"When it comes to domestic strategies for energy production and use, Alaska is also an accidental innovator."
Read more of Gwen Holdmann's column on energy and the upcoming Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference. Holdmann is Founder and Director of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP), an applied energy research program based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which focuses on community-scale fossil and renewable/alternative energy technologies. At the Governor's energy conference, she'll be moderating a panel and breakout session on "The Power of Microgrids" and "Nuclear's Role in our Sustainable Future."
Register for the energy conference today. Just two weeks to go: https://alaskasustainableenergy.com/
Here's a longer excerpt from her column in The Peninsula Clarion:
"When it comes to domestic strategies for energy production and use, Alaska is also an accidental innovator. Alaska has never had an integrated electric grid. Instead, we rely on local microgrids to provide power to ALL Alaskans.
Even the Railbelt grid is just a series of independent but connected services areas, or microgrids. It turns out by not having access to the same infrastructure as everyone else, we’ve had to get really good at developing and maintaining local, distributed energy resources.
This necessity has translated into Alaska being a global leader in microgrid technologies, small resilient islands of power.
Today, Alaska leads the U.S. in total microgrid capacity with over 3,500 megawatts of installed capacity, with some microgrids continually operating for a century or more. Renewables have been integrated into these power systems to reduce ongoing fuel costs and to make them more resilient and sustainable. We’ve been learning about what works — and what doesn’t."
Read the full column at
https://www.peninsulaclarion.com/.../alaska-voices-join.../
Original source can be found here.
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