Alaska co-op makes case for microgrids at Senate committee hearing

Representatives from two Alaska electric cooperatives recently testified about the importance of microgrid research and development to isolated communities in Alaska during a U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee field hearing in Cordova, Alaska.

Clay Koplin, one of the witnesses, is the CEO of Cordova Electric Cooperative (CEC) and the elected mayor of Cordova. The other witness, Meera Kohler, is the CEO of Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC).

Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, which is based in Anchorage, serves 33,000 people in 58 small Alaskan communities with 50 microgrids that are together able to provide six times the average load needed. The average investment per metered connection is $17,000. CEC serves 2,300 residents near the Gulf of Alaska.

“Practical and affordable solutions developed by the survival-driven players can complement the world-class universities, corporations, and national laboratories which work from an entirely different resource base and paradigm,” Koplin said.

The co-ops rely heavily on diesel shipped from great distances to the communities’ isolation. In order to combat this, they are seeking to diversify their generation, increased efficiency and use technology to reduce costs. Kohler testified that AVEC installs wind turbines that generate more energy than the connected electrical load and diverts excess energy to passive loads, like water boilers in waste treatment plants, in order to reduce the amount of diesel fuel needed in those facilities.

“NREL concluded that Cordova can serve as a best-practices model and is a compelling site for a national laboratory outpost,” Koplin said. “This would marry the high technology of universities, national labs, and industry to field applications that refine and improve the technologies as they are integrated into the microgrid.”