Rural Energy Conference Project

Alaska remains, even at the beginning of the 21st century, a place with many widely scattered, small, remote communities, well beyond the end of both the road system and the power grid. These communities have the highest energy costs of any place in the United States, despite the best efforts of the utilities that service them. This is due to the widespread dependence on diesel electric generators, which require small capital investments, but recent increases in crude oil prices have resulted in dramatic increases in the cost of power. In the enabling legislation for the Arctic Energy Office in 2001, specific inclusion was made for the study of ways of reducing the cost of electrical power in these remote communities. As part of this mandate, the University of Alaska has, in conjunction with the US Department of Energy, the Denali Commission and the Alaska Energy Authority, organized a series of rural energy conferences, held approximately every 18 months. The goal of these meeting was to bring together rural utility operators, rural community leaders, government agency representatives, equipment suppliers, and researchers from universities and national laboratories to discuss the current state of the art in rural power generation, to discuss current projects, including successes as well as near successes. Many of the conference presenters were from industry and not accustomed to writing technical papers, so the typical method of organizing a conference by requesting abstracts and publishing proceedings was not considered viable. Instead, the organizing committee solicited presentations from appropriate individuals, and requested that (if they were comfortable with computers) prepare Power point presentations that were collected and posted on the web. This has become a repository of many presentations, and may be the best single source of information about current projects in the state of Alaska