Sitka's Energy Transition Journey

Sitka, for me, means living close to the land and the sea and really having a much closer relationship to the natural world. Sitka's our home with the rest of the community. It's what ultimately will sustain us. The Tlingit people, one of the reasons why Sitka was originally settled was because it was such a prosperous area, in large part due to the water. So the Tlingit people are people of the tides.

Sitka wouldn't be Sitka without water, right? It's surrounded by it, it's constantly covered in it, and it really is exemplified that water is the lifeblood of Sitka. We have relationships with Blue Lake and Green Lake, which sources our power, right? Sources the energy that we use to power our lives here in Sitka. A lot of the communities that are still on diesel power in Southeast Alaska have extremely high rates, whereas Sitka's is relatively affordable.

You know, we talk about rising electrical rates, but still we're quite low for the state The hydropower here in Sitka is reliant on a certain amount of rainfall and melted snowpack. There are unknowns with climate change and how climate change is going to impact Sitka. I worry about the future generating capacity of the dam. There was some low rain years and we did have to run the generators and then people had those fuel surcharges added to their bills. So that was an added cost.

And it's just a very vulnerable place to be. Going to the best science, we have to reduce our emissions by 50% by 2030 and be net zero by 2050. So to me, that's, that's what we need to try to achieve. We can't just do that without the other side of making sure that we're growing our capacity, making sure that we are doing everything we can, finding more sources of generation so that in 10 years we're not running out of power. And having to burn diesels.

The reality is when you operate a grid, when you are providing a power source, it takes decades to establish a new source. So any of these large capital projects truly take decades to plan for and to prepare to deliver. As a utility, We need to be looking at least 10 to 20 years out and really more 30 to 40 years out to understand the direction we're going, what capacity we have to build in for the future. And that's part of why we reached out to Department of Energy, DOE, and the National Labs for this technical assistance.

E-TIP is the Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project, which is a program that is paid for by the Department of Energy and managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So the program uses partners like the Renewable Energy Alaska Project to connect local expertise like we have in Sitka with the brightest minds in the country working on renewable energy problems. And we do so to address the challenge of decarbonizing in Sitka. Well, the ETEP team has a lot of resources. We don't necessarily have the wind modeling capabilities.

We don't necessarily have the data that has been collected by these national laboratories to focus in on, on the energy that's available around us, to what extent. And so with that, these engineering laboratories are bringing a lot of information to the table that was really beyond our reach. While there's no money changing hands throughout this process with ETIP, there is a tremendous amount of information that's changing hands. And it's that resource that a small town of 8,500 people could really use.

It was a great first step for the city to decide that the ETIP proposal was a worthwhile collaboration with NREL and other partners in order to really tackle and address some of the challenges that Sitka really didn't need to do alone. And quite honestly, like, it's great to learn from other folks, right? We can raise all boats together. One of the principal goals was to identify and look at new generation opportunities that we have on the island and to not just identify what the resources are, but to actually look at them as a business model and say which ones are most economically sound and viable and have provided good reliable potentials of energy at a cost that the ratepayer can sustain. We're just in the process now of having a model that mimics Sitka's system.

We're starting to add the theoretical future wind, geothermal, other resources, additional hydro into that system. We don't want our utilization to outpace our generation plan. The financial impacts of that will be far greater than, than taking a nice steady approach with planned decision-making. We can't assume that energy will be infinite. How do we continue to provide, to provide that service for the community in the face of a changing climate and how do we work with the community to conserve energy so we don't need to use as much, so we're not on this trajectory of infinite growth forever and ever.

I mean, it's gonna take a whole bunch of creative solutions and thinking to successfully transition from our dependence on fossil fuel. Sitka has an incredible opportunity to be a leader in the nation in renewable energy generation and decarbonizing without having a negative impact on ratepayers. They can do this with thoughtful energy planning and strategic access to existing and forthcoming grants and loans that are targeted at grid decarbonization. We have a ton of capacity for renewable energy generation here. We have a ton of water, of rain, you know, that we're extremely lucky to have in a world that's going to be having increased drought due to warming.

And so, you know, how can we really work together as a community to confront this reality and then enact solutions to address it? I think that we have an opportunity here to lead in Alaska and kind of across the nation for what community resilience can look like. One of the most important things we can do is bring climate action into conversations, conversations that we have with our families, conversations we have with our co-workers, conversations we have with the assembly members, our elected officials, to make sure that climate action is front and center on the decisions that we make as we evolve the systems that we are part of here in Sitka.