April 22, 2011
By Tim Bradner | Alaska Journal of Commerce:Cook Inlet Region Inc. isn’t the only renewable energy provider knocking on Southcentral electric utilities’ doors these days.
Ormat Nevada Inc. is proposing to develop a 50-megawatt geothermal power project at Mount Spurr, 75 miles southwest of Anchorage. It would like an agreement with utilities to buy its power, according to Paul Thomsen, the company’s business development director.
CIRI is meanwhile working on its Fire Island wind project, which is ready for construction this summer if power sales contracts are signed. Fire Island was initially planned at 50 megawatts but is now scaled back to 32 megawatts as a first phase to make it easier for the utilities to incorporate variable wind power in the regional electric grid, CIRI spokesman Jim Jager said.
There’s wide agreement that Southcentral electric utilities need to diversify sources of energy away from natural gas, which is being depleted in producing fields in the region. Estimates are that shortages of natural gas supply could affect the region as early as 2014.
State Sen. Lesil McGuire, a strong advocate in the Legislature for renewable energy and diversified power supply, has said projects like Fire Island and Mount Spurr could help utilities bridge a gap between the depletion of natural gas and the development of long-term sources of new energy, such as a large hydro project at Watana on the upper Susitna River.
If the Legislature approves, the state will begin preliminary work on licensing a Watana hydro project this year, but it will take about a decade for power production to begin because of the long licensing period and several years of construction. Ormat did core test drilling at Mt. Spurr last year and will be back in the field to do follow-up work this summer, the company has told legislators in Juneau.
The company has invested about $3 million of its own funds, along with payments to the state for the geothermal leases, but has also been assisted with grants from the state’s Renewable Energy Resource Fund, which helped finance exploration in 2010 and will do so again this year. Read more
April 21, 2011
By Katie Spielberger | Capital City Weekly: In the immaculate boiler room of Sealaska Corporation’s headquarters, Nathan Soboleff lifts up the lid of a household-sized trash can, which is not yet full of ash. A couple of five-gallon buckets sit next to it. This is all the ash that’s been generated by building’s wood pellet boiler all winter, he says, adding that he is going to put some of it in his garden — it’s completely compostable.
Soboleff, the renewable energy coordinator for Sealaska Corporation, has been working on a project that’s been attracting attention across the state. The corporation’s headquarters in downtown Juneau is the first commercial building in Alaska to be powered completely by renewable bio-energy.
Juneau residents are used to seeing fuel trucks driving around town, delivering heating oil to homes and businesses. Soboleff hopes we will soon be seeing more wood pellet delivery trucks in their place.
The new wood pellet-burning boiler system was installed in the Sealaska Plaza last fall, and the corporation has been powering their building all winter entirely with renewable energy, for about 25 percent less than an oil burning system would cost.
Sealaska hopes their conversion will be a model that can be replicated through Southeast Alaska and the rest of the state, while at the same time promoting an industry that could benefit local economies.
A couple years ago, Sealaska began talking with Viking Lumber Inc., a family-owned sawmill near Klawock on Prince of Wales Island, about partnering to provide wood biomass energy for Southeast businesses and homes. It seemed like a win-win plan. Wood pellets would provide less expensive, clean energy to Southeast communities and also provide a use for a waste product from mill operations.
There was one problem: The demand wasn’t yet there. At the time, residents in Southeast were only using about 150 tons of wood pellets a year. The Sealaska Plaza building alone has doubled the demand, Sobeleff said, and he hopes that soon enough other buildings will increase the demand enough for it to be profitable for pellets to be manufactured in Southeast (Sealaska Plaza is currently using pellets from Washington).
“This is so new for people, there’s not that existing infrastructure,” Soboleff said.
Until recently, when people asked him about pellet boiler supplies and services he had to direct them to out-of-state business. Now he can happily direct them to local ones, such as Behrends Mechanical and The Plumbing and Heating Company.
In villages, Soboleff said the hope is that larger buildings such as schools or community centers will take the lead with the conversions, creating an economy of scale so that residents can then follow suit.
Burning wood pellets for energy is new in Alaska and the rest of the U.S., but it’s been used for years in Europe, Soboleff said. The Viessman boiler in Sealaska Plaza is Europe’s best-selling brand, and there are at least 15,000 similar boilers already being used around the rest of the world.
Sobeleff spends 10 minutes a week on simple maintenance for the boiler, and smaller systems wouldn’t even require that. The system can be remotely monitored and adjusted (he receives any error messages on his iPhone).
“We’ve just brought this existing technology to Alaska,” Soboleff said. “(The conversion) has been really seamless, because the system is tried and true. … The hard thing is convincing people that pellets really do work.”
Alaskans are quickly being convinced, and there are plans in the works for several conversions in the state, such as Ketchikan’s federal building. The project has attracted interest from the state of Alaska, the federal government, the Coast Guard, the City & Borough of Juneau, and school districts through the state.
It’s no accident that the building chosen to showcase the technology is located just a few blocks from the capitol.
“Sealaska Plaza is front stage to Alaska’s government,” Soboleff said, and “heating the state’s public and private buildings is a big part of our state’s budget.” He has showed off the system to quite a few legislators and commissioners.
And when the cruise ships start arriving in downtown Juneau and coloring the skies with gray plumes from their smoke stacks, take a look towards town for a contrast.
“You will never see anything coming out of the Sealaska chimney,” Soboleff said.
April 19, 2011
Note to REAP readers: Alaska Sealife Center in Seward is also in the midst of installing a seawater heat pump system and expect to have it operational by this summer.
By Jonathan Grass of the Juneau Empire: The Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute has traded in oil for a new heat source: cool seawater.
The marine research facility has just turned off its boilers as it finalized the conversion to its new seawater heat pump system. This marks the culmination of a process two years in the making, according to John Cooper, facilities manager for Auke Bay Laboratories. He added he hopes the boilers will stay off for good.
“One of the big things at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is being good stewards of the environment, and we wanted to reduce our fuel consumption here at the facility,” he said.
Cooper explained that seawater around 38 to 40 degrees is transferred into 120-degree water that circulates through the building to heat it. He said the water will be even easier to heat over the summer since the water may already be a little warmer.
Ground source heat pumps are already being used by the airport and Dimond Park Aquatics Center. But there’s a difference between those facilities and this one in that the research facility is powering with water straight from the ocean rather than underground.
“Since we are a marine facility, we were already pumping over 500 gallons per minute through the facility for our experiments, so we already had that water,” Cooper said, adding, “What makes this unique is because of its unique nature it’s the only research facility in National Marine Fisheries that’s totally green.”
Besides this, the seawater power adds two other advantages to the facility: efficiency and money.
Cooper said that the seawater heat pump is three times as energy efficient as electric heat, and even more so than the facility’s heating oil usage, which heated at 75 percent as efficiently as electric.
He said the boilers were using more than 60,000 gallons of heating oil a year.
“We’re estimating we’re going to save $130,000 of taxpayer money a year,” he added.
This is the final stage of a process to reach its zero-carbonization utilization goal, which began when the facility was using 120,000 gallons of fuel oil annually. The process began two years ago with reducing the laboratory’s airflows and then reducing the heat recovery of fume and canopy exhaust within the lab. This heat pump system, which took about two years to design and get into operation, was completed in February.
The project was designed by the first TSMRI facility manager, Jack Christiansen, and Jim Rehfeldt of Alaska Energy Engineering, LLC.
Cooper took over last August, overseeing the completion and commissioning with the assistance of lead TSMRI maintenance mechanic Gordon Garcia.
“One of the things that’s really neat is we also saved a bunch of money by doing the labor in-house from our NOAA maintenance mechanics and technicians,” Copper said, as the NOAA staff completed most of the systems with some outside local help, such as electricians and plumbers.
TSMRI maintenance mechanic Tommy Abbas led the construction with a team including Mark Hoover, Mike Anderson, Chris Cunningham and Jim Heckler.
• Contact reporter Jonathan Grass at 523-2276 or at jonathan.grass@juneauempire.com.
