Wind farms: part of the rural energy solution.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

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Paying the light bill and keeping the house warm in rural Alaska can be formidably expensive for someone like Samuel Carl, who, with his wife, Polly, works hard to support the family's six children in Kipnuk.

"This spring I've been hunting and we have the spring harvest from the tundra out there," Carl said. "We need to collect some greens before they start sprouting, you know. It's better than the store foods, healthier."

Groceries cost too much to buy regularly. Doing the family's laundry at the local laundromat costs $6.50 a load to wash, another $7 a load to dry. What is most frustrating is not being able to know well ahead of time how much fuel will cost when it's delivered--a critical factor for Carl, an hourly employee at Kipnuk Light Plant.

"Here in the villages, we live paycheck to paycheck," Carl said. "The most difficult time we had was when we ran out of fuel and our water supply started to freeze."

Wind could drastically change the way Carl and thousands of other people live in rural Alaska by relieving and someday drastically lessening their need for expensive and unpredictably priced fossil fuels as their primary source for electricity and warmth.

EXPENSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

Kotzebue launched the first utility-scale wind farm in rural Alaska back in 1997 and in its first decade saved approximately 100,000 gallons of diesel per year. Other remote communities--including Chevak, Gambell, Hooper Bay, Kasigluk, Kodiak, Kokhanok, Nome, Quinhagak, Saint Paul Island, Savoonga, Selawik, Toksook Bay and Unalakleet--are using wind power. The villages of Buckland, Deering and Noorvik, Mekoryuk and Shaktoolik have started to explore the possibility of instituting wind power as a way of cutting the amount of diesel they use to generate electricity.

While wind power requires no fuel, it does require significant expenditures for turbines and associated infrastructure--expenses that are difficult for remote communities to shoulder without help. It is also difficult to find and train people to provide the maintenance the systems need.

Rural and urban communities interested in wind power--as well as hydro, biomass, tidal and geothermal sources of renewable power--received a boost in 2008 when State lawmakers created the five-year, $250 million Renewable Energy Fund, which the Alaska Energy Authority administers.

This year's capital budget contains $36.5 million of that grant's fourth round, slated to help finance commercial...