Photo Courtesy Alaska Native Renewable Industries
In 2017, Edwin Bifelt, an Alaskan Athabascan from Huslia, founded Alaska Native Renewable Industries (ANRI). In September of that year, Bifelt began to wonder about getting into the solar industry. By the next month, he had completed online Solar Energy International (SEI) training courses and launched the company before the end of the year. “Through the certificate programs, I was able to progress from a novice level to close to a professional level in under a year,” he told SEI. Today, the company focuses on bringing solar power to rural areas by installing ground-mounted, residential, and commercial solar projects, serving a wide array of customers. The general contractor also offers community-wide LED retrofits.
“I very much believe that increasing sustainability and self-sufficiency for rural villages is critical. A big part of achieving this is lowering the costs of electricity in the 200+ micro grid utilities that are scattered throughout the 49th state,” Bifelt told CleanTechnica. In 2020, he noted to Alaska Public Media, “Even with Power Cost Equalization, people see rates anywhere from 20 cents up to 40 to 50 cents a kilowatt-hour, which is four or five times the national average.”
Photo Courtesy Alaska Native Renewable Industries
In the autumn of 2018, ANRI completed the first phase of a 120-kilowatt (kW), ground-mount solar project for the Native Village of Hughes, located on the Koyukuk River, for which the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy awarded the Hughes Village Council a grant of over $623,000. David Pelunis-Messier, then director of the infrastructure division for the Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), brought Bifelt on as the project manager. “I have a lot of family in Hughes—my mom is originally from there,” Bifelt explained his personal connection to the project. “It’s a utility-scale project, so hopefully it eventually reduces the utility’s operating costs through reduced fuel costs, and they can pass that on to the residents of Hughes. That’s the overall goal.”
Before the solar project, the community was buying 40,000 gallons of diesel per year and flying it in on planes dating back to the Korean War, leaving community members who were completely reliant on diesel paying $0.70/kWh. “High costs are the primary driver for Hughes. Currently, Hughes is a fly-in-only community, which means they’re not just barging in fuel, they’re flying it in,” Pelunis-Messier said. “Hughes’ leadership is very forward-thinking, and they realized every dollar they spent on oil was a dollar that was leaving the community.”
Energy reliability and security were also key, according to Pelunis-Messier: “If the lights go out, you don’t have your clinic, you don’t have your airport, you don’t have your water plant, you can’t make water. So making sure we’ve got a reliable system is most important.” Therefore, they included a battery system with what was then Alaska’s largest solar PV installation.
The solar-diesel microgrid, which enables the village to be fully solar-powered in the summer, reduces its fossil fuel use by 30% and saves between $54,000 to $65,000 each year, totalling more than $1 million in savings over the project’s 20-year expected life. It also helps the village meet its renewable energy goal of reaching 50% by 2025, relative to 2010 levels.
In 2020, meanwhile, ANRI built the largest solar farm in rural Alaska and the second-largest solar installation in the state: a 576 kW ground-mounted solar project in Kotzebue with more than 1,400 bifacial solar panels. The Kotzebue Electric Association was using more than 1.2 million gallons of diesel per year, with annual costs ranging from $2.4 million to $5 million depending on fluctuations. The association had been using supplemental wind power for many years. However, the first smaller fleet it had installed was approaching the end of its useful life, and it decided to hire ANRI to help it expand into solar. Bolstered by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Northwest Arctic Bureau and support from the NANA Regional Corporation, the project decommissioned and replaced eight old wind turbines with SolarEdge inverters of equivalent power, which were expected to maximize energy yield and system uptime while minimizing operational and maintenance costs. “Once we received that money, or grant, we hit the ground running,” Martin Shroyer, a general manager for the Kotzebue Electric Association, told KTOO.
The system generates more than 700,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, saving more than 55,000 gallons of diesel fuel and allowing the association to operate fewer diesel generators, resulting in annual cost savings of over $100,000. The energy produced every year is enough to power 145 local homes and is equivalent to avoiding the burning of 1,244,162 pounds of coal. With the addition of the solar project, renewables account for up to 30% of Kotzebue’s power portfolio. Matt Bergen, an engineer for the Kotzebue Electric Association, said, “We are enthusiastic about solar because it generates power all the way through midnight during the 24-hour daylight summer months. Plus, it costs less and requires far less maintenance than wind turbines, making it much more appealing to Alaskan utilities.”
As Bifelt said to CleanTechnica, “There is such a huge need to lower costs in tens of thousands of homes and buildings throughout Alaska (in addition to a growing need for rural residential construction), so we are excited to eventually offer services in any community in Alaska and beyond.” Such projects will not only lower utility costs for communities but also shield them from potential future hikes and other volatility.
Photo Courtesy Alaska Native Renewable Industries
The following year, the Northwest Arctic Borough hired ANRI to build similar projects for the villages of Shungnak and Kobuk, which share a power line, where a large majority of residents are Iñupiaq, and which “are some of our highest cost villages in the region,” according to Ingemar Mathiasson, the borough energy coordinator. Using grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the local village improvement fund, the array’s 552 solar panels aimed “to maximize the amount of diesel fuel offset by aiming to try to turn off diesel generators with full solar production in May, June, and July,” Mathiasson told Tribal Business News, saving 15,000 gallons of fuel and $75,000 in associated costs.
Once the project was completed, all 12 communities in the Northwest Arctic Borough had some form of clean energy installation, and Mayor Lucy Nelson said it would help the borough meet its target of generating half of its energy from clean resources by mid-century. “The most important benefit is that solar energy reduces electricity bills, has low maintenance costs, (and) reduces reliance on diesel, which is a high cost and produces harmful emissions that affect the quality of air, water, and soil,” she described to Tribal Business News.
Photo Courtesy Alaska Native Renewable Industries
Each of these projects has spurred local economic development and brought more reliable energy to rural areas. “In all the projects I’ve worked on, I’ve used locally hired labor from within the community, so I think we definitely have some good, hard-working, and competent folks in each of our communities,” Bifelt described to CleanTechnica. The skilled workers are there, he said to KTOO, “Growing up in the village, or rural Alaska, I knew that there was always a lot of talent in the community. A lot of skilled tradespeople.” He explained the importance of hiring local people to Alaska Public Media: “Just to provide some temporary jobs, provide some new skills for people within the community relating to renewable energy, and giving them education and experience with solar.”
Notably, all of the workers on the Hughes and Kotzebue solar projects were from the local area, as Pelunis-Messier reacted, “That was a big win … because a major goal of any project is always maximizing the number of local guys on the ground.” Bifelt added to SolarEdge, “By leading the way in clean living and solar jobs for Kotzebue residents, I am hopeful that other communities across the state will soon follow–we look forward to helping them become more energy independent in the years to come.”
Photo Courtesy Alaska Native Renewable Industries
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