OPINION: A path forward for Alaska’s energy security

House Bill 301, introduced exactly one year ago by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, sets targets for Alaska to be 30% renewable power by 2030 and 80% by 2040. These are achievable goals and essential to preserving the vibrancy of our state and the climate of our planet. The goals of this bill deserves broad support. Achieving these goals will require motivation, thought and action. We need a direction that is low-risk, we can all get behind and will not get mired in permitting or complexity. With the Arctic heating faster than the rest of the planet, speed is of the utmost importance.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review discussed two factors that play a critical role in determining project success or failure: replicable design and speed in iteration. If a project is delivered in a fast, modular manner, it enables experimentation and learning in the process, making it more likely to succeed. If a project is undertaken on a massive scale with one-off, customized, highly integrated components, it is likely to be troubled or fail in its implementation.

Hydroelectric, wind, solar and tide have been proposed for Alaska renewable energy. In Southeast Alaska and Kodiak, hydroelectric is an excellent option, where high mountain lakes provide natural impoundments and the rainy climate abundant flow. In the Railbelt, Bradley Lake and its recent and proposed upgrades are very good projects, but sites with these optimum conditions are limited in most of the state.

One Railbelt hydroelectric project, Susitna Hydro, could have been the solution when it was first proposed in the 1950s, but today it is not the solution. Foremost, it does not have speed on its side; it is at best 15 years off. It is hindered by risk, from the effects on salmon habitat to seismic issues and general public opposition. However, its biggest obstacle is observed by the Harvard Business Review: “When you build something monolithic and customized the project must be 100% complete before it can deliver benefits: Even when it’s 95% complete, a (hydro plant) is of no use. What’s more, the size of mega-projects is typically specified many years before operations are slated to begin. That spells disaster if more capacity is built than is ultimately needed or if demand is greater than expected and additional capacity cannot be added”.

Additionally, a mega-project like Susitna Hydro brings grid risk — if it drops offline, abruptly leaving the rest of the grid to make up the difference, a major disaster might occur to the entire system. Single large generation plants exacerbate this risk.

We need projects that are scalable, redundant and resilient. As we transition from thermal generation plants and consumers retire fossil fuel vehicles, tools and appliances, replacing them with electric versions, the need for renewable electricity will increase. We must meet this demand by starting small and growing with the need for renewable energy. Solar, wind and tidal are all scalable: Build one solar panel array or wind turbine farm, and you can build 1,000 or 10,000. Solar and wind are both off-the-shelf products. Tidal still has a learning curve, but by starting small each iteration will get better. The downside of these renewable energy resources is their daily or seasonal generation shifts for which energy storage is required.

A solution to the inconsistent generation of these modular generators is to pair them with pumped energy storage (PES), a form of hydropower where excess energy is used to pump water from low to high elevation reservoirs, and then it flows back to generate hydroelectric power when the wind is not blowing.

An excellent concept report evaluating PES for the Railbelt was written in 2020 at the request of Dunleavy and at no cost to the state of Alaska, but it was limited in scope. The study should be expanded to determine the optimum locations for the most feasible projects. The report concluded “to further analyze the possibilities and savings, we recommend that the Alaska Energy Authority do a full feasibility study of the Railbelt PES projects and other potential PES sites around the state.” Three years later this feasibility study has not yet begun.

Wind combined with pumped energy storage may be our path to the future, but we won’t know until we put some money toward a detailed study. In the past, Susitna Hydro was a promising project, but today there are more viable, less risky and lower-cost alternatives. Continuing to be distracted by Susitna Hydro is keeping us from moving toward a promising future.

The enthusiasm of Dunleavy to advance our state into the future is admirable but needs to be backed up with action. The Alaska Energy Authority needs to move forward with detailed studies of our alternatives.

In 2022, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Economist magazine, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres accused the world of “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.” He is right. There is no time to waste.

Bob Butera is a retired engineer who designed and constructed infrastructure and energy projects throughout Alaska. He worked on the Susitna Hydro project in the early 1980s and was the project manager for the most recent feasibility study for that project.

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