myumyumyu

Happy belated solstice! Solstice is a big deal here, where getting maximal sunlight is pretty awesome after a long and dark winter. There will be some street festivals in honor of solstice this weekend downtown that I'm going to check out.

Apart from what I'm learning from my projects at work, I've been absorbing a lot of information about Alaska and energy just from being here. I spend a large part of my day researching terms that I hear in meetings or read in articles--there are so many vocabulary words and names used here that sound entirely unfamiliar to me. When we're sitting around at home, we often end up discussing things like the native corporations or the wind farm project on Fire Island. I thought I'd share some of the really cool things that I've stumbled upon that are semi-related to what I'm doing at work.

First, some background. Alaska has about 700,000 people, and more than half of them live in Anchorage, the city where I am this summer. If you think about that for a bit, you'll soon realize that the rest of Alaska is pretty barren. A glance at Wikipedia will tell you that the population density in the state is 1.26 per square mile (for perspective, think about 16 people living in all of Manhattan). Yet, there are many small towns and villages all around Alaska, with just a few families in each. Whittier, a fishing town about an hour south of Anchorage, for example, has a population of 177. I can't even imagine what that's like.

Anyway, a result of the landscape of Alaska combined with the thinly spread population is that many communities are off-the-grid. There are neither roads nor sources of power for many Alaskans. It's crazy to think about, since Alaska has so much oil, gas, coal, and more, and nearly all of the state's revenues are from oil royalties. Despite all of this, Alaskans pay some of the highest rates for energy, and many can't access it. As a result of all of this, however, Alaskans are very aware of energy issues and are working on and have found some amazing solutions already.

Thorsten Chlupp, a man in Fairbanks, AK, built two incredible homes. Each is known as a "passive house," originally Passivhaus in German. These homes use very little fuel and even generate an excess of energy from renewable sources. They're especially amazing because you have to realize that Fairbanks is a place where the average temperature is barely above 0 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter with only a handful of hours of sunlight each day. They're also just beautiful homes, architecturally. Chlupp lives in one himself, and Karl Kassel, who hired Chlupp to build an energy efficient home in the remote area where he wanted to live, lives in the other.

Speaking of alternative homes, Oisin sent me this video the other day at work of this gorgeous solar-powered yurt. I had no idea what a yurt was, so I thought that this was really cool.