New DOE microgrid fund aims to wean remote Alaskan villages off diesel

Charging your phone in rural Alaska is a bit more expensive than doing so in the contiguous United States—or the Lower 48, as Alaskans call them. Once you plug your charging cable into the wall, the electricity that flows into your phone comes from a diesel generator that runs a microgrid.

Almost all of rural Alaska is powered by microgrids, and not the types of microgrids that regularly connect to a larger, centralized electrical grid. These are true islands, and though Alaska itself isn’t one, fuel for the generators must come by air or sea. In the winter, pricey diesel fuel, which can cost more than $15 per gallon, is flown into rural communities; in the spring and summer, once the ice has thawed, diesel arrives via river barge.

And warmer months bring an excess of sunshine, which many rural communities want to harness to offset a portion of their high diesel bills. In June, the Department of Energy announced that it selected 14 municipalities, nonprofits, unions, and businesses to receive shares of its new Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership, or C-MAP, funding. Twelve of the awardees are based in Alaska, and many of them are rural tribes hoping to use the money to update the generators that power their villages to be hybrid—that is, run on diesel and renewable energy.

Tribal ownership: One of the awardees is Kawerak Inc., a nonprofit corporation that serves the Bering Straits Native Association in western Alaska. The organization received $575,000 to integrate renewable energy—specifically solar energy and battery systems—into microgrids that power the villages of Brevig Mission, Teller, Koyuk, Elim, and Savoonga. Currently, the villages get diesel barged in once or twice a year, or have diesel flown to them in emergencies.

Under the new setup, the renewable power generated by the new systems would be owned by the villages as an Independent Power Producer (IPP) and sold to the local utility, and reduce the amount of diesel they need to use per year. Amanda Toerdal, Kawerak’s community planning and development program director, told Tech Brew the award is “about the administration and structure for how the power is run in the communities” just as much as the power generation itself.

“The ownership of a separate energy system,” Toerdal said, “means that that money is going back into the local community instead of going to a diesel fuel company far away.”

Workforce development: Another awardee is the Kuskokwim Corporation, an organization of 10 villages along the Kuskokwim River. The corporation stewards the land, development, and conservation efforts of the villages, and received nearly $300,000 in C-MAP funding to update a microgrid that serves two of the villages to include a solar power and battery system. The villages, Upper and Lower Kalskag, are the only two communities in the Kuskokwim Corporation that are connected by a road.

Andrea Gusty, CEO of the Kuskokwim Corporation, told Tech Brew that the C-MAP project will offset around 25,000 gallons of diesel every year, thereby bringing down energy costs for residents and making village power more reliable. The new system will be owned by the corporation’s nonprofit arm, TKC Fish Wheel, which will act as the IPP.

An important part of the project is also about workforce development and ensuring that Upper and Lower Kalskag locals are trained to operate and maintain the technology, Gusty said.

“In rural Alaska, there seems to be a history of an influx of funding, or a project is created, but the maintenance of that project is—for whatever reason—outside of the community’s ability to maintain,” Gusty said. “We’re deeply committed to ensuring that we bring that training to the people whose projects are in their backyard. Because they’re the ones who are going to live there…and ultimately the ones benefiting from it.”

Funding: The Kuskokwim Corporation’s ethos of building a system the community can maintain is in line with the DOE’s conception of the project. Dan Ton, the DOE program manager of smart grid R&D and lead on the C-MAP funding, told Tech Brew in a statement that the DOE has not made “specific commitments” to provide further funding to awardees, as the program was “built on an understanding‬ that long-term maintenance and operational sustainability must be built into any new‬‭ project.”

According to Ton, the funding is really about getting these innovative, highly customized, and expensive projects off the ground by “improving interoperability and standardization,” as local utilities usually don’t want to take on microgrids because they’re so complex. Insights from the projects will then be shared on a new DOE web portal to be used by future rural microgrid developers to help them “reduce some of the hardships and delays that the early adopters faced.”

And that “role modeling” for future microgrid projects will have the most lasting impact, Brian Hirsch, CEO of Alaska energy engineering company DeerStone Consulting, told Tech Brew. DeerStone is a partner in both the Kawerak and Kuskokwim awards. He said because awardees’ “needs are extreme,” the grants won’t be able to entirely solve many of the issues—or “even come close.” But C-MAP can jump-start momentum.

“The reality oftentimes is you do what you can with the money you’re allocated,” Hirsch said. “There’s still a very long way to go.”