October 10, 2011
By STEVE CLEARY in the Anchorage Daily News:After years of talk, research, negotiation, back and forth and back again — Chugach Electric’s board unanimously approved a contract to buy power from CIRI’s Fire Island wind farm this past June. Since no other utility signed up for the power, the project has shrunk to just one-third of its original size. Chugach has been studying wind generation, at Fire Island and other areas, for the past 15 years. Its decision was carefully made and well-researched.
Yet one big hurdle remains before this important project can move forward. On Monday, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA) will approve or disapprove the contract. All regulated utilities are subject to the RCA. Look at your gas, water and electric bills and you will see a modest regulatory cost charge each month. For those three bills last month, my family paid a total of 87 cents to have the RCA put its fine-tooth comb to a variety of matters, including the Fire Island wind power purchase agreement.
A key aspect of the RCA decision is what standard should be used for assessing the power purchase agreement — “just and reasonable cost” or “avoided cost.” Municipal Light and Power (ML&P) and the attorney general have argued for strict adherence to avoided cost — meaning that any new power has to be as cheap as or cheaper than power currently produced. That’s an unreasonable standard. Using avoided cost will tie Alaska’s hands, preventing us from choosing energy sources that in long run will benefit us by being stably priced and more secure. For example, using the avoided cost standard, the Bradley Lake hydroelectric project near Homer would never have been approved. Bradley Lake is now one of the cheapest sources of electricity on the Railbelt, costing about a third less than natural gas. That was not the case when it was built in 1991. Then, the hydropower was roughly twice the cost of natural gas. But natural gas prices have risen and are expected to rise further, while the cost of the hydropower has stayed stable because the cost of the fuel — the water — is free.
Chugach has shown, consistently and carefully, that Fire Island is both just and reasonable to its ratepayers in the long run. Fire Island is not a no-brainer. The energy that will be generated will not be too cheap to meter. But Fire Island will be a solid step forward toward an energy future not overly reliant on natural gas. Read more
October 10, 2011
Renewable energy projects are blooming across Alaska: Energy talk in Alaska is centered on whether we have a large-diameter or bullet-line-type natural gas pipeline, or the potential of the Watana hydroelectric generation facility on the Susitna River. This focus makes it easy to overlook the need for energy generation all over Alaska.
Also overlooked are the efforts of the Alaska Legislature to meet those needs with more than just energy assistance — but with large dollar investments in clean renewable energy. Through the continued funding of the Renewable Energy Fund, the Legislature has made a commitment to reducing the energy costs to residents all over Alaska, some of whom are paying the highest prices per kilowatt in the entire country.
According to the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, or REAP, 2011 marks the third Renewable Energy Fund construction season. Twelve projects across Alaska are completed and 14 additional projects are scheduled for completion this year. For the first $150 million appropriated in rounds I, II and III, 124 grants to successful applicants are in place.
Successful projects such as Pillar Mountain in Kodiak and the Falls Creek hydroelectric plant in Gustavus point to a future in rural Alaska with lower energy costs that are sustainable in the long term. To date, the Legislature has put its money where its mouth is by continuing to use the Renewable Energy Fund to assure investment and completion of energy projects that have the potential to add to Alaska’s growing portfolio of clean energy generation.
Let’s look at some projects and numbers:
• In Anchorage, our landfill is a viable energy source yielding more than 1,000 cubic feet of combustible gas per minute. An initial grant of $2 million from the Renewable Energy Fund to the Municipality of Anchorage set the stage for a 20-year agreement with Doyon LLC to recover the methane from the landfill and fuel a power plant on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, returning $1.3 million to $1.5 million to the city annually.
• The Matanuska Valley is working on a hydroelectric project at Fishhook Creek, Nikiski is developing wind energy and the Alaska SeaLife Center is prototyping a seawater heat pump system.
• Around the state, we have 66 projects in the pre-construction phase and 58 projects in construction or completed. These projects are developing renewable energy through biomass, geothermal, hydro, ocean/river flow and solar systems and efficiency in heat recovery and transmission. Alaska has great potential and creative people working to meet our 50 percent renewable energy goal. Read more
October 10, 2011
By Ed Schoenfeld, CoastAlaska: When you’re trying to tap geothermal energy, for heating or electrical generation, you’ve got to consider a number of factors.
“The temperature is the obvious one. Flow rate is really important too,” says Gwen Holdmann, director of the University of Alaska’s Center for Power and Energy. She spoke at the recent Rural Alaska Energy Conference in Juneau.
“You might have a really high temperature resource and one good example that’s pretty close by here (Juneau) is Tenakee Springs. They have a fairly high temperature but they have an extremely low flow rate,” she says.
You also need to know the extent of the hot-water reservoir, its depth and the rate it recharges itself.
Another importation factor is location. Being close to a city or transmission lines make tapping power more affordable.
That’s why the Aleutian Islands city of Akutan, and the local Trident Seafoods plant, are looking at nearby Hot Springs Valley.
“We hit water as hot as 350 (degrees)-plus at 500 feet,” says Ray Mann, a consultant for the city of Akutan, northeast of Unalaska.
“But according to the studies that have been done that’s the outflow resource and we probably will not get the flow and the capacity we need. So we have to go further up the valley to the upflow zone. And the estimate is we could achieve anything between 15 and 100 megawatts, with a minimum of 8 megawatts, to provide power,” Mann says.
Outflow is where water comes from the ground. Inflow is the subterranean area where it travels to near the surface.
There’s been interest in the Akutan site for at least 30 years. New wells were drilled this and last year, one finding water up to 500 degrees. Deep water is under enough pressure that it does not boil off at those temperatures. And other studies further defined the resource.
Mann says the city is committed to building an approximately $60 million plant, including about 5 miles of road and transmission lines. Read more
October 7, 2011
By Jill Burke of Alaska Dispatch: As the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA) listens to arguments about whether Chugach Electric Association should be allowed to incorporate wind energy into its power portfolio, another government body – the FAA – is taking steps to make sure development on Fire Island won’t interfere with navigation signals beamed to planes flying overhead.
On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced its plans to replace the island’s existing beacon with a new one. A recently constructed beacon at the Ted Stevens International Airport will provide navigation data for flights in the area once Fire Island’s old beacon is taken out of service.
According to a press release from Murkowski’s office, the announcement “allows the Fire Island Wind Project to proceed” during the transition period to the new tower.
“I’m glad the FAA sees what I see at Fire Island: a project being managed collectively to both help Southcentral Alaska’s energy needs while also addressing safety concerns for air travel in and out of Alaska’s largest city. I continue to support this project and have confidence that the FAA will develop any necessary changes to the navigational system in the most safe and comprehensive manner for Alaskan aviation,” U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in the press release.
Fire Island Wind, LLC, a subsidiary of Cook Inlet Region, Inc., one the state’s 13 regional Alaska Native corporations, hopes to begin construction on a wind farm on Fire Island this year. The island is located close to Anchorage across from Turnagain Arm.
In 2008, the FAA determined that Fire Island Wind would not be able to construct 36 turbines, as originally planned, because of the turbines’ interference with the radio tower. The FAA concluded that 24 turbines, with some at lower heights than others, would be more realistic. Since then the project has been scaled down even further, adjusted to accommodate the financial constraints of having a lone power buyer — Chugach Electric Association.
The FAA agreed to allow for a replacement beacon. CIRI picked up the $5 million price tag for the upgraded, digital model now located at the Anchorage International Airport, and it did not incorporate this cost into its purchase agreement with Chugach Electric. Read more
October 7, 2011
By Edward W. Lempinen, American Association for the Advancement of Science:
DILLINGHAM, Alaska—Tom Marsik and Kristin Donaldson are building a house a few minutes’ drive from the center of this small city, a two-story model with peat-brown vinyl siding that blends easily with the yellows and golds of the tundra in early autumn. The location is stunning, but it’s only from the inside that you see the building’s defining characteristic: White-painted walls that are more than two feet thick.
Built largely on the rigorous codes of Passive House standard, the living space is like a box that has been hermetically sealed, then wrapped in a thick blanket of insulation and placed snugly within a bigger box. Though the house is filled with bright natural light and fresh air, it is virtually air-tight. One night last winter, when the temperature was near zero outside, it was still over 50 degrees inside—without the use of a heater.
“This may be the tightest house in the United States,” Marsik says. “It may also be the most insulated, but I haven’t researched that thoroughly yet.”
Marsik is an assistant professor of sustainable energy at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Bristol Bay campus, and at the annual meeting of the AAAS Arctic Division, he and his colleagues described a range of ambitious projects that are beginning to change Dillingham from a diesel-powered fishing center to a laboratory for deriving energy from wind, sun, and tides.
The meeting, held 21-24 September, drew nearly 200 researchers, educators, policymakers, and students to the Arctic Division’s first-ever meeting in the Alaskan Bush. They came from Alaska, the Lower 48, Canada, and Siberia for a rich program focused on Arctic ecosystems and how humans interact with them.
In Dillingham, they found a town with the hard-scrabble feel of the Old West, but updated: A black wind turbine whirrs outside the local courts building. At the main building of the Bristol Bay campus, south-facing walls feature 24 midnight-blue solar panels, and an increasing number of public buildings and private homes are installing windmills or going solar, too.
In Search of Energy Security
For native Yup’ik, Aleut, and Athabascan people who lived near Bristol Bay long before Russian explorers landed in early 19th century, life was based on salmon. That remains true for current residents, too. Today, the Bay supports the world’s largest remaining run of wild sockeye salmon, and all five types of Pacific salmon are harvested from the watershed. Dillingham’s population of about 2500 people doubles during the summer salmon season, and fishing provides food and income for many of them. It’s even the main course in the diet of many sled dogs.
But since the mid-1900s, the town’s lifeblood has been petroleum. Without diesel, the modern salmon fleet couldn’t get out of the dock. Diesel powers Dillingham’s electrical generation system. In winter, it heats homes and offices. Gasoline fuels boats used for subsistence fishing and hunting; it also fuels snow machines (or snowmobiles, as they’re known in the Lower 48).
Because of their reliance on diesel, residents of Dillingham find their lifestyle and their economy increasingly at risk. In recent years, the price approached $6 a gallon, and last week it was selling just below $5.50. But cost is only part of the problem. Uncertain supplies are another: Because there are no roads to Dillingham or villages upriver, the fuel is delivered in bulk, twice a year by barge. In times of drought or flooding, deliveries become unreliable.
A similar problem confronts many Alaskans, whether in urban or remote rural areas. According to a July 2008 report from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and the University of Alaska-Anchorage, median home energy costs had nearly doubled between 2000 and 2008. [See “Research Matters” #36.]
“We need a stable energy source,” says Arctic Division President Todd Radenbaugh, director of the Environmental Science Lab at the Bristol Bay campus. “The villages are totally dependent on diesel, and if there’s bad weather—floods, or droughts—the barge can’t get to some villages. Or fuel has to be flown in, and that adds 20% to the cost. It’s a crisis until they get the diesel in.”
To address concerns about energy costs and supplies, the state of Alaska is exploring a range of dam projects for generating power, but new dams raise concerns about financial and environmental costs. In cities like Dillingham, some leaders are looking for solutions closer to home.
The Nushagak Electric and Telephone Cooperative has formed an energy conservation committee, says Radenbaugh, who sits on the co-op’s board of directors. By carefully managing power production and matching it with demand, Nushtel has been able to reduce diesel use, and it recently won a grant to add a high-efficiency generator to its power plant in Dillingham. For two consecutive years, Radenbaugh said, it has been recognized as one of Alaska’s most efficient utilities.
“If we can save 2% or 1% or even a half-percent… just by making sure the power generated is matching the power demanded, it saves a lot of money,” he said.
“We know the future is getting off of diesel,” Radenbaugh added. “The problem is how to do it without losing our lifestyle and the standard of living that we want. We have a good standard of living, and we don’t want to lose it.”
Campus Efforts Support City’s Innovation
Yup’ik people historically understood the value of energy-efficient design. Winter quarters were built partially underground, to take advantage of the warmer sub-surface soil; insulation was provided by a roof framed of wood or whale rib-bones and covered with earth.
Now the Environmental Science Lab at the Bristol Bay Campus is exploring ideas based on the same sensibility—practicing efficiency and using the energy provided by nature—but with 21st century technology. The lab’s Sustainable Energy Initiative was founded in 2009, and it has emerged as an important resource in the community, generating ideas and demonstration projects and providing classes and support to people throughout southwest Alaska.
After regular sessions of the AAAS Arctic Division meeting had ended, Marsik and his colleague, sustainable energy technician Chet Chambers, led a tour of Dillingham buildings that are creating electricity or heating rooms and water without diesel.
In one of the initiative’s first projects, Marsik, Chambers, and students in a construction trades technology class built a small building based largely on the Passive House standard. It isn’t much bigger than a shed, but it was a test of principles: Heat is supposed to come from sunlight shining through triple-pane windows, and from the lights, a computer, and bodies inside the building.
To contain the heat, the crew built double-frame walls that are 28 inches thick; cellulose insulation made of finely shredded newspaper fills the walls and forms a dense pad beneath the floor and between the ceiling and the pitched roof. A heat-recovery ventilator brings in fresh air from outside and at the same time expels the stale air from inside, and both streams pass through a core where the heat from the air going out is transferred into the cold fresh air coming in.
The effectiveness of the building in retaining heat is measured in its r value—its resistance to heat flow and loss. The walls have a rating of 90 to 95, and the ceiling scores 140, Chambers explained. By comparison, the average house in southwestern Alaska has an r value of about 20.
“We’ve Had to Learn a Lot”
The demonstration project was completed in 2010; soon after, Marsik and Donaldson began construction of their 580-square-foot home on the tundra. The structure is set on a berm well above the moist tundra soil; immediately beneath the house is a dense panel of Styrofoam insulation, and insulation extends out 8 feet from each side of the house, just under the soil. Much of the building material comes from Alaska.
Early progress allowed the couple to get married at the home in November 2010. This summer, they hung bamboo cabinets; now they’re laying down bamboo flooring and moving high-efficiency appliances into place. They’ve even installed a small heater—partly because home insurance policies require it. They expect to move in by Christmas.
The project has drawn from the lessons of the small demonstration building, but like most innovation, it has raised a succession of challenges.
“We don’t have enough plumbers in Dillingham,” Donaldson said. “We don’t have enough electricians. We’ve had to do almost everything ourselves. And so we’ve had to learn how to do it—we’ve had to learn a lot.”
While the advanced building methods and green materials have elevated costs, Marsik takes the long view. “It’s going to be a home that’s here for 100 years or longer,” he said. “It will be here basically forever, and it will pay itself off eventually.”
A Boat, an Anchor, and a Tidal Generator
When summer comes and the fishing crews return, electricity demand rises by 40% or more. For Nushgak Cooperative, that creates a dilemma: The utility needs a plant big enough to generate that electricity, but the extra capacity goes unused in the winter, and customers have to pay for a plant that is partly idle. Now city leaders are thinking about how to improve overall energy efficiency by improving the efficiency of the salmon fleet.
Wind turbines aren’t a perfect solution—winds here tend to die down in summer. But the answer might be right beneath their hulls. The Environmental Science Lab has taken the lead in an ambitious proposal to draw electricity from the tides.
How would it work? According to Radenbaugh, a tidal generator—a “low-flow, in-stream hydrokinetic turbine system”—could become part of a barge that produces the ice needed to store the fresh-caught fish, or perhaps part of a floating fish-processing plant. The craft would operate in Nushagak Bay; as tides flow in from the Bering Sea through Bristol Bay, the water would turn the turbine and generate power.
“There would be no permanent structures in the water to impede fish migration,” he said. “The only thing in the bay is the anchor, and the barge, with the tidal generator.” The University of Alaska Fairbanks and partners hope to test a prototype at the confluence of the Nushagak and Wood Rivers in 2012.
With consumer tastes moving away from canned salmon, the processing industry based in Dillingham is moving toward more fresh or flash-frozen fish. To demonstrate how that evolution could boost the local economy, Radenbaugh points to salmon from Alaska’s Copper River, which fetches premium prices around the world.
“There’s a reason they can charge twice as much—they know how to take care of the fish,” he says. “The key, for quality fish, is chilling. People want fresh fish now, and fresh products require chilling.”
And today chilling requires diesel—until researchers, working with Alaskan political and business leaders, can generate an alternative.
October 4, 2011
By DAVID JOLLY for the New York Times: If Parisians can share bicycles, why not cars, too?
Bertrand Delanoë, the Socialist mayor of Paris, and the billionaire investor Vincent Bolloré think they will. To that end they have begun an ambitious new electric-vehicle partnership called Autolib, extending the city’s effort to reimagine urban mobility and improve air quality with alternatives to exhaust-spewing cars.
On Sunday, Autolib rolled out 66 ultracompact Bluecars at charging stations for a two-month trial period to help familiarize the public with the system and work out the bugs before it fully goes live. Officials hope to have 3,000 of the zero-emission, four-seater Bluecars on the streets and 1,000 charging stations in Paris and surrounding cities by the end of 2012.
The bet is that urbanites needing occasional access to a car will opt out of ownership in exchange for the convenience of an easy, occasional rental, without the hassles of paying for gasoline, insurance, taxes and maintenance.
If the uptake on Vélib’ is any indication, Autolib should be a hit.
Getting its start in 2007, Vélib’ has peppered Paris and surrounding cities with stations that allow commuters who pay a small annual subscription to take a bicycle for up to 45 minutes free of charge. Vélib has been hugely popular — despite thefts and vandalism that have added to its costs — and the system’s 20,000 bikes are ridden on millions of trips each year. That has given officials the confidence to move ahead with Autolib.
Mr. Bolloré, whose businesses include shipping, energy and a controlling stake in the Havas advertising company, is expecting to invest €200 million, or $265 million, in Autolib. He will also pay €750 annually for each parking space, while receiving all the revenue from the program. Vélib’, in contrast, is financed by JCDecaux, a major advertising company, in exchange for the revenue from a concession on outdoor advertising.
Mr. Bolloré says he does not expect to make money on the project until the seventh year. Read more
October 5, 2011 to October 6, 2011
**October 5 & 6
ANCHORAGE – Two LEED workshops will be held – LEED 201: CORE CONCEPTS & STRATEGIES will be held on October 5 from 8am to 5pm in the Captain Cook Hotel, Club Room, 939 West 5th Avenue. This workshop is intended for anyone who wants more than a basic understanding of LEED – including those with a stake in their company’s or community’s building practices, those directly involved in green building projects, and those pursuing GBCI’s LEED Green Associate credential. For more information, go to http://cascadiagbc.org/events/2011/october/leed201-coreconcepts-workshop-alaska/
LEED 301: BUILDING DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION WORKSHOP will be held on October 6 from 8am to 5pm in the Captain Cook Hotel, Club Room, 939 West 5th Avenue. The workshop addresses LEED tools and unique aspects of the New Construction rating system. Workshop participants will discuss the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders in the LEED process, as well as strategies for communicating with team members at various stages of that process. Official USGBC LEED Faculty who are LEED and facilitation experts will walk the class through the phases of a typical project, including key decisions that project teams must make and guidance on how to make them. Throughout the day, you will engage with other participants in interactive activities using case examples to enable you to work hands-on with LEED implementation strategies and Rating System tools, including project forms from LEED Online v3. At the end of this workshop, you should be able to apply your newfound knowledge to real-life LEED projects. For more information, go to http://cascadiagbc.org/events/2011/october/leed-bdc301-workshop-anchorage/
