From The Associated Press, Sunday, June 27, 2010:
Continue reading: Govs consider alternative energy, climate change
Promoting sustainable shelter in Alaska
From The Associated Press, Sunday, June 27, 2010:
Continue reading: Govs consider alternative energy, climate change
From The Associated Press, Thursday, June 23, 2010:
Continue Reading: $25M veto cuts into Alaska clean energy plans
From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Wednesday, June 23, 2010:
From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Saturday, May 1, 2010:
Fort Yukon could turn to wood-fired power to ease its reliance on diesel fuel. Tanana could install wind turbines and start using half as much fuel within a few years.
The Alaska Energy Authority published those scenarios and about 200 more, including cost estimates, this week. The report comes less than a month after the Legislature set, as official state policy, the target of using wind turbines, hydroelectric dams and other renewable projects for at least half Alaska’s electricity by 2025.
“This gives you the pathway to get there,” said Steve Haagenson, director of the authority.
The agency released the report, an “energy pathway,” to coincide with a three-day rural energy conference in Fairbanks that ended Thursday.
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From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Monday, May 3, 2010:
If Michael Golub isn’t readying cars to run on electricity there’s a chance he’s spending his time on bigger conservation projects.
Golub is one of a handful of staff, faculty and students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks working on an emerging, student-initiated directive to make the campus greener.
Golub had been converting vehicles to run on batteries when last year students approved a fee to improve energy efficiency and conservation, and invest in renewable energy.
That money, matched by campus administrators, could mean close to a half million dollars per year during the next decade. The task of deciphering the 2009 student vote and putting that interpretation into motion has fallen to elected and administrative student leaders.
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From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Wednesday, April 28, 2010:
The Golden Valley Electric Association announced plans Tuesday at its annual meeting to pursue the Eva Creek wind project, a $93 million effort to generate about 24 megawatts of power near Healy.
“After almost a decade of planning, study and research we finally think that we have a project that makes economic sense,” said Brian Newton, the GVEA president and CEO.
He said the final decision on the project is to be made in the next few months. It would be the first wind project by any Railbelt utility and the largest of the dozen or so wind farms in Alaska.
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From The New York Times, Monday, April 12, 2010:
The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock.
Far cleaner than conventional incinerators, this new type of plant converts local trash into heat and electricity. Dozens of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago.
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From The New York Times, Monday, April 12, 2010:
Like most other sources of alternative energy, the wind can be intermittent. It does not blow uniformly, so power output from wind turbines rises and falls. And when the wind doesn’t blow at all, output drops to zero.
Intermittency is not much of a problem now in the United States, since there are relatively few wind farms and plenty of interconnected conventional power plants to pick up the slack when wind output falls, keeping the power supply stable. But if the proportion of electricity supplied by wind were to grow to, say, 20 percent or more, it would become increasingly difficult to handle the fluctuations in output.
One proposed solution to the intermittency problem is to tie many wind farms together with a transmission line — making an electric grid, as it were, consisting of wind turbines. Now, Willett Kempton of the Center for Carbon-free Power Integration at the University of Delaware and colleagues have shown how this “all-for-one” approach might work with offshore wind farms along the Eastern Seaboard.
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From Alaska Dispatch, Wednesday, March 31, 2010:
The methane gas produced by rotting trash smells awful and can even blow up, but Anchorage’s Solid Waste Services has a plan to put that gas to work.
SWS plans to take the gas emitted at the Anchorage Regional Landfill and use it as energy. Estimates say the landfill’s methane could produce about 3 megawatts of power, or enough to power 2,500 local homes. Right now the methane gas is burned off by flares.
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From Alaska Dispatch, Tuesday, February 23, 2010:
On Tuesday, the village of Unalakleet, seated on Alaska’s northwest coast, celebrated the town’s newest energy force — turbine number six. The awakening of the high-tech wind catcher completes the installation of the town’s new wind farm, which has already saved the village tens of thousands of dollars since the first turbines powered up a few months ago.
Since November, Unalakleet has cut utility costs by nearly $55,000 and generated enough electricity to power 86 homes for an entire year, according the wind farm’s new Web site. The site also claims the wind energy has significantly reduced carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise have been pumped into the atmosphere through more traditional, diesel-only power generation — the equivalent of more than 580,000 miles of driving in the family car. According to our calculations, that’s about 111 one-way trips between Anchorage and Key West, Florida.
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