colonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, and how that history shapes the infrastructure deficit todayThe energy sovereignty risk: 138 million litres of foreign diesel imported annually, with telecommunications dependent on non-Canadian Starlink technologyNukik's landmark MISO certification making it the first and only Arctic electricity developer accredited by a US regional transmission organisation and what that milestone means for project bankabilityMark Carney's Major Projects Office and why Nukik meets all five national interest criteria, yet commercial close remains contingent on federal commitmentWhy Inuit communities are pushing Nukik to build faster, and why that represents a rare and valuable social license for infrastructure investorsFor UK and continental European institutional investors, the strategic parallels are direct: regulated transmission infrastructure, sovereign-backed energy security imperatives, and anchor customers in the form of major mining operations with long-term energy contracts. The project is commercially advanced. The question, as Anne-Raphaëlle puts it plainly, is who blinks first.