Can Hybrid Wind Help Alaska's Rural Poor?

The isolated, impoverished villages of western Alaska are in the sports world spotlight this week. Mushers from across the globe (including, for the first time, a Jamaican) are zooming toward the finish of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, a 1,100-mile feat of endurance billed as the world's "last great race."

The pups run in commemoration of the 1925 journey of cartoon-minted hero Balto, a Siberian husky who stopped a diphtheria epidemic by transporting the antitoxin from Anchorage to Nome. It should take more than the spectacle of cute huskies zipping through snow drifts and subzero conditions, though, to get you to pay attention to tiny race-route communities like Koyuk and Nulato.

For all the massive changes Alaska has undergone in the 85 years since (statehood, a pipeline and Sarah Palin, to name a few), the state's 230 rural villages still lack sufficient access to employment, health care and education.

While Alaska's statewide poverty rate of nine percent is among the lowest in the country, the levels in remote western boroughs like Nome, Wade-Hampton and Bethel are over twice as high. These same areas, by the way, are populated in overwhelming majority by Alaska natives.

Energy costs are a major culprit. You might think a place so famously rich in fossil fuels that it cuts its residents an annual check just for living there would be immune from spiraling electric bills. But most Alaskan oil gets shipped down to West coast refineries, and these days, oil and natural gas sales in Alaska are tied to world commodity prices. Plus, in a state with lots of land but very few roads, transportation costs are steep.

Because the villages are disconnected from any power grid, their troubles are exponentially worse. The average residential electric bill in the U.S. is 11 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to 17 cents in Alaska. Yet in the villages, which are dependent on shipments of diesel and fuel oil, those bills can climb as high as nearly a dollar a kilowatt hour.

"It's very, very difficult for people in these villages to pay their utility bills, to pay their heating, to pay their electricity," said Chris Rose, founder and executive director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project. "Eventually, these communities will not be able to exist if energy prices keep going up."

That crisis is, at least, driving innovation. Alaska is at the forefront of developing wind-diesel hybrid systems, an emerging technology which pairs diesel generators with wind turbines. For rural communities, this means less dependence on diesel's volatile prices, which have jumped dramatically in recent years.

So is wind-diesel the silver bullet? Well, not just yet. For now, advocates can only promise to stabilize electric bills, not dramatically lower them. Experts still want to create higher penetration systems -- in other words, hybrids that take a greater proportion of their energy from wind to diesel. And everyone agrees that finding a way to cut heating bills is the next challenge.

But the potential is huge. About 15 villages currently have hybrid systems in place, thanks to the work of organizations such as the Alaska Wind-Diesel Applications Center. More than 100 possess the strong winds necessary to make them good candidates.

So watch these last legs of the Iditarod. Root for Team Margaritaville. But while celebrating past heroics, remember that this part of the world faces very modern problems.

Photo credit: Alaskan Dude