High fuel prices have suffocated rural Alaskans. What can be done?
October 6th, 2008
If you’ve never met anyone from Adak, the odds just got better that you will soon. Officials in the small Aleutian community began asking residents to leave the island last month in the wake of a fuel crisis that is threatening to shut down the city for good.
It’s now happening across the entire state: Alaskans are being forced from their homes and communities—land where their families have lived for generations.
For too long, high fuel prices have suffocated rural Alaskans. The sting of high energy costs put big strains on family budgets, and continues to push village businesses from profitability to bankruptcy to extinction. The whole state is now in the midst of a full-blown energy crisis and, as rural Alaska knows all too well, it’s past time for solutions.
Short-term solutions have to include price relief for Alaskan families and businesses. We must continue to strengthen Power Cost Equalization (PCE). It is time to maximize use of LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program). Government must also make it easier for businesses to get emergency loans and tax breaks for investment in conservation and energy production. But energy independence means much more than just temporary relief: It means structural and long-term changes in the production and consumption of energy.
Essential changes must include widespread coordination of bulk-fuel purchases, so that our communities get the lowest possible price for energy. Additionally, we should pursue paying off utility infrastructure debt, so that Alaskans don’t have to pay down interest as part of their fuel bills. We’ve seen this work in Cordova, where energy bills were reduced by more than 15 percent when the state paid off the remaining $2 million owed on Cordova’s hydro project.
In addition, Alaska must develop our vast renewable energy resources. That means research and prospecting for resources, and taking advantage of proven technologies. There’s a wind farm in Kotzebue saving roughly 100,000 gallons of diesel a year. We can install wind turbines in 80 villages for only $150 million dollars. We must also embrace geothermal power. Every volcano and hot spring is a potential power source. The country of Iceland gets almost 95 percent of its energy from geothermal. Here in Alaska, Chena Hot Springs already saves nearly 250,000 gallons of diesel a year.
Alaska also has 90 percent of America’s tidal energy potential, and we should take the lead in developing this sustainable energy source. An additional 160 Alaska communities could also make use of biomass, creating energy from fish waste, captured methane or wood chips. Solar power, while it isn’t always here when we want it, may also be a part of solution.
Conservation is also necessary. The state is already investing $300 million toward a weatherization program to improve thermal efficiency of hundreds of Alaska homes. Work being done at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks shows that we can build and retrofit structures to make them even more energy efficient. Alaskan homeowners stand to save hundreds–perhaps thousands–of dollars in heating bills every year. There is no silver bullet to solve the energy crisis–but there is a lot of silver buckshot.
Every time we import a dollar’s worth of diesel, we export an Alaska dollar and miss the chance to create a job. It’s time to innovate, to be bold and to invest in cutting-edge energy technologies. We all hope to bring North Slope gas on line and produce oil from new fields, but we cannot afford to wait for this to happen. We must act now for energy security and energy independence.
