A new community-led initiative promotes green energy projects in Northwest Alaska.
Inspired by the recent “Solarize” projects in Anchorage and Kenai, Energy Project Manager at the Native Village of Kotzebue Chad Nordlum said he created the Kotzebue Clean Energy Coalition in January to “foster grassroots involvement in the transition to renewable energy.” The Community Clean Energy Coalition competition sponsored by the Department of Energy gave him the idea.
Since then, between two and six people have been meeting on Thursdays from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Chukchi Campus to share ideas and plans to focus on actualizing clean energy projects in the future, Nordlum said. After the end of March, the plan is to meet monthly.
“The idea was to build a grassroots group to push initiatives that actual residents of Kotzebue were interested in,” he said. Based on the meetings, “there is interest in solar power, batteries, energy-efficient homes, grid-scale projects and recycling of various materials. The goal is to come to a consensus on projects to work towards and to work together to get the projects done.”
Participants as young as high school students and as experienced as working professionals came together to discuss their clean energy priorities during the coalition’s first meeting in January, according to the coalition’s newsletter. Super-insulating homes and heat pumps were the topics during other meetings.
“Heat pumps were talked about as an option to lower home heating costs and reduce reliance on expensive stove oil, the main home heating option in Kotzebue,” Nordlum wrote in the newsletter.
In the Chukchi Gardens, a heat pump was used to heat the hydroponics van year round, and the technology can be used in the Arctic more broadly, Nordlum said. The heating solution is not perfect: heat pumps can be expensive and have temperature limitations for operation, Nordlum said.
“Air-source heat pumps struggle to provide heat on the coldest days,” such as 20 below and colder, he said, “and ground-source heat pumps in the Arctic could be difficult due to permafrost.”
But it is possible to work around the challenges, Nordlum said, and heat pumps can be used to heat the homes in the Arctic in combination with other solutions.
Another idea the coalition discussed is community solar, where a solar project benefits multiple customers. For example, Nordlum proposed an idea he called Solarize Kotzebue — leasing roof and backyard space from homeowners and businesses and building tribally owned solar arrays, sharing the benefits with the property owners and the community.
“Tribal Energy and community solar seem like a match made in heaven,” Nordlum said in the newsletter. “The cost of installing solar arrays has come way down, it’s reliable (when the sun is out), and maintenance is minimal, a bid deal in Rural Alaska. When power from the sun is available we should be set up to gather as much of that energy as we can.”