HRES-260424-1300

Good afternoon. This meeting of the House Resources Committee will now come to order. It is now 1:33 PM, Friday, April 24th, 2026, in Capitol Room 124. Members present are Representative Mears, Representative Elam, and joining us online we have Representative Kahlum, Representative Hall, Representative Prox, Co-Chair Representative Freer, and myself, Co-Chair Representative Dybert. Let the record reflect that we have a quorum to conduct business.

Please take this time to silence your cell phones for the duration of the meeting. Thank you so much. I would like to thank Cheryl Cole from Records and Renzo Moises from the Juneau LIO for staffing the committee today. Today in House Resources, we will hear a presentation from the UAA Institute of Social Economic Research and the Alaska Center for Energy and Power that shares the results of statewide survey on energy policy, including the Alaska LNG project. And online we have Gwen Holdman, Chief Scientist at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and Diane Hershberg, Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

And let's see if we could— if you all can hear us online. Thank you for joining us today. Please state your name and introduce yourself and begin your presentation when you're ready.

Hi there, good afternoon. This is Diane Hirschberg from Institute of Social and Economic Research, I apologize that for some reason my camera is not turning on, but y'all don't need to see me anyway. And Gwen— Gwen, are you able to unmute? Dr. Holman, if you can hear us, please state your name and affiliation for the record. Oh, she said to me she cut out from the feed, so hopefully she will log out and log in.

Great. Okay. Dr. Hirschberg, would you— Should we move forward? And then when she joins—.

Sure, I will get us started. Dr. Holdman is going to do the majority of the presentation, but I am happy to kick us off. And so if you go to the next slide.

We're going to be talking about a survey that was recently completed by ACEP and ICER that is exploring community views of energy options in the state. And so this is looking at perspectives on energy, but also adding in some additional research that ACEP has been doing recently, looking at the cost of energy for particularly on peripheral railbelt areas. So talking about the cost, for example, in Fairbanks as well as in rural Alaska. And then we're going to share the general perspectives on the energy technologies. And because we know there's so much interest in the state, really wanting to dig into how Alaskans are looking at the LNG pipeline and where, where there's stronger support or when there might be less support, depending on the different options that are still being discussed, as well as looking at nuclear energy.

And it looks like Gwen has relogged in, so Gwen, do you want to see if you can introduce yourself? Thank you, Dr. Hirschberg, for that introduction. I'm getting a nod that we do have Dr. Holman online, and before we go to her introduction, I just want to note for the record that we've been joined by Representative Fields at 1:36 PM. Dr. Holman, if you can hear us, state your name and affiliation. Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much. Can you hear me all right? We can hear you. Yes. All right.

Well, thank you for the opportunity to testify. This is Gwen Holdman. I am the chief scientist at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. So—. Thank you.

Diane, do you want me to go ahead and take over here, or what do you—. Sure. Well, I think we're actually at the point where we want to talk a little bit about ACEP and ISER. Thank you both so much for being here, and just because there are two women speakers, state your name for the recording secretary. Thank you.

Great. So this is Gwen Holdman speaking, and I'll just really quickly, if we can move to slide 3, I'll start by saying that we want to thank Strategies 360 for their work in helping us conduct the surveys that we'll be talking about here today, and a couple of our colleagues, Nicole Jacobs and Peter Fix, who have helped with data analysis. This survey and the work, the body of work that we're presenting today was conducted partially with support from the Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program. This is a grant that we, the Alaska Center for Energy and Power and the Institute for Social and Economic Research, co-led over the last 3 years. And so this is an example of the kinds of research that we do collaboratively between ACEP and ICER, between UAF and UAA.

And so that partnership is something that we're very proud of. So I just want to acknowledge that. Slide 4. So just moving on, we've actually been conducting these annual public polls on Alaskans' perspectives on energy issues facing the state beginning in 2023. We've done this for 3 consecutive years now.

The goal was really to understand what the perception of different— what Alaskans' perceptions of different energy technologies and options is, talk or learn a little bit about Alaskans' perceptions on the cost of energy, their energy burden, at the household level. Then, we're really taking a look at the awareness of emerging technologies. Nuclear energy has been one of the technologies that we have repeatedly surveyed Alaskans about. One of these sets, the middle set of surveys, was actually funded through work that we were doing with the state of Alaska looking at carbon capture and storage. We also have captured Alaskans' perspectives on that.

We're interested not only in looking across the state but also regional differences in attitudes and people's perspectives on their cost of energy and things like that. Slide 5. Diane, I welcome you to chime in here anytime. You're more of the social scientist than I am. In terms of the survey methodology, I just want to acknowledge that there was between Around 500 to 600 is our sample size that we use.

The first year, we included an oversample of Fairbanks. This was tied to the announcement of the microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base, so we did an oversample of Fairbanks. 2024, We looked statewide without any oversample, and then last year, with our Nuclear Energy University Partnership grant, we did a similar oversample of Nome and Kotzebue because we were interested in the rural Alaska perspective. In terms of the demographics, the respondents tend to skew slightly older and more highly educated, but are otherwise balanced in terms of age and gender representation compared to Alaska's population. I think this is a challenge with surveys and polls more generally, is that they do tend to skew a little bit older in terms of the demographics.

And we also want to note, and Diane, this is where you might want to chime in, but this is a bit of a convenience sample. So the results, we think they are somewhat representative of the perspective of Alaskans, but they're not fully representative. We want to be a little bit careful about how much we read into this, these, these results. Diane, do you want to chime in there at all? Sure.

So this is Diane Hirschberg, and it's just cautionary that we think that these are really solid indications of views, but particularly when we start talking about some of the subgroups, whether we're looking at views in the Matsu versus Fairbanks, or we're thinking about Nome and Kotzebue, that definitely there's larger variation. And if these are areas where people have particular interest in a deeper dive, I think that's something we'd love to discuss as a possibility of going back with another iteration of this. But for now, it's— we're very comfortable talking about as a whole In the state, these are shared views, but we want to be cautious when we, when we get to these different areas, for example, that you all represent, and thinking it's an indication, it's not necessarily the final answer on how we all believe these energy decisions should go. Thank you, Dr. Hershberg and Dr. Holman. We have a question from Representative Elam on slide 5.

Thank you. Uh, through the chair, I just kind of curious here. I noticed that you say that there is oversampling in Fairbanks and oversamplings in Nome and Kotzebue. Uh, what level of oversampling are you looking at? Oh yeah, thank you for asking that.

So the oversample in Fairbanks was actually 100. Um, there was 100 sampled in Fairbanks, so the total number was 600. I actually should have probably presented this a little bit differently here. So it's 500 statewide and then an additional 100 for a total of 600 for 2023. In Nome and Kotzebue, our target was 50 residents in each of those communities.

I think we didn't quite hit that target, so similarly, that, that N number there is 600 for the entire survey, and, um, and we got a, a similar number in Nome and Kotzebue, just slightly under 50 each. Follow-up, please. Follow-up. So 20% of the total sample size from the 2023— or I guess a little over that since there was the oversample— was 600. So, um, was just from Fairbanks?

Dr. Holman? Yes. Yes. If I may follow up one more time? Follow up.

How many people were represented from the Kenai Peninsula, which is the area that I represent? Dr. Holdeman?

Thank you. Through the chair, we can provide that data. I think it may actually— on the following slide, it shows the 2025. If we went to slide 6, I was actually planning to skip over that, but you can see of the 600-ish respondents that we had in 2025, it was pretty close to that. We had about 10% in the Kenai.

That's about 60. That rate, that seems correct to me. It was around 60 to 70 that we had from the Kenai for 2025. If I may follow up. Yes, follow up, Representative Elam.

Thank you. So the, the information here is based off of 60 people specifically from the Kenai Peninsula. Out of the 65,000 people that live there. Dr. Holman? Yes, Representative, through the chair, that's why— that's one of the reasons why, as Diane sort of cautioned, we have to be a little bit careful to draw too many conclusions about regional differences.

And so that's just something to take into account. There is a formula in terms of how many people you need to sample to get an accurate sample size for a particular population. And some of it is a bit counterintuitive. You actually need to survey less people for a larger population. This was a bigger problem for us in, say, Nome and Kotzebue.

It looks like a higher proportion of the population, but it's actually less potentially representative of that population. I can tell you this is where the folks that we acknowledged in that second slide came in, and so that's why we're adding in these cautionary comments that this is directional, this isn't an absolute representation of the Kenai or Fairbanks or Anchorage. At the state level, I think that that's where we have more confidence in the overall results. If I may follow up with one more thing. Yes, one more follow-up.

Thank you. I just noticed that on the representation presentation here for the age demographics that 32% were between 18 and 34 and 18% were 65 and older, which particularly on the Kenai Peninsula, we have significantly more numbers of over 60 than we do under 30. And so I just find that like, that's just kind of an interesting number. Um, do you know on the Kenai Peninsula specifically where those demographic or where these surveys were completed, like which townships? Dr. Holcomb.

Yeah, Representative, through the Chair. So these were mainly primarily done by phone and through online tools, and so we don't, we did not ask respondents for anything more than the region that they were responding from. And I do want to mention that we didn't survey, obviously, anyone that was under 18. That was one of the things that we, you know, we did not serve anybody that was under 18. And so these proportions, you have to take into account they're skewed a little bit because they add up to 100%, but they don't represent the sizable portion of Alaska's population that is under 18.

My—. If I may—. My point was that I have a significant number of people that are actually in the senior class rather than in the 18 to 34 category. And this represents 32% 18 to 34. And so it's just like on the Kenai Peninsula and really across the state of Alaska, we have a lot of, of people that are older than 34.

But yet— so never mind, go ahead. Thank you. I don't mean to derail though. Thank you for your questions, Representative Elam, and thank you, Dr. Holman, for just kind of giving us a snapshot of how this process works and how you gathered the data. It's very helpful as we head into the presentation.

And before we move on to the next slide, I have a question from Representative Sadler. Thank you, Madam Chair. No, I just wish to record for the record that I did arrive about 10 minutes ago. Yes, I had a note for that. Representative Sadler, for the record, 1:40 PM.

Thank you for—. Thank you. Dr. Holdman, please continue. Thank you. For the record, this is Dr. Gwen Holdman, and I do, I do just want to make one more comment.

As my colleague Diane mentioned earlier, you know, one of the things that we're actually quite interested in is doing more rigorous surveys like this in the future. I think it really is, it gives you a fantastic window potentially of what your constituents their perspectives on these sorts of issues. And so this is something that we are quite interested in continuing to do over time. And also, we are very interested in getting a better snapshot of regional differences around people's energy perspectives and the challenges that they have related to energy cost. And so that's something we'd love to have a conversation with in the future.

Right now, we've been pretty opt— opportunistic with the funding that we have had available to us for doing these, but we certainly agree there's an opportunity for more rigor in the future, and we would really— we would very much appreciate the opportunity to do that. So moving on to slide 7, so this is part 1. I'm just going to go ahead and jump to the next one, but again, as Diane had mentioned, that we've divided this into into two sections. This is really Alaskans' perspectives on the cost of energy, and then kind of coupling that with some of the research that we've done that validates some of those perspectives as far as we've seen. Also kind of dividing it into these peripheral railbelt areas, so for example, like the Kenai Peninsula or Fairbanks, and then rural Alaska too, as subdivisions.

Slide number 8, the question of how affordable is your electric power bill. This is sort of a subjective question. But you can see here for those respondents, for example, in Southeast Alaska, which has predominantly hydro-based communities, with the exception of some rural communities that are also diesel-dependent. 80% Find that their electric power bill is somewhat or very affordable. And you can also see from what the effective cost of power today is in Juneau, it's about 13.7 cents a kilowatt hour.

That's all costs kind of wrapped in together, including any fixed charges for each customer. And so, as well as like the cost of energy, that's put on top of that. So you can see Kenai and Fairbanks are substantially lower here. You can see about 40% of respondents do not find that their energy bills are very affordable, and those are actually some of the lowest in the state. And you can also see that the effective cost of power is about 32 cents in both of those locations right now.

So next slide, please.

So slide number 9 here is basically the same information. Again, you can— it's broken down a little bit more. We're asking folks how much they believe that their monthly electricity bill is. So just to be clear, this is again a subjective question. We're asking them to estimate what their bill is, and so we didn't go back and verify that.

So again, I just want to acknowledge that there's some limitations regions in the survey here. But again, you can see that for Fairbanks and Kenai, between 48% and I think 54% of respondents said that they're paying more than $200 a month for their electric bill, which was significantly higher than any other regions. And that actually includes rural Alaska. We also see higher bills there, about 47% say that their bill is above $200. But just want to sort of show that.

The next slide, slide number 10. Part of the reason why there is these high energy costs in places like the Kenai and in Fairbanks— I'm using Golden Valley as an example here, but you could absolutely substitute Homer Electric Association in here as well— is that those residential customers do have their rates subsidized through the Power Cost Equalization Program. And that Power Cost Equalization Program is essentially the average of the rates paid between Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, those three urban centers. And that basically— what happens is that Fairbanks and Juneau sort of cancel each other out. You've got low cost in Juneau, high cost in Fairbanks.

And so it gets to be very, very close. To what the rates are for Chugach Electric Association and Matanuska Electric Association, those more central areas on the rail belt. And so the end result is that you have residents in Fairbanks and residents in Kenai and Seward that are paying more than 10% above that PCE level, that optimal level that we're trying to get rural residents in rural communities. That doesn't mean that all communities are getting to that level, but that's sort of what we're aspiring to in terms of power cost equalization. It's kind of like trying to get to a postage stamp rate where we have reasonable electric power rates for most residents in the state.

But this year, Fairbanks— and again, you can substitute in Kenai or Seward— our payment paying more for electricity than 140 of the 188 PCE-eligible communities. So I just really want to acknowledge that the cost of energy in some of these peripheral areas of the rail belt are quite high. With that being said, I really want to also acknowledge that rural Alaska is always struggling with high cost of energy, and the power cost equalization only covers about a third of the kilowatt hours that are sold in rural Alaska. And so two-thirds are paying the full weighted cost of power in these communities, which is higher than the rates that you would see in Fairbanks or the Kenai.

So if we move on to slide 11, when we look at some of the more recent reasons why you're seeing very high cost of energy, at least in Gold Valley service territory. There's some differences why you're seeing those high costs on the Kenai and in Seward, but the role of natural gas, which has been the lowest cost power that's been supplied through the Alaska Intertie historically, it's not been available. There's no extra gas available to be able to provide economy power to Fairbanks. Fairbanks. You can see there in 2025 there's been no— essentially no natural gas generated power from south central that's coming up north on the Intertie.

This is a chart provided by Golden Valley. Slide number 12. You can see here the end result of that is that Fairbanks is substituting that less expensive natural gas power with diesel-based generation. And so right now we are burning in Fairbanks during the winter, we were burning 250,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day. And just to kind of put that in perspective, all of rural Alaska together burns about 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel for power generation each day.

Just to put that in perspective. [Speaker:JIM] I'm kind of jumping ahead of my question. [Speaker:JESSICA] Thank you. Dr. Holmen, we have a couple of questions on this slide. I'm going to go ahead and start with Representative Sadler.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Actually, I have a question on slide 11. Just flip back one. If I missed the question and answer before, I apologize, but what accounts for the precipitous decline from about 8% of natural gas GVA to less than— basically nothing? What was that?

The contracts— supply contracts run out? Dr. Holmen? Representative Sadler, through the chair, there, there is simply not any extra gas to be contracted. What we've done traditionally is Fairbanks or Golden Valley has either purchased gas directly from suppliers and then paid a utility, whether it's Chugach Electric Association or Matanuska Electric Association, to basically spin their turbines or their generators, generate power and send that north on the Intertie or just purchase economy power from whatever the source is from those South Central utilities. And right now, the gas contracts are so tight that there's not any opportunity for either Golden Valley to enter into a contract of itself or for any of those utilities to send economy natural gas power.

Power North. Follow-up? Thank you. And, and Ms. Kohl, yeah, I'm just, um, I understand the supply and demand, just, uh, there had been about 8%, uh, and then the next year there's nothing. Was—.

Do you guys buy spot or do you buy long contracts? Did a contract expire? I understand the competition for molecules of gas, but what was the precipitating change? Dr. Holman. Thank you, Representative Sadler.

Through the chair, that would probably be a question better asked of Golden Valley, but I do believe that their last gas contract that they had ended in 2024, and they were not able to enter into a new one due to the limitations in supply. Thank you. All right, thank you, Dr. Holman. Uh, Representative Fields. Uh, thank you, through the chair.

Um, Dr. Holman, I know that GVEA has been trying to get the Delta Wind project, a 30-megawatt project, approved and built, and that has been delayed by the Trump administration adding some additional bird strike permits to the point that now the project won't be able to get the wind ITC. My understanding is GVA is still trying to deliver the project. I was hoping you could contextualize in the next slide, the slide that you were just on, how much, how much does 30 megawatts in additional Alaska-based generation displace in terms of gallons of diesel diesel? Like, how much of that will it eat into if GVA is ultimately successful at deploying Delta Wind?

Yeah, thank you, Representative— sorry, Dr. Holman. Thank you, Representative Fields, through the chair. Um, that, that's a great question, and as you, as you've stated, there's quite a lot of interest from Golden Valley in terms of developing this wind farm. Um, that's been discussed for, for a lot— long time.

When we look at wind energy, we typically think of a capacity factor just as a back-of-the-envelope for wind energy of about 30% in Alaska. And so that means that you might have 30 megawatts of wind, but it's not gonna be putting out 30 megawatts all the time. It's putting out 30 megawatts or some version of that about 30% of the time. So if you count up all the potential potential megawatt hours that you might produce over an entire year if it was running at 100% capacity all year, you're actually gonna be producing about a third of that total. One thing that's really great about wind energy in the interior is that it is— it does tend to blow.

It tends to be windier in the winter. And so, it's the time where we have the highest demand. We also have the highest resource availability. And so that's one of the reasons why wind is something that is very much something that Golden Valley is interested in developing. Follow-up?

Yeah, follow-up. I don't expect you to have this offhand, but I was hoping that maybe as a follow-up, if you don't have it offhand, you could explain how much Delta Wind will offset in terms of daily diesel consumption. And I understand capacity factors, you could just average it and say on an average day it'll be 10. I realize it'll fluctuate, but, but what does that represent in terms of offsetting gallons of diesel?

Representative Fields to the chair. I'd be actually very happy— I'd be interested myself in getting you that number. One of the things that we do need to take into account is when we have a wind resource like this, and, and Golden Valley actually has the largest wind farm in the state right now with Eva Creek, so they have some experience with this. And so, one of the challenges that they've already had with Eva Creek is that they're having to regulate wind as a non-firm resource from Eva Creek. And so, they're actually having to use their LM6000 turbine in North Pole, which is some of their more efficient or lower-cost generation, and they're having to use that to sort of balance out that wind resource.

And so, that's actually running that unit a little bit more efficiently less efficiently than it normally would be. And so, there's a little bit of a penalty, basically, on having to regulate a wind resource. So, it's not just a one-to-one offset. And so, I'd actually really appreciate the opportunity to get you a good answer to that question. I'm quite interested in myself later today or tomorrow.

[Speaker] Has a follow-up. [Speaker] Yes, follow-up. [Speaker] Dona, through the chair, I'm pretty sure GV has a better battery pack? I'm assuming the batteries help with that regulation.

Representative Fields to the chair. So the existing battery that Golden Valley had was not designed for, um, for, for basically addressing that kind of fluctuating resource like a wind resource. It was really purely designed to deal with outages from when the intertie went down and dealing with brownouts in the Fairbanks area when Fairbanks was cut off, so you have some period of time to bring up another generation— generator online. So it's basically a replacement of spinning reserve on the northern side. So the battery was not designed for anything other than like full— like discharge, you know, recharge kind of cycles.

And so the new battery that they're— that they're working to acquire now will be able to help address those kinds of variable resources, as I understand. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you, Representative Fields. Thank you, Dr. Holman. We have two questions left on this slide.

I'm going to go to Representative Prox and then Representative Sadler. Yes, thank you.

I guess more of a comment. When we talk about offsetting diesel with variable power, be it wind or solar or whatever that's variable. We should get a thorough discussion from Golden Valley to really understand what's going on here because there's, there's two considerations.

Even if you have like a 90% online rate, the utility has— well, the utility has to run a turbine engine to handle the variability. And then once you start a turbine engine, you have to load it up as close to 100% as you can to get efficiency out of it. So what ends up happening is that Golden Valley ends up having to back down on their base load power generation, which is coal, in order to get any kind of efficiency out of the diesel. Or the turbine. And you can't just start and stop a turbine because then that wears the turbine out.

So it's really kind of a complicated consideration, and you can't just talk about kilowatt-hours wind power versus kilowatt-hours diesel power or any other power mix that you have online. And that has led to lots of confusion and lots of discussion that— don't talk about offsetting diesel with wind until you understand how the whole thing works, otherwise you make a mistake. Thank you, Representative Prox. Maybe it's a further discussion down the road. Yeah, valuable discussion down the road and save the paperwork.

Representative Sadler. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just, uh, for Ms. Goldman, Dr. Goldman, just, uh, wanted to clarify. You said wind is 30%. I'm not sure if you meant it's only 30% efficient or only operates 30% of the time, or I just— could you clarify real clearly what you meant about 30% and wind?

Yeah. Represent Sadler through the chair. So basically, when you have a variable resource like wind, you have the capacity of the turbine that's rated to 30 megawatts. So you might have a 30-megawatt diesel generator. You might have a 30-megawatt wind turbine.

A diesel generator might be able to put out 30 megawatts consistently all the time if that's its sort of rated capacity. Electricity. But a wind turbine is dependent on the resource. So, if there's no wind, you're gonna put out no— it doesn't matter how big your wind turbine is, you're gonna put out zero megawatts, right? If you're in an optimal wind regime, you might be able to push, like offshore.

This is why we put turbines offshore, or want to, is that there's a more consistent wind regime. Maybe you can get to like 40% of the time it's sort of putting out at sort of its its kind of rated capacity. And so, basically, it's a fairly generally simple equation to be thinking about it as 30%, which is kind of about what we have for either Eva Creek or even the Fire Island Wind Farm down in Anchorage, that it's putting out about 30% of the number of megawatt hours that it could put out under optimal conditions. [Speaker] Great. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Holman. And I just want to do a time check. We have— we're on slide 12. There's 40-ish slides and we have about 50 minutes. So just a quick time check.

Please proceed, Dr. Holman.

Thank you. I'll, I'll try to, to run through a few of these. And if folks do have questions, I'm happy to take questions after the fact and answer them. There are some really important issues. I've also recently published two articles in The Beacon, one that was on this question around Fairbanks and the other that's on rural Alaska cost of energy.

So quickly, slide 13, just acknowledging Fairbanks and other peripheral rail belt customers do have these high energy burden, which is how much of a person's household income is spent on energy costs. And so on average, the average resident in Fairbanks pays 10% of their household income on energy costs, including heating and electricity, not transportation. And so 3% is considered high energy burden in the US. All right. I'm just going to go on to slide 14.

I just want to really quickly again mention rural Alaska, especially with with the current situation with the increasing price of diesel is going to be in a really difficult position. I just testified on this, I think yesterday, and again, the article that I published in the Beacon, I think it was republished in Juneau, really addresses this particular question in some additional detail. But I do want to mention this is just electric power rates. You can kind of see Juneau is below the US median. That's the line at the very bottom there.

The US average is the orange line. And then you can see Anchorage and Nematsoo, Fairbanks is the blue line. My point, though, is that there's two different types of communities in rural Alaska. There are the larger hub communities, and that's sort of that purple line. They—.

This is the unsubsidized rate of power. So this is before PCE is applied. The kilowatt-hour sales that are sold that are not eligible for PCE. This is what they're paying roughly today. That's going to be going up significantly with the increase in diesel.

And then small communities are even in a more difficult situation. So communities less than 1,000, they pay these extremely high prices for electric power. And I realize that this committee is familiar with this. I'm partially dwelling on it because these costs are going to be going up substantially. Slide 15 again shows this, the household energy burden for these different regions in Alaska.

I don't want to dwell too much on this slide because we do have a few others to go through, but it basically shows what the burden would be without the power cost equalization, what it is once it's subsidized, which is the blue bars. But this is just for electricity. US average for heating and electricity is 3%, and we're approaching that in regions such as like the Kusilvec region. People are paying over 3% just for electricity when it— even with the subsidy. So I just want to point this out.

Slide 16. This shows the price of heating oil in rural Alaska. This is where I think a lot of communities are going to be— are going to be hit the hardest next year. We have estimated that for every dollar increase in heating oil or dollar increase in liquid fuels in rural Alaska, the impact is going to be approaching something like $100 million in overall impact. I have more detailed slides than the next few that sort of show that, but it's going to be a very significant impact for these rural residents.

Slide 17, this just kind of shows the general distribution of how— and this is based on surveys that were conducted by ICER, actually, So again, talking about Diane, so this is a survey that they did out in much of western rural Alaska to determine that the average resident out there uses about 1,200 gallons per year across all uses. So that includes electricity, so that's the diesel that's being used to produce electricity, for space heating, and then for local transportation. So that doesn't include flying anywhere, and that doesn't include include bringing anything into communities. That's just local transportation, whether that's vehicles or snow machines or four-wheelers. So, once you know that it's like a 1,200-gallon per person per year in PCE communities— this is old data, this is from 15 years ago, but we don't think this number on a per capita basis has really changed all that much— you can quickly start to see if cost of fuel goes up a dollar, what the— $2, $3— what the impact can be on a per-resident basis.

So again, slide 18 through 20. I don't want to dwell on these too much. We actually have updated projections since we put these slides together. I'll pause for a second. Was there a question?

Seeing no questions, please proceed. Okay, thank you. We were asked by the Denali Commission— there's a bulk fuel working group— and we were asked to estimate what the impacts in rural Alaska would be if there was a $5 increase in the cost of liquid fuels, which might be kind of an upper extreme, potentially, but part of the challenge that we're running into is not just the cost, but also supplying communities in rural Alaska. Actually, even procuring the fuel and delivering it before winter is going to be challenging in some places. And for communities where you have to fly the fuel in, we often see these extreme high costs of like $14 a gallon for heating oil, and that's what we're trying to avoid, but there are some places where we might have those sort of real extreme cases.

But our most current estimate is that— and again, we chose the $5 per gallon number because it was one that the Denali Commission asked us to look at— the impacts on all of rural Alaska across all different uses of oil, gasoline, everything like that would be about $450 million. This is a very back of the envelope exact number, but it's a large number. And so we're just trying to get a bit of an order of magnitude number for legislators to understand what the challenge might be.

Dr. Mase, I'm going to stop there. Yes, perfect timing. We have a question from Representative Prox. Thank you. Through the chair, I'm trying to figure out what the numbers what the numbers on the x-axis of your graph mean?

I think the numbers on the right mean dollars, but I have no idea what the numbers on the x-axis mean. Yes. Dr. Holmes. Thank you. Thank you, Representative, through the Chair.

So basically that's like the number of communities, it's kind of adding up communities. And part of the issue, and why I don't really like this slide, and I have a new version of this that I wish I had had the time to replace this particular slide with, is that it shows the number of— and obviously we have more than 80 communities in Alaska, but some— there's more— the data is shown with the actual points of each community. And so you've got a few that are very high. We have some that are actually at $14 in terms of the cost of— cost per gallon on the left axis there. And then, it's the number of communities that are facing a particular price point of fuel that's actually represented there.

And some of them are duplicated. Some have the same cost of fuel, especially in the middle range there. I'd prefer to give you guys updated information if you're interested in that question. [Speaker:JOSHUA DUBOIS] Okay. Okay, thank you so much, Dr. Holman.

A question from Representative Satter. Yeah, just echoing that, um, unless we actually know the communities that— I think I'll agree that chart's not great. The top line is that it's $6 a gallon. I assume fuel means diesel, that this is the extra burden. So that, that's pretty clear, but the communities in that cumulative is just— that's not— I think you agree it's not that telling.

So thank you. And same thing for the next 3 slides, I understand. Yes.

So, um, I— so, so just to comment on that, this is Gwen Holdman again for the record. Um, we originally put these slides together on relatively short notice to get information out there, and I, I recognize that these are not that, that, uh, clear. And like I said, um, we'd be happy to give some updated slides that have better clarity on these numbers to the committee after the fact if if that would be acceptable.

Yeah, I'm looking to the committee, and we would appreciate that. Thank you, Dr. Holman. That'd be great. So I, I'd like to skip on to part 2, slide 21. And so this is really kind of looking more at the different energy technologies and general perspectives of Alaskans related to these different energy technologies, with a little bit of a special focus on the AK LNG project and then nuclear energy as well.

So, slide 22, we asked the general question, "Should Alaskans use more or less of these different technologies?" Hydroelectric power has— this is 2025 results. But we found that it has been fairly consistent in terms of the responses that we got across all 3 years. And also, there's been other surveys that have been done, and we've taken a look at those, compared our results to other surveys by other groups that have been done, and I think these are fairly consistent perspectives from Alaskans. So, hydroelectric power tends to be quite popular. Solar and wind, Alaskans tend to want to see more solar and wind in the state.

Waste-to-energy is a little bit tricky. Right now we really mainly just have the, the landfill gas project in Southcentral, so that there's interest in that. Nuclear power, divided. Natural gas, and then coal is the one that most Alaskans do not think that we should be using more of. So again, this is just a quick question on more or less use.

So thank you. Thank you, Dr. Holmen. We have a question from Representative Elam on slide 22. Thank you. I, I guess I'm kind of curious where the solar becomes so popular at in the state of Alaska, because I know on the Kenai Peninsula I've been involved in a number of these projects and it is wildly unpopular on the Well, Representative, through the Chair, I don't know what to tell you there.

I find that in Fairbanks it is actually quite popular, so I do think that there's some diversity of perspectives in the state, but this is what we got, and this is actually fairly consistent with other surveys that I I've seen from other groups, and so I don't know what to tell you. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Holman. Representative Prox.

Yes, thank you. Through the chair to Dr. Holman, I guess I'm wondering in how you asked the question, is this just all else being equal, I'd like one thing or another, or if one thing was more more expensive than another, would that change the response?

How did you ask the question? Thank you, Representative Prox. Through the chair, that's an excellent question from my perspective, and you'll see when we looked at the AK LNG project, we did actually ask some of those questions about people's perspectives on the cost of energy. Typically, and I think in the next slide, if we could maybe go to slide 23, when you ask Alaskans if they support moving toward clean energy projects like wind and solar, the majority support it. But I do think that there is the assumption that that comes— that that— because that's not requiring fuel.

For power generation, that it's less expensive. And so when you ask folks if they're willing to see their utility move toward clean energy, but that would require paying a little bit more, just a small increment— and we actually did play around with like asking people if it was like a fraction of a penny, you know, what is your perspective then? Typically, though, people don't necessarily— want to pay more energy, but 50% are willing to pay more for it. So that's kind of something to take into account. But there's no question that the biggest reason for moving toward renewables is definitely the idea of reducing the long-term cost of energy.

And so this idea that even if it's not cheaper today, that it's hedging against a future increase, I think is something that a lot of Alaskans are beginning to sort of think about. Thank you, Dr. Holman. We have a question from Representative Fields. Yeah, through the chair, um, solar is the leading source of energy being deployed around the world for years now. It's the cheapest source of energy in most places, including with batteries.

And I'm curious if the way that you asked your question, like Representative Prock said, do Alaska do Alaskans know that solar is the cheapest source of energy in most places on Earth, which is not necessarily true in every location in Alaska, or are they sort of hoping it is? I'm curious how much Alaskans follow global energy trends.

Dr. Holmen? Yeah, Representative Fields, through the chair, that— I think that would actually be a really interesting question to ask. We did— we have not asked that We have not looked at that level of detail. One of the limitations we've had with these surveys is the length of time that we can ask respondents to spend on these. A lot of these more general energy questions aren't what has been the source of funding.

These are questions we're interested in as Alaskans, but the source of funding has been related to carbon capture or nuclear. We've had to spend a a fair amount of time on these surveys on those questions. And again, I think this idea of doing a more expansive, more robust survey is something that both Diane and I and others are quite interested in. But we did not ask that kind of question. And again, I would be quite interested in that answer as well.

Okay, thank you, Dr. Holman. We have a question from Representative Freer. Thank you. Through the co-chair, I don't actually have a question. I just would like to ask the committee's privilege to recognize that I have some constituents that are in the room.

They, uh, they weren't here on the floor for introduction of guests, but we have, uh, some students that are here from Aasog with their chaperone or guide, David. We've got Mark Ortilia, he's here. Olivia Sakaluk and David Oluvuk are in the room, and I just wanted to give them a shout out, uh, and thank them for being here. And listening to this presentation on energy costs in Alaska. So thank you for being here.

Thank you, uh, co-chair, for the privilege. Thank you. Welcome to, uh, House Resources, and glad you could be part of the, the discussion on energy and the high cost. You— I'm sure you'll experience that too, as long with the rest of us. So thank you for being here.

Thank you. Representative Sadler. Thank you, Madam Chair. Briefly, because I know we have a lot of work to do. Yeah, I understand we're getting an overview on energy industry and not debating a larger-scale macroeconomic energy policy, but without more developing— delving into the topic, I really kind of have to take some exception or challenge the assertion, the blanket assertion, alternative energy is the cheapest form of energy.

That's an issue to be debated, and I just want to let that not Q: Please continue, Dr. Holmen. [Speaker:DR_HOLMEN] Thank you. This is Gwen Holmen, for the record. And for the record, Representative Sadler, I just want to be clear, I did not state that renewables are necessarily cheaper than other sources of energy.

That is something that is debated here in Alaska. And so I actually do have a lot of thoughts on that, and so I do think that that is something that is a big part of the conversation that we have on the rail belt in particular in terms of the cost of different energy technologies. Absolutely. Yeah. So I want to move on then to the AK LNG project specifically.

I have a few slides on this. I'm just gonna jump to slide 25 right now. So when we asked respondents about their support of a natural gas pipeline, there was very strong support. It was the strongest in Matsu and lowest in Southeast. And so you can kind of see that here.

And this is consistent with a lot of other polling that's been done. This is a poll question that's been asked over time. And our results were pretty consistent. But if you look at slide 26, it kind of— we asked— this was an open-ended question, so we asked respondents, like, why do you support or oppose a natural gas pipeline? You can see a lot of the reasons for supporting it, again, are related to energy resource or the cost of energy, economic opportunities.

This is a— this is kind of the general reasons why the respondents were supporting it. But the one I thought was more interesting is slide number 27, which is where we did ask some of these questions, as Representative Fields had asked earlier, whether we did this with, say, solar or something like that. But how would your support change under different conditions? And so if there was the need for additional state investment, would your support support increase, be no different, or decrease. And we saw a decrease of about 27% in support if there was the need for additional state investment.

And if the cost of energy— we're careful on how we worded this— if the energy costs increased compared to where they are today, not some potential future theoretical higher price, then there was a significant decrease in support for the project. The reason why I think this is kind of an interesting— this is an interesting bit of information is because I do think that a lot of the support is tied to the idea that this is going to result in lower cost or stable cost energy for Alaskans. We don't know that to be absolutely true. This is just something that I think is something that's interesting to throw out there.

Slide 28, we asked a couple of additional questions too. So if more of the gas is, for example, exported— so if it's more of an export pipeline— how would that change your support? And if the prices remain stable, so if that didn't increase or decrease but just remained exactly stable, how would that impact your support for the project. And those are basically the questions that we asked around natural gas. We had pretty limited ability to add these into the survey, as I said, but I thought these would be of interest to this group.

If there's no questions, I can just move on quickly to the perspectives on nuclear energy.

Seeing no questions on that section as of right now, I do want to say to the committee that committee aides will share articles and links with committee members, as well as any questions we don't get to. And just a time check, we have about 15 slides left with 30 minutes. Thank you, Dr. Holman. Okay, thank you. So this is, uh, this is Gwen Holdman for the record.

Um, and so moving on to nuclear energy, and so slide 30. So So just very quickly, I do believe this committee has some familiarity with the concept of advanced nuclear energy, but it's basically this new category of reactor design that differ from conventional or legacy nuclear power. We're actually bringing a group of utility managers to Idaho National Lab to learn more about nuclear energy at the— next week, we're gonna be there at INL with 13 utilities from across the state, from both rural and rail belt utilities. And we're actually organizing a second tour for legislators, for those that are interested, and we're tentatively looking at the end of June. So, I'm intending to send out an email to this group in case there's interest in potentially participating in that.

But just, you know, quickly, so, advanced reactors are different from legacy and conventional reactors, and they both can be larger reactors, say like 300 megawatts or something that would be appropriate for the rail belt, and there's many that are also smaller, microreactors, and an example would— of that would be the project that's been proposed at Eielson Air Force Base. On slide 31, this is just a mockup of an example of these microreactors. This is the director of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, Jeremy Casper, with me This is in Saskatchewan at the Saskatchewan Research Council. This is a Westinghouse Iwinche 5-megawatt reactor. The idea is that this would fit in kind of an oversized Conex container and then get shipped out to a site where it would be used.

Saskatchewan is gonna be one of the first places where these are deployed, and so they've built this mock-up there that's life-size for people to get to kind of see and touch and understand the technology a little bit. Better, but I thought it would be a good visual here for you guys as well.

So slide 30. Yeah. Oh, I was just gonna comment, that is— that's a pretty cool photo.

Thank you. Yes, I agree as well. It's nice to be able to see a real visual instead of just a computer-generated image. And so this is kind of a pretty much exactly how one of these small reactors is going to work. This particular one, the idea would be it would be refueled about every 7 to 10 years, and you would move the entire module, the entire reactor CONEXX container, big shipping container, out.

So instead of refueling on site, you just replace it with a newly fueled replacement and send the original one out. So there's no refueling on site at all. There's a lot of different vendors. There's about 3 dozen active vendor— vendors operating in the US today. The first ones, there's actually been groundbreakings.

We're gonna be seeing some of these being deployed at Idaho National Lab. So this is very much a technology that's coming. It's not one that's quite here yet, but it's in a very, very near future, this is something that I think utilities could start to be thinking about making decisions around. So moving to slide 32. The first question that we asked is whether folks were aware of these microreactors, these advanced reactors, as something— as a different category compared to more conventional or legacy reactors.

And so this is two different snapshots. So the first time that we, we asked this question in 2023, only about a quarter of respondents had heard of these. By the time we did the survey again last year, so a couple years later, that number went up to about 40%. So this doesn't have anything to do with support for it. This is just awareness of whether you are— whether you've heard of these.

So we still have less than 50% of Alaskans that are— have never heard of these kinds of advanced reactors. So, moving on to slide 33. So, again, this has some of those different regions on here. And again, we are not super confident in— with the small data, the small sample sizes in terms of these regional differences. But you can see here that Fairbanks is the one that is the most familiar.

And that is— that makes sense because you have the microreactor that's in plan for Eielson Air Force Base, which would be the first commercial microreactor deployed anywhere in the United States if they stay on track for deploying that system in 2027 or 2028. That timeline is likely to slip, however.

Moving on to slide 34. So this is a question about the support for using nuclear energy in Alaska. So this isn't about awareness, this is about support. So this includes people that are not aware of advanced reactor technologies. And so you can see it has increased by about 10% from that 2023 level.

There's been about a 10% increase in our last in our last 2 years. And opposition has dropped a little bit, but there's still some that are pretty strongly opposed to it too. So just recognition of that.

Slide 35. This is an example of where we were giving respondents a little bit more information, in this case about specifically a nuclear microreactor. I put the statement down at the bottom here because as much as this could be construed as a neutral statement, I would also say there— you could actually make the case that it's actually— there's— that it is— that it makes it look pretty good, right? So I do want to, like, recognize that, and that's why I put that in here so that people can draw their own conclusions about this statement. But basically, the increase was pretty significant, the final support.

Like, after they heard that statement, understood what a microreactor was, there was a significant increase in support. Now, this is just during the survey. This isn't something that's necessarily lasting beyond that, but you can see that opinions are still fairly malleable related to nuclear energy among Alaskans, just tied to that lack of awareness, I think, too. And so slide 36, you can see that this— we do have more data for this, and we'd be actually happy to provide additional— the full survey slide deck to you guys as well. So you can see here, this kind of holds up across this informed sort of support across all regions, ages, and political leanings.

So there's like a lot of consistency there across a lot of different diverse Alaskan stakeholder groups or demographic groups.

Slide 37. We did a separate survey of Alaskans that attended last year's Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference. This was conducted by one of our PhD students working on nuclear energy, and we found that there was a much higher level of familiarity among people attending this conference. These aren't just all energy industry folks, but it's people that are in leadership positions in the energy industry, and there's like a much higher awareness. And as a result, there was also a much higher degree of support among those respondents.

And so that's something that I think is important to sort of be aware of, is that we did We did see that same— as you become more aware of the technology, there's a tendency, although this isn't 100% true, there's a lot of people that are very opposed to nuclear as well, but there's a tendency with more information or more general awareness to be more supportive of nuclear energy. The informed public, including leaders in the legislature, are more knowledgeable on average about nuclear energy than the general public. That's something that I think is interesting is just to recognize is that people in leadership positions are often more supportive because they're more knowledgeable about some of these technologies than their constituents and the general public. So it's just something I think is interesting or worth being aware of. And so that's really all we have.

I guess I'm gonna just wrap it up here with slide 30. We can skip 38 'cause we've already seen that. Slide 39. I'm gonna just quickly pass it back to Diane, who's been very patient here, in case she has any other comments or maybe just give a quick plug for the Alaska Energy Data Gateway. Thank you, Dr. Holmen.

Dr. Hershberg, if you could hear us. Yes, thank you very much. So this is Diane Hershberg, and thank you, Gwen, first of all. Great presentation. As always.

And this is just a reminder, many of you heard our joint ACEP/ISER presentation on the Alaska Energy Data Gateway, but if you did not, this is a great opportunity for legislators, your staffers, and your community, your constituents to be able to look at data themselves to understand what the differences are again with these costs that we see, with energy usage. A lot of this is also tied to demographic and other data. I also just want to circle back to something Gwen started with. ACEP and IESSER have been partnering on the Alaska Energy Data Gateway since 2010. This is probably one of the strongest partnerships I'd say across the UA system.

We're really— and we have multiple projects since then, whether it's looking at electric vehicles, renewable energy, nuclear energy. And so this is an example of bringing together a multidisciplinary team to provide the information that hopefully helps you make the best possible decision. So we're just really excited to sharing all of this information with you and look forward to hearing any other questions that you may have. Thank you, Dr. Hershberg and Dr. Holman, for your presentation. This was very— I mean, I know I'm from Fairbanks, I represent Fairbanks, and the cost of energy is very high.

And I, you know, I— when I have to conversations down here in the legislature. I remind folks in all of my meetings and talks of energy and our resources, like how expensive it is in Fairbanks and, you know, how we could brainstorm and help folks up there in the north lower energy costs, and then obviously the rest of the state. And I did want to mention last Friday fall at the Defense Forum, we had a new micro nuclear— small modular micro nuclear reactor town hall, and it was standing room only. It was a great discussion. I'm not sure if you remember, Representative Prox and Representative Sandler, where we had just the public came out to learn about the micro nuclear nuclear reactor in Eielson, and it was very helpful to the community.

And I hope we could have more of those town halls on energy options, whether it's nuclear, solar, wind. With that, are there any more thoughts or follow-ups? Representative Prox. Yes, thank you. Through the chair, I guess I'm trying to find out what policy questions you were trying to answer or if you had specific policy recommendations for us based on the information that you gathered.

Dr. Holman or Dr. Hershberg?

I'm happy to jump in a little bit on the background. This is Diane Hirschberg. Actually, we— when ICER and ACEP were down last month and we showed up the day after Glenfarm had done their presentation to the legislature about the pipeline, what we simply wanted to do was add some more information for you all to to have as you are making the decision. So we had brought copies of just the survey data, as Gwen referenced, that we are of course happy to share again. And Representative Freer asked if we would be willing to come and talk some more about that with this committee.

So, so truly for us, we want your questions that either— hopefully we have of the research done that we can provide you with answers and/or if there are opportunities where we need to be doing some more research. Like Gwen talked about, we've been talking about what a perhaps more robust, different methodology survey might look like to dig into some of the questions, but we want to do this in a way that's always going to help you answer the questions. Questions that you have. And so that was really the impetus for this conversation.

Thank you, Dr. Hirschberg. Representative Fields, do you have a thought, question? Representative Elam? Thank you. I actually was trying to get— Representative Colon wanted to be in the queue.

Oh, got it. Okay. I saw hands pointing at me and I thought it was Representative Fields. But I'm going to go to Representative Calhoun online. Thank you, Chair Dibart.

Can you hear me? We can hear you. Okay. So I kind of held my questions to the end because I know online or when I'm on the phone it kind of interrupts things. So if you don't mind, I have a couple of questions on a couple of slides.

On page— on slide 16, it shows the decline of the price of heating oil in rural Alaska. Around 2015. I'm just wondering what accounted for the decline.

Dr. Holman, I'm assuming. What was the slide? Was it 16 or 15? 16, One-six. One-six, thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Representative Kulum, through the chair. So these are, these are inflation-adjusted numbers, and I wish that we were— I had a more complete data set. I do have a more complete data set that I can share now because it's kind of come back up, but these were inflation-adjusted numbers, and so I think in part that is an artifact of that. That inflation adjustment. I don't think you would see that same decrease in absolute numbers.

Oh, it's just inflation. It's the inflation that caused the current— it looks like it went down, but it's just that inflation was low?

I believe that is the case. I can— as I said, I believe if you— if we bring this out for the last couple of years, you'll see that go back up because inflation has been higher since 2021. But I think that that is part of the artifact for that reduction there. Part of it is a real reduction in cost, but part of it is also, I think, there's some inflation component to that as well. I can actually, I'd like to look into that question and get back to you, Representative.

Okay. That'd be great. And if I may, one other question on slide share. Yes, Representative Klum. Thank you.

So on slide 9, the estimated monthly electric bill by region, on the very far left hand it says total. Is total mean the average of all these regions? What is, what does total mean?

Representative Klum, through the chair, that is the the average across all Alaskan respondents. Okay, all right, great. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.

Uh, thank you, Representative Klum. Um, next I'm going to go to Representative Mears. Uh, thank you through the chair. So I just wanted to emphasize, uh, something that Dr. Hallman was talking about. Uh, yesterday in House Energy, we did have a very robust discussion about the impact of the war with Iran on fuel availability and cost that gets delivered throughout the state.

We've got some limited capacity for refining here.

We had a gentleman from Vitus that supplies fuel by, by barge to western and northern Alaska, and where they'd been getting fuel in South Korea most recently just doesn't have it available because their fuel comes through the Strait of Hormuz from the Middle East. They're looking at Canada and Canada has got competition. Folks from California are competing for gas from those refineries in Canada. Now they're looking, do we need to go off to the Gulf of Mexico and get— get natural gas or get fuel from there for Alaska, which has got other consequences. So there's a lot to it.

I think having folks that are really on the ground dealing with this right now— we also had Tom Atkinson from Kotzebue speak. Dr. Holman was there. Nils Andreassen from Alaska Municipal League, and then also Director Mohler from DCCED. So it was a, it was a broad-ranging discussion, and we've got real consequences that are coming to hit the state. We're not dealing in theory, this is reality.

Another point that Dr. Holman made in her slides was, uh, it wasn't included in the graphics today, but like once prices rise, she called it sticky, they tend to stay stuck high for a little while. Because when we're looking at fuel in rural Alaska, in communities that get seasonal deliveries, you get 1 or 2 deliveries in a lot of communities and whatever price you buy at, you're stuck with. But it also is— it kind of lasts over a period of years. You know, it's not necessarily just seasonal. So we are looking at very real impacts.

Energy prices will be going up for Alaska.

Thank you for that, Representative Mears. And you know, the Gulf of Mexico is a long ways away, and if we have to get fuel from that far away, I can imagine what the price is going to be. I'm going to go ahead and go to Representative Freer. Thank you. Through the co-chair, to Dr. Hershberg and Dr. Holdman, I just want to thank you for your patience and your willingness to continue rescheduling this presentation.

We, we asked for this presentation weeks ago, and then we canceled 4 hearings in a row. So I just want to— and I know you've traveled down, back, and both of you have traveled down. So thank you for the presentation. I'm glad we were able to do this today. I think it's great information, great perspective to to share from folks in all regions of Alaska.

And yeah, just want to— yeah, thank you for being here. I don't have any questions, just final comments. Thank you, Co-Chair Freer. Yeah, just, you know, hearing from Representative Mears, our rural communities, just moving forward, we're going to have to have thoughtful discussions and just really, you know, plan for how we can help all of Alaskans. Representative Elam.

Thank you.

I just find this slide interesting here, slide 9, the estimated monthly electric bill, because I am looking at the Kenai and Fairbanks, right? So the Kenai is actually pretty high on that 42% of the $250 per month estimated. And I guess I'm just wondering if the, if the type of home was in consideration in this, because like my, my neighbors that are more affluent have larger homes with larger heating bills, but then like myself, I have a smaller, more modest home, and it's actually really quite cost effective. And so I'm just wondering, um, of those Was there consideration for the types of homes within the survey? Because like rule of Alaska over here is, you know, the 30%— like, I mean, their, their, their utility costs, it really doesn't tell us what their utility costs are by household.

It's really more the types of, of, of monthly bills they get.

Dr. Holman. Thank you, Representative, through the Chair. I actually think this is a question I can answer, and we did ask people what their form of heating, their primary and their secondary form of heating is, and so I think the big difference that we see here is that there's more electric space heating on the Kenai than there is in Fairbanks, and I think that that's the primary difference that that you're seeing here. And so, yes, thank you. So it's not really like the total cost of utility for the household, it's just the electric bill.

Do you have any information on the total cost of utility?

Representative, yeah, we, we, in the very first survey, we did ask people about their what their cost of heating was. I can say that a lot of the data that we got, it didn't necessarily track with what we think is accurate, and in part that's because people are not getting like a monthly heating bill if they're heating with fuel oil, for example, in Fairbanks and things like that. If you're getting a monthly gas bill, it's kind of easier to track, But when people aren't getting a monthly electric bill, it's harder for them to estimate. So we got really skewed responses for places that were not, you know, using gas, basically. This is Diane Hershberg through the chair.

This is also just a very difficult question in general because if you— I mean, I'm in Anchorage and I just put in a new wood stove. So now estimating my— there's my bill and then there's do I have trees that are down in my neighborhood or do I have to go buy cords of wood? When we tried to ask, we were in Galena and we were surveying residents in person asking them about their heating, not even just the bill, but what they use and when they use it. And, you know, there's this calculation of my Toyo stove is great on the shoulder seasons, but wood heat is great when it's really cold, but I can't use it on the shoulder seasons because it's too hot. And so people— this kind of question becomes really difficult in a state where so many people are using multiple sources of energy to heat their homes.

And it— electric—. I—. When I fill out the survey, I actually went and looked up my Chugach Electric bill over time, and I could use their calculator, figure out kind of an average, because I know my rates vary enormously. From summer to winter when I just, you know, can turn off all the lights in the summer as well as heat.

But that is even by size of house, it's really, really difficult to ask that question and get a meaningful response just because we all have such, in some cases, really innovative ways of trying to maximize and minimize cost and maximize the benefit of the heating sources we are using. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Dr. Hirschberg. And, uh, Representative Prox. Yes, thank you.

I would think, through the chair, I would think that it would be easy to get the data on whether the increase in the price of electricity has changed behavior per household or per industry or whatever. You call up Golden Valley and they track each individual meter and they probably, probably know by now if that's changing behavior.

Dr. Holman. There's certainly a break-even point. This is Gwen Holdeman, for the record. We've done a lot of analysis on the point at which, for example, installing an air source heat pump makes economic sense, regardless of whether the actual equipment is subsidized. Some of the utilities, like Homer Electric Association, do provide a small subsidy for systems like that, but there's a break-even point where the cost of fuel oil and the price for electricity intersect so that installing equipment that would reduce your fuel oil consumption makes sense to install.

Whether— at what point people are actually making those choices to fuel switch is sort of another question because there's a lot of like sort of resistance to change. It just takes, takes effort to make these kinds of changes. Same thing with weatherization. So there's a lot of studies that have been done in terms of human behavior versus energy pricing, and we could certainly share more of that with this committee in the future if there's interest in it. Okay, thank you.

Dr. Hirschberg, if I may, through the chair, thank you. I think the other piece that can be a little tricky is, is there are people who are opting to pay more for their electricity because of other reasons. I, for example, have an increase in my electric bill right now because I bought into one of the Chugach, um, solar arrays that they're building for community solar power for those of us who live in dark parts of Anchorage. I fully anticipate that if the price of electricity goes way up, I'm actually going to be on the lower end because there are returns to that. But right now, I know that my electric bill has gone up quite a bit.

And, and for me, that's, you know, an investment. And so I think that's another tricky piece of that question of when we work with the utilities is understanding some of those changes we're seeing and what is the underlying cause. How much of it is I've actually thoughtfully unplugged things or I've plugged a whole bunch more into my house and how much of it is these other choices. Chugat certainly can tell who got a higher electric bill because they opted into that grid. But, but it doesn't show up necessarily when I'm just surveyed on on an instrument like this.

Thank you, Dr. Hershberg. Representative Prox, follow-up? Right, what I'm— thank you. Through the Chair, what I'm getting at is yes, there are all kinds of factors that come into somebody's decision-making, but to try to get as much asked questions to try and get as much noise out. As an example, in, well, in my case, my electricity bill has gone up because I can't use my wood stove to heat my garage and I don't want to buy fuel, so I plug my car in.

My electricity use went up even though the price went up. That's an anomaly. But I would think that if you looked at it borough-wide, it would be interesting if the individual price— or if the individual consumption rate, per individual consumption rate, went up even though the price of electricity has gone up. You would expect it to go down. Why not?

And then another question that I'm just observing is, there are many more people pulling up to the heating fuel dispenser at their local filling station and down at the bulk plant. And suppliers, fuel oil delivery companies, it appears to me you see fewer of those trucks on the road. So there's behavior changes that affect, that are driven by price. And it would be interesting to see what's going on because of that.

Okay.

And thank you so much. That sounds like we could follow up on that and get an answer. And we'll definitely follow up with you on that, Representative Prox. That completes the agenda for our House Resources Committee meeting today. Our next House Resources Committee meeting is Monday, April 27th, where we will bring back House Bill 381.

The time is 3:01 PM, and this hearing of the House Resources Committee is now adjourned.