It’s true the farm already sported 17 windmills, but the new additions are on a bit of a different playing field and triple the farm’s wind-power capacity. The 17 turbines were supplying about 1.1 megawatts of wind power. That boost allowed KEA to decrease last year’s diesel use by 90,000 gallons. With the two new Danish mills adding 1.8 megawatts, diesel use will be at an all-time low. Good news, considering diesel costs have doubled twice in the last decade.

“We’re at a point where the town can absorb as much as we’ve got at this point,” said KEA General Manager Brad Reeves, saying this is the cap for the electric utility’s wind power for now.

The problem with adding more wind power is what to do with the excess, Reeves said. If the grid doesn’t need it all at the moment, that extra juice has to go somewhere. KEA is working with a modern power storage technology, a zinc bromide flow battery, which allows excess power to be stored at slow periods and called in for duty at high-usage times.

In many ways, the KEA farm is an innovator. In 1997, they became the first utility-grade wind farm in the state, and one of the first around the world to put turbines up on tundra. That distinction requires a whole other set of blueprints than the average farm, including a winter-only construction season. Read more

Like so much heavy equipment in Southwest Alaska, the turbines are old-school hand-me-downs imported from the Lower 48 — in this case, the California desert. They seem small and stodgy by today’s standards, resembling Kansas farm ornaments with four-legged bases and lattice-work sides. But at 12-stories tall, they’ll tower over tiny Kwigillingok, Kongiganak and Tuntutuliak, home to about 1,200 residents total.

They’re a perfect fit for the small communities, experts said. And refurbished though they are, the turbines are part of a decidedly high-tech project that includes online meters residents can use to monitor electric use from home computers and electric heaters that automatically fire up when extra wind blows.

People are ready for relief from high costs in the Yup’ik villages near the Kuskokwim River mouth, where the diesel fuel that provides power and heat is barged up the coast at great expense, said William Igkurak, longtime manager of the local power company.

In Igkurak’s home village of Kwigillingok, the smallest of the three villages with 350 residents, hunters fill freezers with seal and fish because living there is pricey. To top it off, annual incomes average $10,000 a person — about one-fifth of Anchorage’s average wage — for those lucky enough to work.

Over the decades, Igkurak had grown tired of seeing heat and power swipe up to two-thirds of a family’s money during the coldest months. So he and other villagers formed the Chaninik Wind Group in 2005 to tap into alternative energy.

“We wanted to be reliant on ourselves, not someone else,” he said. “We wanted to build human capacity and train our people. Too many workers come from outside, get paid and take their money away. I’m trying to reverse that effect.”
State fuels a renewable boom

Key to the $10 million project has been Alaska’s renewable energy program, which provided about half the funding; another state program provided most of the rest. Launched in 2008 when oil prices spiked, the state’s renewable energy effort has provided almost $175 million to study 227 potential projects statewide. Of those, 84 were completed or are in development.

The projects will save utilities and other organizations about $35 million annually once they’re all online in two years, said Peter Crimp, head of the state’s renewable energy program. Some already provide energy.

In Juneau, the airport now uses underground warmth to heat the terminal and melt sidewalks. Wood-fired boilers heat the school in Tok and reduce fire hazards by using wood thinned from the forest. The Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward heats its building with special pumps that grab warmth from Resurrection Bay seawater.

Those new projects join old ones like the dams and other hydroelectric facilities built in the 1980s during another state-funded boom sparked by skyrocketing oil prices. When oil prices crashed and electric bills fell, skeptics thought Alaska had tossed away millions, Crimp said.

But oil rebounded higher while the costs of the hydroelectric projects remained stable. “People thought, ‘Oh boy, that was a mistake,’” Crimp said. “Now here we are at $120 a barrel and things are looking just great.” Read more

Proponents of the dam say it will provide stable electricity rates for the Railbelt far into the future. Opponents charge it will cost too much in state money and impacts, and that there are better ways to provide for Alaska’s electricity needs.

Back in January 2009, then-Governor Sarah Palin was giving the Susitna-Watana dam its official raisons d’être. When she announced the state’s new goal of producing 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, there was no mention of a dam project. Environmentalists praised the decision. They might have been less enthusiastic if they’d realized the goal would be widely cited as justification for bringing a major hydroelectric project in Alaska.

“The only way we could ever achieve that goal would be to have big hydro,” said Joe Griffith, Matanuska Electric Association’s general manager and also president of a new cooperative of Railbelt electric utilities.

“Everyone was concerned we were going to run out of gas in Cook Inlet,” he said. “What better way to get something resolved than to start talking about renewable, because that was a vogue term and still is.”

Griffith said it was a goal advanced by the Palin administration, not the utility companies, but he thinks it was a sensible move.

Money had already been appropriated in the 2008 legislative session to study the feasibility of big hydro in Alaska. In 2009, state-hired consultants evaluated possible hydro projects at two sites: one on the Susitna River, and one at Chakachamna in the Cook Inlet.

The Susitna site won out, and initial cost-analysis and evaluation of the project, based on modeling from the 1980s when it was first explored by the state, was completed in November 2009.

In the same month, the Alaska Energy Authority released its draft Railbelt Regional Integrated Resources Plan, a guiding document for development of the electrical power system in the Railbelt. It included construction of a major hydro project.

But getting half the state’s electricity from renewables wasn’t the legally-adopted state energy policy until June 16, 2010, when Gov. Sean Parnell signed House Bill 306. A group of citizens, some representing renewable energy groups, contributed to the final version that passed in the State house and senate and was signed by Parnell. The bill’s language doesn’t explicitly call for the major hydroelectric project that would likely be necessary in order to achieve its energy policy goals.

Chris Rose, who was on the citizens’ group that worked on the bill, said he remembers discussion about whether or not hydro counts as renewable (it doesn’t in most states). But, he said, he doesn’t remember anyone talking about a major hydro project as a way to achieve the bill’s renewable energy goals.

“I would not say it was ever discussed,” said Rose, who is Executive Director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project. “I don’t think it was what anyone contemplated, was the only way to get the 50 percent was a dam.”

But the policy is cited by the Alaska Energy Authority as the reason building the Susitna-Watana hydroelectric dam not only desirable for the state, but also necessary. AEA’s webpage on big hydro in the Railbelt states” “The only way to achieve the new goal of deriving 50 percent of our electricity from renewable and alternative sources is for a new, large hydroelectric project to be built in the Railbelt region.”

The state agency met in April 2011 with the Federal Regulatory Commission, the federal agency in charge of licensing the dam, to discuss moving the project forward. By July 14, 2011, Governor Parnell had signed Senate Bill 42, authorizing the state to pursue and construct the dam. In Dec. 2011, AEA filed its pre-application with FERC, putting the project officially in the pre-licensing process.

Wayne Dyok, project manager for Susitna-Watana, said his team plans to apply for the dam’s license with FERC in September 2015. Construction, once it begins, is expected to take about seven years, he said. Read more

Xtreme Power announced Tuesday an agreement with KEA to install a 3 megawatt battery storage and management system onto the Pillar Mountain Wind Project.  The 4.5 MW wind farm was completed in 2009. The rural utility decided last year to expand Pillar Mountain in an effort to wean itself off diesel-powered generation. But the intermittent nature of wind power on this scale can create grid instability issues, the electric cooperative noted in a release today. Ultimately, the electric cooperative wants 95 percent of its electricity to be generated by renewable energy by 2020.

Xtreme Power’s battery storage system, which has management software designed to control use and smooth out power fluctuations on the grid, is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2012. Read more

Hebert, the president of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, was joking — but not by much. CCHRC and UAF are joining together to build a new student housing complex with the experimental buildings that they believe will function year-round without burning any on-site oil.

Planners for the development, dubbed the Sustainable Village, unveiled designs Friday for four new buildings at the site near UAF’s lower campus. By using super-insulated buildings, solar heat systems and biomass, they hope the project will ultimately help a region struggling with high energy costs.

Planners behind the development are setting expectations high from the start. Hebert thinks the lessons learned from the Sustainable Village development could transform cold-weather home-building techniques.

“We want this to be a worldwide example of what can be done at this latitude, and I think we’ll accomplish that,” Hebert said.

The project is unusual not only for its ambitions, but for how it has developed. CCHRC sought design ideas from UAF students last fall, and the winning five-student team joined planners this winter to come up with a prototype for the development.

The more ambitious elements of the student design, such as a “living machine” that would treat wastewater with plants and micro-organisms, didn’t make it into the buildings that will go up this summer. But the basic layout for the homes — boxy designs with flat roofs, an outside deck and big, south-facing windows — was largely intact from the student blueprints.

They’ll be integrated with a heavily insulated envelope, a solar-hydronic heating system and, most likely, a pellet stove for a mid-winter boost. Two different types of foundations will be used, along with four different types of wall systems. A 14-kilowatt array of solar panels at the site was funded by a UAF sustainability grant. Read more

For now, the wind turbines and related equipment will be stored at the port until all the ice is gone. Then a landing craft or barge will haul the equipment to Fire Island, where construction will get underway this summer. A company named Tetra Tech was the successful bidder to deliver 11 windmills for the Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (CIRI) Fire Island Wind Project. The venture is the state’s first major power project owned by an independent power producer. Chugach Electric Association, Alaska’s largest electric utility, will buy the power.

Once construction of the turbines and undersea transmission lines are finished, the wind farm is expected to begin supplying power late this year. The Fire Island project is envisioned to eventually consist of 33 wind turbines able to generate 144,000 megawatts of electricity each year – estimated to be enough to supply 17,000 households. Read more

By Russell Stigall | Morris News Service-Alaska, Juneau Empire:  The state of Alaska has a relatively new law that requires a quarter of public buildings be 15 percent more efficient by 2020.

“Ten to 20 percent is the low hanging fruit,” Jonathan Westeinde, founder of Windmill Development Group Ltd. said. “We should look at 40 to 50 percent improvements.”

Westeinde said the state’s energy goals are a great step forward, but that larger goals could be met easily, he said. “Could we be doing more? Are we missing the opportunity to make more money?” Westeinde said.

The House Energy Committee invited Westeinde to present his “Making the Business Case for Energy Efficiency” talk at a lunch-time learning session, March 27.

Westeinde’s said his goal was to start up the greenest new development firm in Canada.

A current project of Westeinde’s is the highest LEED rated building in the world, he said. “And we’ve been about to do this while still making the same amount of money as anybody else. If anything we can make more money, if done properly.” Read more