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Alaskans seeking relief from high energy prices and unreliable supplies.

Our finding success in transitioning to renewable energy.

So with this big fuel spike that we've seen, it is a fantastic time for the system to come in to focus because it will be saving a lot more than originally projected.

Renewable infrastructure to fit the unique and differing needs of Alaska's communities for a more stable energy future.

Right now on Alaska Insight.

Good evening.

Happy New Year and thanks for joining us for tonight's program.

We'll hear about upcoming renewable energy projects in Alaska and learn about one project that will save a community thousands of dollars and lower fuel expenses and also create local jobs.

But before we get to that discussion, we'll start off with some of the top stories of the week from Alaska Public Media's collaborative statewide news network, the Anchorage Assembly, as well as former municipal manager Amy Demboski, are waiting for answers from the administration of Mayor Dave Bronson after a letter sent by their bosses.

Attorney outlines scathing allegations they called her December firing illegal and retaliatory.

The letter also accuses Bronson of numerous legal and ethical lapses, including issues with contracting, creating a work environment rife with sexism and other unlawful and unethical activities using municipal resources.

Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance and Assembly Vice Chair Chris Constant issued a written statement Thursday in response to the allegations, describing them as a level of mismanagement of municipal resources that we have not seen in our tenure on the Assembly.

The letter says if Bronson wants to try to reach a settlement and avoid involvement of the court system, his lawyers must contact their bosses.

Attorney by January 18th.

Officials with Bronson's office have so far declined to comment on the allegations.

California based translation company Accent on Languages says it will reimburse the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA for a contract to translate disaster relief information for communities hit by the remnants of Typhoon Maria back into two Alaska Native languages after the translations were deemed indecipherable by native speakers of the languages.

The company was hired to translate information into Yucatan or central Yupik as well as Inupiaq.

However, the central Yup'ik translations were found to be a jumbled collection of phrases from an 80 year old book of Russian language and folklore.

The Inupiaq translations were not only found to not make sense, but were written in an alphabet from an indigenous language spoken in northeastern Canada.

It is still unclear how the translations ended up this way.

The director of the Alaska Division of Public Assistance, Shawnda O'Brien, is no longer in her post following revelations that the division has a major backlog of food stamp and Medicaid benefits certifications.

In December, keto reported that thousands of Alaskans had been waiting months for their benefits.

State Health Commissioner Heidi Hedberg blamed the backlog on a 2021 cyberattack and a recent surge of paperwork.

However, sources in the division told keto there were longstanding problems in the department, including chronic understaffing.

It's unclear at this time whether O'Brien was fired or left her position voluntarily.

State officials did not respond to Cato's requests for comment.

Juneau resident Deb Etheridge will replace O'Brien.

You can find the full versions of these stories and many more on her website, Alaskapublic.org or by downloading the Alaska Public Media app on your phone.

Now on to our discussion this evening.

Winter temperatures in the small community of Ambler can fall to 60 below.

The extreme weather combined with the high price of fuel, makes heating buildings expensive.

But thanks to a new biomass, heating system, powering the village's two largest buildings is now saving money and bringing new jobs to residents.

Alaska Public Media's Matt Faubion traveled with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to document the installation of the furnace.

And Elyssa Loughlin brings us the story.

Ambler resident Woodrow Grisst is keeping the fire alive that fuels Amblers new biomass furnace.

It uses locally harvested cordwood to heat the community's water system and public facilities.

Now, instead of burning fuel oil, the town's main offices are largely heated by a renewable resource.

Ambler Mayor Morgan Johnson expects the furnace to divert the town's limited fuel stores to private residences.

We haven't been putting fuel in the fuel tanks so far.

Just operators are keeping a fire going and hopefully that can happen throughout winter, you know, and we can save a lot of money on double.

The biomass furnace system which was installed by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium or A.H. See has been up and running since September.

The system is a welcome source of renewable energy in a village off the road system where fuel prices are an especially high burden.

Ingemar Matthiasson, Ambler resident and Northwest Arctic Borough energy manager, says that Ambler situation is even more precarious now due to climate change.

As spring comes earlier and snowmelt recedes, the Kobuk River doesn't always stay high enough for fuel barges to make it to the village safely.

That can force Ambler residents to rely on planes, the most expensive form of transportation.

You're dependent on far away conflicts, like in the particular case right now where Russia invade Ukraine.

That raises the cost for the entire world's supply of oil and you don't want those.

If you want stability, sustainability, you want to do the renewable resources at home first as much as you can.

And he decided to install a biomass furnace system because the forests surrounding Ambler can provide the town with the wood that fuels the furnace.

Project manager Katya Karankevic in the price of heating fuel last fall makes the system even more important.

So with this big fuel spike that we've seen, it is a fantastic time for the system to come in to focus because it will be saving a lot more than originally projected.

With the installation of the biomass system and THC estimates that the city will cut its annual oil consumption by approximately 3500 gallons.

That's $50,000 a year that will stay in Ambler.

Do you get the financial benefits of more jobs for biomass operators, more jobs for wood cutters, less cost for the city to have to operate and keep their doors open to the Washington area, the the laundry and the shower services, but then second fold.

The community is more independent.

Renewable energy systems like the Ambler Furnace create a circular economy in the communities they serve.

In Ambler, residents are paid for the wood that they gather, chop and deliver to fuel the stove.

And the money the city saves on fuel can be reallocated to supporting its residents.

ANTHC has active projects in more than 80 communities across the state.

These renewable energy programs that harvest, wind, water and other sources are expected to keep money in communities and put Alaskans on a path toward a more sustainable future.

Projects like these mean a lot to rural Alaskans, where the cost of living makes everything that much harder.

But lifelong Ambler resident Brian Whiskey believes renewable energy systems are an opportunity to change that and so much more.

We can be independent and and we can do the things we need to do and feel a sense of pride.

You know, if you're working, if you're clean, you feel better.

You know, it's just it's just the way it is.

If you can provide for your family, buy shoes for your kids, food on the table, that's that.

It's a sense of pride.

It always has been for me.

Now you're going to get me emotional.

Milo Woodburning biomass furnace system may not be the right choice for every rural area.

Karen Kerridge says that and she is working to help Alaska Native communities develop renewable energy systems that divest from fossil fuels.

For Alaska Public Media, I'm Elyssa Loughlin.

What a great story.

We wanted to know more about what else is being done in Alaska to bring more renewable energy to rural Alaskan communities.

So joining us tonight is Chris Rose.

Chris is the founder and executive director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project or Reap.

Also here this evening is Dustin Madden.

Dustin is the Rural Energy Program manager at the Alaska Tribal Native Tribal Health Consortium ANTHC.

Welcome, both of you.

Thanks so much for being here.

So the words, the stability and sustainability.

I really I loved that thought of, you know, bringing that energy, those systems close to home.

So people have control and they can they can have that stability and sustainability into the future.

For both of you.

We just saw that example of a biomass project.

The potential for the community to save $50,000 per year really stood out to me.

That's money that can support jobs or other needs.

Is this this particular project a good representation of what you see coming for other rural areas?

Or is this amount of savings kind of on the high end of what you'll see in these projects?

Yeah, so that's pretty much in line with a lot of our projects.

We actually did a review recently of the past ten years of projects with the Rural Energy Program at A.H. C, and we found that on average, like when you took the total amount of savings and divided by the total households in each community, they were saving on average around $600 per family, per year from these energy projects.

So this is actually a fairly typical project, especially right now when oil prices are really high.

And so are you seeing other communities also then free up money for creating local jobs or maybe sustaining the systems, as we saw with this particular example?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So really, you know, I guess a good example of that is in Quebec, we put in a heat recovery system which essentially takes the waste heat from a diesel power plant and pipes it to the water plant, similar to the way that your car takes the waste heat from the engine and blows that hot air on you.

And the savings from that project help the community reduce their water and sewer bills by half.

So, you know, pretty significant.

I think they were paying around $200 a month, I want to say.

And they cut it down to two under 100.

So those savings are really going into the pockets of families.

Outstanding.

What about the air quality with these particular types of systems?

Fairbanks can't meet EPA clean air requirements because of wood burning.

How efficient is the Ambler system?

Particulate wise?

And is biomass considered a transition type of system to cleaner types of energy systems, or do you see that as something for the long term?

So this is a Garn biomass boiler, and so it's very different from the kinds of technologies that are in Fairbanks.

Those are the ones that are causing most of the particulate emissions.

Are these outdoor wood boilers they're called, and they're kind of on the household scale and they're basically run at a very low temperature all the time.

And when you're when you have kind of a smoldering fire, you get a lot of smoke and you get a lot of particulates.

These GA and biomass boilers, on the other hand, are made to operate at a really high temperature.

So you burn the wood really hot and then it has a secondary combustion chambers that basically kind of re burns the particulates from that smoke.

So it's actually quite clean relative to, say, my wood stove at home or to especially to some of the older wood burning devices in Fairbanks and other communities.

Because it burns that much hotter.

Does it require a considerable amount more fuel then?

You know, so it so it's burning really hot, but it's wrapped in a water jacket.

And so that he heats the water and you're able to sort of expand the length of time that that he can provide useful warmth.

All right, Chris, in a in a did you want to comment before we move on here?

Well, I was just going to say, heating projects are probably the most important kinds of projects in Alaska because you can turn the lights off, but it's really hard to turn the heat off.

And when most people think about renewable energy, they actually are thinking about renewable electricity.

And so there's a big difference between renewable electricity projects and renewable heat projects in terms of the local impact sometimes, particularly with biomass, because not only can you get the fuel locally, but it's creating some jobs.

Typically, you know, there's there's also several communities in southeast Alaska that have been able to take advantage of the local wood supply if it is a sustainable wood supply, and have all kinds of interesting uses for the waste heat that comes off of those.

In fact, there are several communities in Southeast that are heating greenhouses and growing food with the waste heat that's coming from from the biomass heating systems.

You asked about transition and there are some transitions on heating to heat pumps.

Heat pumps are a very efficient way to heat, but it requires electricity.

And if you're electricity is super expensive, then it may not pan out as much.

It always will depend on how cheap your electricity is compared to how expensive your fuel oil is.

But there are many new incentives now in the Inflation Reduction Act for people to get heat pumps, and there's more effort to get renewable energy into communities.

And, you know, there's the power cost equalization endowment that funds power cost equalization, which helps keep electricity prices down.

So there actually are people in the Arctic not actually very far away from Ambler that are using heat pumps.

And so there are a lot of technologies out there for heating and electricity that are starting to work together.

More fantastic in an earlier interview before today, Chris, you said it was really impossible to cover all that's happening.

There's so much going on.

For instance, you were having a three hour forum just this week on rail built power projects.

Clearly, we can't discuss them all.

But just in terms of what's on the horizon, does the amount of investment and variety of current projects, how does it compare to past years?

Well, that's an interesting question because there's a lot of different sources of financing for these projects, and that's one of the things that we really focus on is how are people actually going to pay for technology?

You can have all the policy in the world, you have great technology.

But if people can't finance a project, it's very difficult to get things off the ground.

The Renewable Energy Fund that the state funds to state appropriations from the legislature has not had nearly as much money in the last few years, partly because it's tied to the state's budget than we've had in the past.

On the other hand, there's a lot more money coming now from the federal government.

Now, not a lot of that has actually started to flow, but there's going to be a lot more money than we've ever seen before coming into states across the country for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

So there's so many different projects out there.

Like I said, there's heating, there's electricity, and then there's just efficiency writ large too, to make sure that you're being as efficient in your generation of heat and electricity and also on the demand side that you're using inefficiently.

And so there are many different programs made here and agencies out there.

And I think things are ramping up.

Is a lot of the money already here or is most of it in that big bill that was passed in December?

A lot of the money is not here yet.

We just talked about that earlier this morning.

It seems that some of the federal infrastructure money is flowing faster in other areas like transportation or broadband.

What I heard is that perhaps Dewey has lost some people over the last several years.

And it's it's been difficult for them to staff up to figure out how to get this money out the door.

So the Department of Energy is working hard now to get that money out the door.

And it's going to go to a lot of different places, state agencies that will receive it.

And then there's also federal agencies that are going to continue.

Programs are in large programs.

Dustin You have projects in 85 communities.

That's exciting and fantastic.

You said most are efficiency projects, so helping people kind of button things up.

Once you do help these communities get to that, the highest level of efficiency you can help them with will many of them then move toward renewable systems?

Is that sort of the step plan as you first improve what you can of existing infrastructure and then move to the next step?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

You have the plan.

When you think about the energy costs that our community face, there's kind of two ways you can reduce those costs, right?

One is you can reduce the amount of energy you're using.

The other is you can reduce the price.

And so you know, it's usually most cost effective to reduce the amount of energy you're using first through efficiency.

And so at this point, we've worked in water systems in most of the communities around the state to do energy efficiency retrofits.

And those systems tend to be one of the biggest energy users in the community, up to a third of the total community's energy use.

And so now that we've kind of done some a lot of those low hanging fruit in partnership with our rural communities know we're moving towards developing renewable energy projects.

So community scale solar projects, hydroelectric projects, wind projects.

So across the board and biomass projects like you saw here.

Chris, you said that historically you focused well, maybe maybe this was your comment doesn't I'm not sure here but focus mostly on efficiency and heat recovery.

But a big shift has come about because of the decreased cost of renewable technologies.

How has that or how will this change the equation for especially very small communities that just simply couldn't have afforded to maybe could have got some grant funds to put systems in, but then how do you maintain them?

I mean, that's been the problem for many years in rural Alaska, is maintaining big expensive infrastructure systems, water, sewer plants.

Well, you hit on a really important point because we want to make sure that whatever projects are developed across the state have local people who can operate, maintain and even optimize them over time.

So, for instance, if you're putting in a renewable system with wind or solar, you might really be on the lookout for the latest energy storage technology that will make your system even better over time.

So we want to really make sure that we're training people across the state to do that.

So there are a lot of opportunities, I think, in increased workforce development to sustain the pace that I think we're going to be changing.

But you're right that technology keeps getting cheaper.

Rooftop solar is getting to be something that people are doing all over the state.

Even though we may only have about a eight month solar system or solar season.

So it really does make sense.

Just like you don't maybe use your mixer, but four or five times a year you still have a mixer.

Now solar panels are cheap enough.

You're going to have solar panels, even if only work eight months a year.

And a lot of people, you know, your car sits in your driveway 95% of the time you still have a car.

So the thing about technology prices is that they are coming down so quickly because more people are buying them, which in turn creates more of economies of scale, which in turn drives the prices even lower.

So we have to figure out how to deal with this change in the market that it is coming into these community systems.

And how do we plan for that?

MM.

Dustin, you work with Cleric in the Bering Straits and a nonprofit in the UK built on solar battery projects.

So Quirk is actually a nonprofit in the Bering Sea and Bering Strait region and an investor in the.

In the wiki.

I'm sorry.

Yes.

And so talk about the improvements there in battery storage systems and how that has made solar a much more viable.

Right.

So.

So to back up a step, yeah, we're working with both of those regional nonprofits because it's an easier way to sort of partner more closely with communities.

Right.

We're a statewide organization.

And so it's really hard to build these relationships with, you know, 180 communities across the state that are these kind of rural Off-Road tribal communities.

And so these partners are able to work with their region, their regional villages more closely.

And right now, we're working to prioritize those communities to develop renewable energy projects that make the most sense.

And yeah, so in sort of previous years before battery energy storage was as cheap as it is now, it was much harder to do these kinds of projects because the battery energy storage really helps to stabilize the grid and also ensures that the communities can actually turn their diesel generators off when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Mm.

I think it's you, Chris, that has the Energy Transition Initiative Partnership program, is that right?

That's right.

We are working on E!

Tip.

It's a daily program that is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and works with other laboratories around the country.

And there are different regional partners with Enroll.

We are the regional partner in Alaska and so we are working as a liaison essentially between remote communities in Alaska who need technical assistance from the laboratories, who may not otherwise have any kind of a relationship with those laboratories.

And so there are many different communities now in in the second cohort we've already gone through the first cohort of UTEP communities, and we're about to start a third that are receiving technical assistance from those national labs and it's just one of the many different ways that we engage with communities around the state.

There's another one that's very similar to the what I think Dustin was just describing with a regional approach, which is very important in Southeast, the Sustainable Southeast Partnership.

So in that partnership we are working with different communities in Southeast primarily who are relying on imported diesel for fuel, and they are working with local people in every one of those communities.

And so it's not just people from Anchorage or Fairbanks or Juneau saying, you know, you should do this.

It's people in the local community who are working with people who may be providing assistance from around the state and even outside of the state.

You've worked on state legislation to establish a green bank.

What would that provide and do you think the bill might get traction this year in a state that's dependent on oil for so many decades?

Are lawmakers receptive to this idea?

Yeah, to use a football analogy, we were on the one inch line last year when the legislature ended, so we got a lot of traction.

In the two years that bill was in, the legislature went through almost every committee that needed to go through.

And at the very end we ran out of time.

The bill will be introduced again.

We believe and we do believe that the legislators will be receptive.

A green bank is essentially a quasi governmental entity that does the heavy lifting of designing loan programs and loan products that the private sector banks really haven't designed yet, so that we can provide affordable loans to people to do things like energy efficiency upgrades and solar.

Great analogy is when cars were invented, you couldn't go out and get a car loan the next day.

I mean, banks had to figure out what the risk profile of these things called cars was.

And then now you can walk, you know, walk off the lot with a zero interest loan on a car.

We want to try to create those kind of easy to get affordable loans for energy efficiency, rooftop solar and things like that.

All right.

And in our final minute here, this time goes by way too fast, Dustin.

Talk about that connection.

And THC is a health organization.

Talk about how you see that it's working on energy projects, that connection between health and energy in rural Alaska.

Right.

Yeah.

So people often ask me this question because we are a health organization.

We have this really bold vision that, you know, Alaska Native people are the healthiest people in the world.

And so that's our that's our big goal.

And so obviously, you need clean water and healthy wastewater for that to be possible.

So we have a whole division of environmental health and engineering, and they've been putting in these water and sewer systems across the state for four decades now.

But those systems, like I mentioned earlier, are just really energy intensive.

Right.

They often are built on permafrost.

So you've got water in pipes and above ground.

So it doesn't not the permafrost.

And so you're just constantly heating this water in the Arctic.

So efficiency.

Yeah, that's really not the ideal way of doing it.

So it takes all this energy.

And so we've had to develop our energy program to be able to support communities so they can afford this water and sewer and have access to those sort of basic, basic, you know, public health infrastructure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you so much.

I'm sorry to have to rush that right there.

Alaska was built on oil revenue, but the path to a clean, sustainable future where energy costs are reasonable and communities and businesses can thrive, must include the continued transition toward renewable sources of power generation.

Beyond fuel savings, green energy systems mean less pollution to protect clean water and healthy air for Alaska's future.

That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Visit our website, Alaska Public dot org for breaking news and reports from our partner stations across the state.

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Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Lori Townsend.

Good night.