Rising Fuel Costs and the Arctic

By BJ

While the Arctic may be the place most affected by climate change, at least so far, it is also one of the areas most dependent on fossil fuels for its survival. Not only are they necessary for transportation in and out of the communities, but fuel oil is most commonly used for heating houses, and significantly, diesel generators are the major source of power generation. As summer approaches and the bulk fuel supplies are being lined up, the very high cost of all that fuel is causing more than a few people great concern, and the region's governments considerable budgetary headaches.

Village electric utilities in rural Alaska, panicked over the sky-high cost of fuel arriving on the summer's first barges, are appealing to the state for help.

The fuel bill for the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, which serves 53 small villages in the west of the state, is leaping from $14 million last year to $26 million. That cost will be reflected in electricity rate increases that some villagers cannot afford, said Meera Kohler, the co-op's president.

In the village of Eek, for example, residents are looking at electric bills increasing another one-third to one-half. Eek, near the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, has an average household income of only $17,500, according to the federal census. Many families already have a hard time paying electric bills that run to $300 a month, said city clerk Fritz Petluska.

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And that was the price of electricity when they were burning last winter's diesel. Now that the season's first fuel barge has unloaded, the price of diesel just jumped $3 to $7.50 a gallon, Sweetsir said.

The article discusses several new subsidy proposals being bandied about in addition to the current ones already in place. Alaska currently has the good fortune of being an oil producer that can pour that income into such subsidies. In any case, the debate is one I recognize from the other side of continent.

The Nunavut government is preparing for a much higher fuel bill this year, just as the annual fuel resupply is set to begin this summer.

Finance officials estimate the government will spend $70 million to $85 million more on fuel this year than last, Finance Minister Louis Tapardjuk told MLAs in the legislative assembly Friday.

That increase alone is nearly as much as the government's entire capital budget for this year.

The good news about all of this is that it is finally bringing people around to the idea of using the rather abundant winds to generate power locally and more economically, not to mention the whole environmentally-friendly part.

It's long been the Canadian Arctic's dirty little secret: Most of its remote communities are powered solely by diesel.

But with soaring oil prices and growing concerns about climate change, the Northwest Territories is considering a renewable energy solution that could one day see wind farms sprouting in the Far North.

"Our Arctic coast villages are on the front lines of climate change and seeing the effects on a daily basis," explained Wade Carpenter, the territorial government's alternative-energy specialist. "Wind can help us reduce our dependency on diesel and it fits in well with the Inuvialuit principles of using the land."

There is of course, still some resistance to the idea thanks to the uneven history of such projects.

However, the idea of wind energy has blown through the Canadian Arctic before, with disastrous results.

Yukon is the only territory left with a handful of active wind turbines. Those that were set up as pilot projects by NWT, prior to the creation of Nunavut, in the 1980s and 1990s have all either fallen down, broken down or have been dismantled.

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"Doing anything in the Arctic is more expensive and challenging," he said, adding that trained staff is hard to find and equipment wears out a lot quicker because of the cold and harsh climate.

"The Arctic is incredibly hard on machines. If something has a design life of 20 years, in the Arctic that would be two or three," he explained.

He said when those costs and challenges, such as maintenance and atmospheric issues, began to pile up, the industry and federal government lost interest in the North and concentrated its efforts in provinces such as Alberta and Ontario.

The technology for wind generation has improved significantly since the last attempt, and with ever rising oil prices, the cost-benefit relationship is swinging towards alternatives at an ever-increasing rate. (Though as a note, if trained staff is hard to find to maintain windmills, why would anyone seriously consider nuclear reactors? I do think nuclear power plants will be a necessity in the near future, but they should be limited to places where they can be assured of qualified people to run them.)

It is not just the extreme north that is pushing this idea, but the extreme south as well, with New Zealand and Belgium looking to at least partially power their stations in Antarctica using wind, (the Belgians completely so).

Both seem to be following in the footsteps of the Australians, who started putting wind turbines up at their Mawson station in 2001/02. They have a very neat page where you can see real-time data on their power system. The station is also looking at further means of reducing fuel use, including using excess wind power to generate hydrogen to use for transportation and power generation when the wind itself isn't enough.

Of course, tiny, isolated outposts in Antarctica are a far cry from most places, but they are excellent test beds, as are small, isolated communities in the Arctic. It is far easier to transform the infrastructure of a single community than of an entire inter-connected continent. If we are ever to move to a hydrogen economy, such places make for perfect laboratories. (Though whether or not hydrogen or more purely electric technology wins out in the end, or more likely winds up sharing the stage, is actually far less relevant than where the energy itself is coming from.)

On a larger scale, Iceland is working to prove they can run their nation without fossil fuels, mainly since they don't have any and don't like the idea of being dependent on others for their energy needs. Their example of using locally available means for meeting their energy needs is one we should all be paying very close attention to, since it is likely that we will be forced down that path ourselves in the very near future.