Alaska village swaps diesel for solar and biomass power

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GALENA, Alaska — Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost.

Every year, the Huntington family spent about $7,000 on diesel to heat the cabin during bone-chilling winters. And a few years back, a power outage at the town’s diesel plant left residents temporarily freezing in minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When power finally returned hours later, water pipes had frozen, leaving about two dozen homes without running water for days.

“We just didn’t open our door all morning until the lights came back on,” said Huntington, a member of the local Louden Tribe.

In Galena, a sprawling village of 400 people on the banks of the Yukon River, a community built around a former military base is shifting to clean energy to reduce its reliance on expensive, imported diesel. Local leaders say their nearly completed solar farm, along with an existing biomass plant, will boost the town’s savings and protect residents from blackouts during extreme weather. The facilities have the potential to provide clean backup power in emergencies and improve the power grid’s resiliency, all while diversifying the village’s energy sources and providing job opportunities for locals.

The projects come at a precarious time for renewable energy transition in the United States. The Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars of clean energy grants to bolster fossil fuel production, and billions of dollars more in investments have been scrapped or delayed this year. So far, the village’s federal grants for the solar array haven’t been impacted, but local leaders know the risk remains. Whatever the future of public funding, the village is an example of how renewable energies can save costs, boost reliability during extreme weather and create jobs.

Once online, the solar array will ensure that the village’s power grid has a backup system, said Tim Kalke, general manager of Sustainable Energy for Galena Alaska — or SEGA — a nonprofit that will operate it. Then a power outage won’t result in tens of thousands of dollars in repairs, he added, and heat will be guaranteed in times of extreme cold.

“You’re dealing with life, health and safety,” he said.

In May, dozens of high school students in navy blue caps and gowns stood with nervous excitement in a locker-brimmed hallway, each waiting their turn to walk through yellow tinsel into a packed auditorium. It was graduation day for Galena Interior Learning Academy.

The school’s vocational training courses and cultural offerings attract some 200 students annually from across Alaska, boosting the village’s population and energy needs.

Students here can take classes on sustainable energy, aviation, carpentry and much more. But to keep the school running — especially during long, cold winters — it needs heat.

That’s where the biomass project comes in. Every winter since 2016, trees (mostly paper birch) are locally harvested and shredded into wood chips that fuel a large boiler plant on campus, offsetting use of about 100,000 gallons of diesel annually for the school district and the city, said Brad Scotton, a Galena City Council member who also serves on SEGA’s board. It’s notable as one of the state’s first large-scale biomass plants and the most rural, he added.

Cost savings from use of biomass has allowed the Galena City School District to hire certified professionals in trade jobs and do upkeep on campus facilities, district superintendent Jason R. Johnson stated in an email.

It’s also created a local workforce, and a job base the village never used to have.

“It’s keeping the money that used to go outside within the community and providing pretty meaningful jobs for people,” Scotton said.

In rural areas of Alaska, the costs for many goods can be high, as they must be brought in. Galena burns just under 400,000 gallons of diesel annually to produce electricity, and an energy price hike around 2008 helped the village realize something needed to change. Scotton remembered when a gallon of diesel was $1.64 and then skyrocketed to $4.58 another year. At that wholesale price, the city was paying more than $1.8 million to keep the lights on.

“It was really quite a shock to everybody’s system in terms of trying to operate with those elevated costs,” Scotton said. “So that really got the community assessing whether or not we could continue business as usual with that reliance.”

That’s when they started looking for grants to build a solar array.

On an overcast May day, on a field flanked by boreal forests, workers in reflective safety vests slotted rectangular panels onto a metal grid. They were working on the nearly completed, 1.5-megawatt solar farm that will connect to a battery system.

The community will eventually be able to turn off its diesel engines and run on 100 percent clean, renewable energy on sunny summer days. Any excess power will be stored for nights, emergencies or heating the local indoor pool. The solar array will allow diesel operations to be shut off between 800 to 1,000 hours per year, saving about 100,000 gallons.

The solar farm won’t necessarily lower people’s electricity bills. But like the biomass plant, the hope is that it will stabilize energy costs, allowing those savings to go back into the community, all while providing work opportunities for residents like Aaren Sommer. Last year, the 19-year-old graduated from the academy, where he learned about solar energy. Now he’s helping to install the solar array.

“That’s going to reduce the diesel usage a whole bunch over at the power plant, which is going to help us out,” he said.

Editor’s note: Pineda reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalist Alyssa Goodman in New York contributed to this report.