Transcriber: amal alkurdi Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Imagine for a moment Alaska 100 years from now.
Imagine it’s a world that no longer wants,
much less needs, our oil or gas.
Imagine it’s a world beyond fossil fuels.
(Audience) Woo-hoo
What kind of jobs would we have?
What would our economy look like?
If Alaska’s not an oil and gas state, then what are we?
If this is hard for you to imagine, then it may surprise you to learn,
there was once a time when oil from the North Slope
was the thing that was difficult to picture.
In fact, Alaska's oil and gas industry as we know it today almost never happened.
Admitted as a state in 1959,
Congress gave Alaska the opportunity to select 100 million acres of our own land
to develop as we pleased.
It wasn’t lost then what we know so well now.
Selecting the quarter of the state with the most valuable resources
would be key to Alaska’s economic future.
A petroleum geologist by the name of Tom Marshall
was tasked with selecting the land,
and he chose one of the furthest and most ragged pieces of Alaska possible,
a part of the Arctic coast called “Prudhoe Bay.”
His choice became known as “Marshall’s Folly.”
Even the governor of Alaska at the time had to ask, “Doesn’t he know it’s frozen?”
While a typical oil prospect would need to be more than 100 million barrels
to make business sense,
Alaska’s northernmost coast would need to hold an unfathomable amount -
more than 1 billion barrels.
The US Navy had already explored much of the North Slope in the 1920s,
but even with that information,
oil exploration in the 1960s was more like throwing a dart at a map
on the wall than the finely engineered exploration we know today.
BP and Sinclair Oil teamed up to drill the first six wells, and each came up dry.
And so it went for well after well, and for company after company,
until by 1968, most had given up.
Arco and Humble Oil rolled the only remaining oil rig
on the North Slope to Prudhoe Bay to drill their last well.
A young geologist working the well at the time said:
”It was like watching grass grow”
Until one day while testing the well's pressure,
there was a burst of gas so powerful,
it sounded like the roar of a jet engine overhead.
The crew ignited the gas,
and it lit the dark night sky for over eight hours, 50-foot high.
The discovery was eventually confirmed at 9.6 billion barrels of oil.
the largest discovery in North America at the time.
The rest is history.
But what may not be so familiar
is that this wasn’t Alaska’s first role as an energy leader.
Alaska was an early pioneer of electrification,
long before our days in oil and gas.
It wasn't until 1935 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt established
the Rural Electrification Administration or REA to expand access to electricity
across the country and throughout the rural United States.
Until then, electric power was largely
a luxury only dense urban populations could afford.
But as a result, our electric power system is known as one
of the 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements
and has been called the world’s largest machine.
Made up of nearly 7 million miles of power lines,
the electric power system delivers the only commodity in the world
that is produced and consumed at the same time.
But in the 1930s, Alaska wasn’t even yet a state.
After we had been purchased from Russia,
Our population had burgeoned to a whopping 60,000 people.
Our biggest city, Anchorage, was 2,700.
Alaska was, by every definition,
one of the rural areas targeted by the REA for electrification.
But in reality, Alaska was already being electrified and by Alaskans themselves.
In 1893,
barely 10 years after the first commercial power station was opened in the U.S,
in the metropolis of New York City,
Alaska Electric Light and Power was founded,
making our capital city of Juneau
one of the very earliest electrified cities in the U.S.
In the late 1800s, power stations were constructed across the state
to meet the needs of a population that would double over the next two decades.
And by 1908, Alaskans had built over 30 waterpower sites.
Anchorage was still a tent city
when the Alaska Engineering Commission introduced electric power here.
But by 1947, Anchorage Power and Light was operating multiple types of generators,
including a ship to meet the needs of the city.
That’s right, I said a ship.
Sackett’s Harbor was a tanker that broke in half off the coast of Adak in 1946.
The forward half of the ship drifted away with 10 crew on board,
and thankfully, a radio.
(Laughter)
When they were rescued five days later,
they celebrated like true Alaskans by sinking the bow of the ship.
Then they towed the forward half of the ship back to Anchorage,
where it was run aground in Ship Creek,
and it provided power to the city for nearly a decade.
Alaskans have always been as innovative as we are industrious,
but electrifying such an enormous state has come with one major challenge:
For most rural communities,
the available technology is largely limited to diesel generators.
Fuel has to be shipped over long distances,
and the risk of spills increase
each time it’s transferred to further and more remote locations.
More than that, fuel that was once inexpensive has crept up in cost
and with a volatility that makes it hard to operate reliably.
As the greatest contributor to the cost of power,
expensive fuel means that some rural Alaskans
spend up to half their annual income on heat and power.
To reduce their reliance on diesel,
Kotzebue Electric Association began pioneering wind energy,
installing wind turbines above the Arctic Circle in the 90s
and years before the large wind farms you see in the lower 48 today.
This involved installing special freeze-back pilings
that passively keep the permafrost around the turbine foundations frozen,
and strategically moving large cranes
required to erect the turbines across frozen tundra
in temperatures often well below -40 degrees.
Meanwhile in Fairbanks, they were experiencing power issues of their own.
To manage frequent power outages
Golden Valley Electric Association constructed an energy storage system
decades before they became popular around the world.
This system that’s still operating today
can power the city of Fairbanks for nearly 15 minutes on its own,
and it has helped avoid over 4 million customer outages
since being certified by Guinness
as the world’s most powerful battery in 2003.
Since then, energy storage systems have been installed across the state,
making rural Alaska a global leader in what we call “microgrids.”
Microgrids are power systems
capable of operating independently of a larger power system,
and Alaska has over 200 of them, more than anywhere else in the US.
More than just backup power systems, these microgrids have proven
that renewables can operate in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth.
In fact, many of these microgrids operate on 100% renewable energy,
utilizing no fossil fuels at all for periods at a time.
One of the best examples can be found in Kodiak, Alaska,
where they have been operating on nearly 100% renewable energy since 2014,
using a combination of cutting-edge technology.
To understand what this really means,
it helps to check out the 340-foot tall crane in the center of town.
This crane serves one of the nation’s largest fishing ports
and handles just about everything that comes and goes from Kodiak.
Like everything else on the island,
it's powered entirely by renewable energy and is an engineering marvel.
The crane requires a massive amount of power to lift the containers
off the ships, but then it regenerates the same amount of power
as it lowers them back to the ground.
The wind, with its intermittent nature, can’t match the crane’s needs,
nor can the slow hydro ramp up and down
fast enough to meet the crane’s operations.
So Kodiak Electric Association
installed an innovative flywheel energy storage system
to eliminate the need to start a diesel generator to tame the crane’s wild load.
These microgrids are some of the most advanced systems in the world.
While large megacities like Los Angeles
have committed to fast track their way to 100% renewable energy,
small communities in Alaska have quietly been leading the way for decades.
Another of these communities is Shungnak Alaska,
a small village of about 250 people,
tucked into the Cosmos Hills just north of the Arctic Circle.
There, they’ve installed enough solar
and energy storage to turn their diesels off and operate on 100% renewable energy.
When I visited the community last fall,
I had the opportunity to take the Shungnak school’s ninth-grade class
on a tour of their community-owned solar storage facility.
As they learned that the solar would generate electricity from the sun,
they learned it was designed to have a 30-year life
and would one day be theirs as adults.
I told them the battery was sized to power not just their community,
but the neighboring community of Kobuk for two-and-a half-hours on its own,
and combined with the solar,
would enable them to turn their diesels off for days at a time,
while keeping the lights on.
And I told them they were one of the very few communities
in the world that could say that.
The kids immediately began making plans
to power their Friday-night basketball games on solar,
without the roar of the diesel in the background.
They asked if they can install a real-time dashboard in the hall of the school,
so they could always see what it was producing.
They asked if they could incorporate it
into their math and science class to learn more.
As I was leaving, the principal of the school pulled me aside.
He thanked me and he said, “This project is going to save lives.”
The highest rates of suicide are in the darkest months of the year,
January through March.
Now the children will have the solar farm
as a reminder that Spring is around the corner.
The solar will power not just the town,
but our community’s hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow.
This project makes us proud that Shungnak is an example to the world
of a future built on clean energy.
Communities like this have been pioneering
a micro solution to Alaska’s megawatt problem of declining oil revenues.
According to studies by the National Renewable Energy Lab,
Alaska has over 20,000 terawatt hours of annual renewable potential,
more than five times the annual consumption of electricity
by the entire United States.
Put in terms we are more familiar with,
since 1980, Alaska has exported approximately 16 billion barrels of oil,
the rough equivalent of 27,000 terawatt hours of electricity,
less than two years of Alaska’s renewable potential.
The production of Alaska’s vast renewable resources over the next 40 years
would be an astounding 480 billion barrels of oil.
Alaska’s moment is now.
Our decades of experience as an energy state position us
to be a leader, not a victim, of the global energy transition.
Our state's vast renewable resources are our next Prudhoe Bay.
Like the ninth-grade class in Shungnak,
let’s build Alaska’s future on clean energy.
(Applause)