Energy efficiency in rural Alaska: innovations, cutting costs, weatherizing, and using less.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: ENERGY

One in five rural Alaska households spends almost half their income to heat and power their home, more than five times what Anchorage residents pay. There's no single solution, but many groups have different approaches to the problem and, together, a patchwork quilt of solutions is emerging.

Heat and power are the two top utility costs. For most residents, that spells a reliance on costly diesel fuel and heating fuel. One of the top priorities identified in Commonwealth North's 2012 report "Energy for a Sustainable Alaska" is to mitigate the high cost of diesel by reducing diesel consumption through efficiency measures and diesel alternatives that make fiscal sense.

Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) is a leader in energy efficiency projects. Since 2008, the organization has made improvements in 16,500 homes across Alaska, both urban and rural. CEO Bryan Butcher and John Anderson, director of AHFC's research and rural development office, say those homeowners are seeing a reduction in heating and power costs of about 30 percent, although some residents see as much as a 50 percent reduction.

In the Kotzebue area, Kotzebue Electric Association has nineteen wind turbines spinning to help offset their yearly use of diesel fuel. Contractor STG, Inc. is installing three more turbines, one in Deering and two in Buckland, this year.

Alaska Village Electric Cooperative serves about 30 percent of the residents in rural Alaska. The cooperative is a leader in energy efficiency measures and has taken another approach to increasing efficiency: building small-scale energy grids connecting two or more communities at a time. In many cases, running a low-voltage transmission line between two communities allows the cooperative to retire older, inefficient diesel generators in one of the two communities.

Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) three years ago, used grant funding to supply consumers with "energy detectives" that, when attached to the electrical panel in a house, help consumers know how much energy their home is using. The company got a grant last year to perform energy audits at rural Alaska businesses, in hopes of helping business owners find ways to reduce energy costs.

In a 2015 outlook, AVEC president Meera Kohler says lower oil prices should spell lower fuel costs, but she plans to continue to press the state for a long-term solution that will benefit rural Alaskans.

"We will continue to press for significant changes in how the state develops an energy plan for the entire state. We will continue to press for fair and equitable treatment of all Alaskans," she wrote.

In Kotzebue, Innovation Wins

Kotzebue Electric Association (KEA) was the first organization to bring utility-grade wind turbines to Alaska. That was back in 1997, in the early days of wind-diesel integration.

"It was kind of before wind was cool," says KEA general manager Brad Reeve.

The interest in wind was formed when it appeared the state-run Power Cost Equalization program, which uses state funding to subsidize the high cost of energy for rural Alaskans, was in jeopardy. Reeve says he and the KEA board of directors needed to find ways to reduce power costs in case the equalization program went away. They...