Kodiak reaps benefits of renewable energy, with lessons for rural Alaska

KODIAK -- From the window of a yellow floatplane, Kodiak Electric Association president Darron Scott points to towering white wind turbines strung along a green ridge on Pillar Mountain, a pinnacle behind town.

Those wind turbines, a leap of faith for the community six years ago, now account for between 16 percent to 18 percent of the electricity Kodiak uses. So far, they've saved the city from using more than 8 million gallons of diesel fuel and have helped to stabilize rates. People in Kodiak now pay less for electricity than they did 15 years ago. A bill for 600 kilowatt hours of electricity, considered a household standard, in Kodiak runs $102.73, cheaper than in places like Homer, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su or even Anchorage.

"I can't think of anything else in Kodiak (priced) like that, except salmon," says Scott, an amiable Texas-bred engineer who has lived on the island for more than 15 years.

The mountaintop wind farm has also become the symbol of a gradual revolution that has lately put this Gulf of Alaska island on the map as a vanguard of rural renewable energy.

For more than a year and a half, Kodiak has independently powered itself with its own wind and water.

Since the beginning of 2014, the electric association has scarcely turned on its fossil fuel-burning generator while keeping the lights on at homes, schools, grocery stores, industrial fish processing facilities, the largest U.S.Coast Guard base in the country and even a busy port that includes a massive electric crane.

Local, national and even international media outlets like Al-Jazeera have taken notice. The accomplishment even garnered a shout-out by President Barack Obama himself on his visit to Alaska in early September.

Speaking to an audience in Kotzebue, Obama praised Kodiak as an Alaska energy success story.

"Its wind power alone displaces more than 2 million gallons of diesel fuel a year," he told the crowd. "So people are saving money and helping the environment."

Kodiak is not the only town in Alaska that doesn't rely on a fossil fuels for electricity generation -- Sitka, for example, gets all its power from hydroelectric generation.

A handful of other Southeast Alaska communities also get the lion's share of their electricity the same way.

But what Kodiak had done is unique, says Chris Rose of the Anchorage-based nonprofit Renewable Energy Alaska Project.

It is the only town to kick its diesel habit by harnessing the power of wind and water together in a stable, consistent manner, augmenting its system with innovative use of mechanical and chemical storage technologies,like batteries and a flywheel.

"There are not many folks out there relying on wind for as many megawatt hours as (Kodiak) is," said Chris Rose, the head of the Anchorage-based Renewable Energy AlaskaProject."They are the first to do that, really."

In rural Alaska, where many villages get their electricity from running expensive diesel generators and where fuel can cost $10 a gallon, people are watching Kodiak closely.

Most places don't share the island's abundant hydropower potential. But the way Kodiak is harnessing the potential of wind through energy storage shows promise.

The question is how Kodiak's renewably powered grid will hold up in the face of increasing demand.

"We will be watching and learning from their experience," said Steve Gilbert, the energy project manager with the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, which supplies power to 51 mostly small villages in rural Alaska. "It's one thing to put it in and make it work. It's another thing to make it work for 5, 10, 15 years."

A 'leap of faith'

The floatplane threads through a mountain valley milky with clouds, mountain goats dotting green peaks on the way toward Terror Lake -- the source of most of Kodiak's power.

The pilot lands at a deep green estuary at the head of Kizhuyak Bay. From there, it's an hourlong climb in a jostling pickup truck past lupines, snowfields and hundred-year-old volcanic ash drifts to the other big piece of Kodiak's self-reliant energy portfolio.

The alpine lake is the source of roughly 80 percent of Kodiak's electricity, in the form of a hydroelectric project that dates back to 1984.

As he steers a big white pickup around darting Sitka black-tailed deer, Scott tells the story of how Kodiak switched to fully renewable power.

The effort began about 10 years ago, when members of the Kodiak Electric Association board set an audacious goal: They wanted to be 95 percent renewable by 2020.

Back then, Kodiak relied on the Terror Lake hydroelectric project for 75 percent to 80 percent of its power, about the same as today. The rest came from diesel, which board members saw as both cost-ineffective and unsustainable.

"We did not want diesel to be a large part of our future," Scott said.

Given Kodiak's blustery coastal location in the Gulf of Alaska, wind power seemed like a natural option for replacing the fossil fuel. But the key would be finding a way to maintain power-grid stability with the right mix of energy sources.

With the old hydro-diesel system, if the water level in the lake dropped, engineers could switch some of the load on the electricity grid to diesel with the press of a button.

Wind would be far more variable.

First, Scott said, Kodiak consulted with Brad Reeve of the Kotzebue Electric Association, the pioneer in bringing wind energy to rural Alaska. Kotzebue has long harnessed its winds with turbines.

Then the Kodiak cooperative studied the quality of the wind, measuring turbulence and variability.

In some other places in Alaska, unpredictable winds or frequent violent storms helped to doom smaller wind power projects undertaken in the 1980s, when turbine technology wasn't as advanced, said Gilbert, with AVEC.

Those failures have left wind power with a lingering bad reputation in some parts of rural Alaska, he said.

"That has created a hurdle those of us in the renewable sector have had to work with all these years," he said.

But by the mid 2000s, when Kodiak was looking into wind power, turbine technology had advanced to the point where it was considered "widely commercialized" throughout the country, said Rose, the head of REAP.

In Kodiak, engineers found Pillar Mountain to be the ideal site for a wind farm.

In 2008, the Kodiak Electric Cooperative bought three General Electric-built wind turbines, shipped to Alaska in pieces on a special barge to accommodate their huge size.

They were the first megawatt-class wind turbines in Alaska, and at the time "there wasn't a crane big enough in the state" to erect them, Scott said. One had to be brought in specially for the job.

The total cost of the initial project was about $21 million, paid for by state Renewable Energy Fund grants and federal subsidized loans.

The wind turbines began spinning in July 2009.

But to consistently keep the lights on for Kodiak residents without falling back on diesel, it was essential to build a system that could handle natural ebbs and flows in wind and fluctuations in hydroelectric power.

In 2012, three more turbines were added and the association added three megawatts of batteries that could instantly inject power into the system in case of a spike in demand.

"It worked on paper but getting them to work in the field was a bit of a leap of faith," he said. "The basic model of utilities is risk averse and going to wind requires taking risk."

In January 2014, the association added a third turbine at Terror Lake hydro project.

That kicked the entire system to 99.7 percent renewable, six years before the goal the electric association board had settled on back in 2005.

Then a new challenge cropped up.

Matson, a shipping line, wanted to add a giant electric crane, the largest of its kind in Alaska, to help offload container ships at the Kodiak port. When the crane lifted a container, it could put an additional strain on the system of 2 megawatts, enough to make system unstable.

At first, the electric association said no.

"We said, 'we can't do it,' " said Scott.

But the group ended up adding a flywheel system, a form of mechanical energy storage that relies on momentum to offer a reserve of power. In an unusual arrangement, costs of the flywheel were shared between the electric association, the city and Matson Lines, the shipping company operating the new crane.

The flywheel, coupled with wind, hydro and battery power, can handle even the biggest bump in demand from the crane, Scott said.

Kodiak's experience could be instructive to other communities in rural Alaska, but renewable energy is site-specific -- meaning what worked in Kodiak wouldn't work in a Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta village of 300 people. Kodiak has a large alpine lake suited for hydroelectric -- most villages in Alaska are not similarly situated, though a hydro project is in the works for Old Harbor, another Kodiak Island community that's not connected to the city grid.

Right now, AVEC is expanding its use of what it calls "high-penetration" diesel-wind hybrid systems, Gilbert says. The idea is to take some of the pressure off of diesel generators by harnessing as much wind power as possible.

Such arrangements are already up and running in some villages.

Last year, 6 percent of the cooperative's total power generation came from wind. In the Y-K Delta village of Quinhagak, around a quarter of the community's power was wind-generated.

Like Kodiak, AVEC is trying to find ways to better store energy. They are experimenting with energy storage devices called ultracapacitors, which are light, inexpensive and easy to maintain. Using them in the right way might mean being able to install smaller diesel generators.

"That way we can sip our diesel instead of guzzle it," Gilbert said.

A part of Kodiak's identity

Navigating through pitted roads, Scott thinks about the small ways renewable energy has wiggled its way into the island's do-it-yourself identity, becoming as much a symbol of Kodiak as orange Grundens fishing bibs or surreally fat salmonberries.

In 2013, the annual slogan for Crab Fest, a Memorial Day weekend shindig featuring seafood and carnival rides, chose the slogan "Powered by Nature." The wind turbines were featured on the event poster, along with a crab. The wind farm also showed up in the visitor's guide. And at least one seafood processor on the island has marketed its fish as "sustainably processed," says Trevor Brown, the director of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Between pouring pints at the busy downtown Kodiak Island Brewing Co. owner Ben Millstein, a longtime KEA board member, says powering the island with its own wind and water strikes a chord with Kodiak residents, who pride themselves on self-reliance. Controlling electricity costs takes the edge slightly off Kodiak's expensive housing and high cost of living.

"Kodiak really is a blue-collar place," Millstein says. "I don't think that climate change and the green revolution are really at the top of the list for most of the population. But at the same time, seeing those turbines up there and knowing we're approaching 100 percent renewable is kind of ... irresistible."

The next challenge is to keep up with increasing demand.

Trident Seafoods, the fish processor that is one of the island's biggest employers as well as second-biggest power customer -- behind the U.S. Coast Guard -- expanded its plant this year. Another phase of expansion is planned. That means a "significant" increase in demand on the electricity grid, according to Scott.

And new residential construction on the island is increasingly being built with electric heat.

"There's going to be a time when demand exceeds supply," Scott said.

Can Kodiak stay on its diesel-free energy diet?

Scott thinks so. Pillar Mountain could accommodate more wind turbines. And there are plans to increase the energy supply of the Terror Lake hydroelectric project.

Getting to Terror Lake itself isn't going to happen today, Scott announces from behind the wheel of the pickup: A tumble of rocks and rushing snowmelt is blocking a narrow section of road. It looks too deep to safely drive through.

Kodiak has proven it's possible to harness Alaska wind and water to make power on a scale previously unknown. But as Scott knows, sometimes nature just does what it wants.