Federally funded research project to rely on Galena's 'traditional, local knowledge' for community-scale system
University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) researchers will partner with Galena residents on a Yukon River hydroelectric project intended to demonstrate if the technology can provide power to the community.
A $9.5 million federal grant will enable UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power, or ACEP, and a Galena-based nonprofit to develop a hydropower system based on a prototype ACEP’s been testing for more than a decade.
“This funding opportunity is hopefully a chance to take that first step out of the test site,” says Ben Loeffler, an ACEP research professional and principal investigator for the project.
Loeffler is heading up the United States Department of Energy-funded pilot project to determine if an in-river turbine can generate electricity for the Yukon River community of Galena. The system is based on a stationary underwater turbine powered by river’s current, technology that ACEP has been developing at a Tanana River test site in Nenana.
“The test site will still have a role in answering narrow technical questions, but this Galena project, I think, will start that process of answering the bigger more wholistic questions about how do you develop a functional project in a community,” Loeffler said.
Loeffler emphasized that the U.S. Energy Department grant requires local residents’ involvement in every phase of the five-year project, which is intended to reduce the community’s use of diesel-fired generators.
“The first year, it’s focused on team formation,” Loeffler said. “So getting all the right people at the table and engaged.”
Galena resident and renewable-energy advocate Tim Kalke agrees.
“Community engagement, community planning,” said Kalke, the general manager of Sustainable Energy for Galena Alaska, or SEGA, a nonprofit that promotes community energy projects. He’s partnering with Loeffler on the river turbine project, which he says will greatly benefit from local input.
“There’s a lot of traditional and local knowledge that will establish a fantastic base from which this project can move forward,” Kalke said.
Loeffler says that knowledge will be essential to, for example, identify suitable locations for deploying a turbine in the Yukon River, as well as areas to avoid.
“You can’t do it there, it’s too shallow,” Loeffler said, citing the kinds of advice the ACEP team is looking for. “You can’t do it there, that’s where the barge comes in. You can’t do it there, there’s fish-habitat concerns. You can’t do it there, that’s where Joe hauls his firewood out of the river.”
Kalke says the locals also have a lot of technical knowledge derived from building, operating, and maintaining SEGA’s biomass/wood chip-processing facility that provides fuel for the city’s district heat system. There’s also a 50-kilowatt solar array the Louden Tribe built last year, with help from Tanana Chiefs Conference, and a larger system with battery backup now under development.
“There’s already a foundation of knowledge about this sort of thing,” Kalke said. “So we’re excited about it.”
Loeffler says the first year of the project is focused on community engagement, followed by up to three years of field work testing turbine designs and researching the river and wildlife to identify an ideal site. He says if all goes well, the system will enable Galena to harness some of the mighty Yukon’s power to generate electricity for the community by the end of the decade.
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