Energy Update 11-23-11
By Kate McKeown
The start of week welcomed us with powerful winds and brutal temperatures, all over the state. As I sat in my Anchorage office watching leafless branches violently swaying outside, I couldn’t help but think of the wind turbines towering above Kodiak, and the future ambitions of our neighbor to the south..
Currently the Kodiak Electric Association (KEA) has a 4.5 megawatt, three turbine wind farm located on Pillar Mountain, which supplies about nine percent of the power to Kodiak’s 6,000 residents. The wind project was completed in July 2009, and since then the city has saved 800 million gallons of diesel fuel, realizing savings of $15 million a year.
Now, KEA wants to move forward with an ambitious energy goal of reaching 95 percent renewables by 2020. How will they get there? By doubling the size of their current wind warm. Darron Scott, the co-op’s president and CEO, explained that the expanded plant is anticipated to supply 16 percent of the city’s power. When you couple this with the already existing Terror Lake small hydroelectric power plant, the goal of reaching 95 percent renewables is very achievable. Scott also spoke about use of electric heat in Kodiak; “Our members are just starting to switch to different forms of electric heat, such as heat pumps and water heaters. That will drive up loads. With the cost of electricity staying constant due to our renewable energy portfolio, as fuel prices increase, members will begin to switch to more cost-efficient electric heat.”
Kodiak residents aren’t the only ones to see more renewable energy projects in their city. Juneau’s Alaskan Brewing Company recently received nearly half a million dollars to install a first-of-its kind boiler that is fueled
entirely by spent grain. The funds were received from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for AmericaProgram, which distributed grants for 52 projects this year. The brewery, that just won numerous awards in Europe’s largest beer festival, presently has to dry their spent grain and ship the waste to Seattle where it is used by farmers for animal feed. The machinery used today to dry the grain is fueled by 50 percent spent grains and 50 percent oil. The new boiler will be fueled entirely by spent grain, eliminating the use of oil in the drying process. Alaskan Brewery claims that the boiler will cut the brewery’s overall energy use from oil by more than 70 percent.
Of course, renewable energy projects are always fun to write about (especially if they concern a brewery), but energy efficiency should always be the first step. Many lucky Southeast residents will soon realize the benefits of energy efficiency as the first fuel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted one million dollars to the Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority (THRHA) to fund a program to “Super-weatherize” homes for seniors and low-income families in the communities of Angoon, Hoonah and Kake. It is anticipated that the program will lower energy bills by 30 and 50 percent, and the program will create local jobs. It will also address energy conservation and behavior through education and energy use monitoring.
risks it costs over $1 million USD to put up ONE wiinldml so.. when you see 500 or 600 or 800 of them in a big field, you can calculate the cost One of them produces enough electricity to power, what . 5 houses? of all of the wiinldmls we have ALLLL OVER the us . thousands .. it only accounts for 1% of our energy. also, they are cool, but it sucks having millions of 400 foot tall wiinldmls dotting the what would otherwise be a beautiful landscape. also, there are only certain places in the world, certain types of landscapes that are truly conducive of having wiinldmls. and of those places, most of them have them already. and even there, they don’t ALL ALWAYS spin.. when they aren’t spinning, they aren’t producing.benefits . that’s 1% less coal that we have to burn. but realistically, there doesn’t HAVE to be ANY coal burned at this point. it could all be nuclear. meltdowns are very very very very very very very very very very very unlikely. the only reason they’ve ever had one was because the staff there didn’t keep up with the equipment because they didn’t feel they had to.. and of course there was a meltdown. The problem is the waste it produces. germany subsidizes solar power they allow the sale of solar energy by the public. because of that, there are TONS AND TONS AND TONS of solar panels all over the place, and about 46% of their energy COMES from solar whereas 2% of the US’s power comes from solar. problem is, if it’s dark, it’s not producing there are ways to convertt water into electricity, but governments won’t allow it. sea water could be filtered, have electrolites added, hydrolicized to an “unstable” liquid, and burned by machines that generate electricity there’s an over abundance of sea water, and hell the level is getting higher each year is it not? the only biproduct of such a thing would be atomized water not co2.