Bringing alternative energy to life on the remote island of St. Paul, Alaska, reads a lot like theatrics. There are complex characters against a dramatic backdrop with just a twist of irony. But putting these together proved undaunting to UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power. And despite the final twist in the story, the center was able to assist a community in coming one step closer to a renewable source of energy.

Even as the price of fuel begins to fall from the historic highs of last summer, energy costs in rural Alaska are still at crisis levels. In general, rural Alaska residents pay 11 times the national average for things like gasoline, home heating fuel and electricity. Prices like these make it difficult for residents to remain in the same areas that provide important cultural connections for their families.

The setting: St. Paul Island. Located in the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles off Alaska’s west coast, the island is populated by about 450 residents, many of whom are descendants of the Aleut people, a population enslaved and relocated to the island by the Russian American Company during the height of the fur trade in the early 19th century. Today, St. Paul’s economy relies mostly on the fishing industry—with two commercial canneries located on the island and many residents who own or work on commercial fishing vessels. Tourism is also a major player in St. Paul as the island is a birding hotspot, with 248 species of birds spotted on the island over the years.

Enter Tanadgusix Corporation, an Alaska Native village corporation created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and responsible for the economic well-being of the people of the village of St. Paul. Like many Alaska Native corporations, Tanadgusix, or TDX as locals refer to it, is involved in many investments through subsidiary companies to provide revenue for the corporation and its shareholders.

TDX designed and built a hybrid wind-diesel power plant in 1999, taking advantage of the extreme winds that push through the Pribilofs to provide power for the corporation’s facilities on the island. TDX has historically been involved in alternative energy development, and wind-generated power has been the corporation’s most profitable venture so far.

In 2006, TDX installed two additional wind turbines on the island, resulting in an excess of electricity from the plant. The corporation currently uses some of this excess electricity to heat a 6000 gallon water tank that circulates water through TDX buildings to provide heat. But the forward-thinking corporation leaders wanted to do more.

The problem: TDX could not sell energy on the island and compete with the already existing diesel-fueled electric company owned by the city of St. Paul.

“TDX was left with the enviable problem of what to do with low-cost excess electricity,” says TDX’s Connie Fredenberg. So the company turned its interest to hydrogen, and naturally to the expertise of UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power.

“TDX Foundation approached ACEP because both Dennis Witmer and Gwen Holdmann have experience with electrolyzers for producing hydrogen,” said Fredenberg. “ACEP had graduate students this past summer who were very interested in exploring solutions to the energy crisis faced by Alaska’s remote locations. It was a perfect match.”

TDX wanted to find out how wind energy could be converted into hydrogen energy and used to fuel a fleet of shuttle buses that run throughout the year on the island. During the summer, the buses are used to shuttle bird-loving tourists to various locations on the island, while in the winter the same buses provide transportation to resident senior citizens.

The future of power

In June 2003, President George W. Bush signed an agreement with the European Union to accelerate the development of hydrogen energy technology. Since, millions of dollars have been invested in hydrogen energy research, both by the U.S. government and by other countries and industry. Iceland, Germany, Canada and others have begun road-testing mass transit vehicles that run on hydrogen energy, while the U.S. Department of Energy began FreedomCAR, an initiative to partner industry and government and encourage the cutting-edge research needed to create vehicles that are efficient, safe, emissions-free and sustainable.

It takes energy to create hydrogen, which is why hydrogen should properly be considered an energy carrier, rather than an energy source.

The benefits of hydrogen energy are clear. Vehicles that run on hydrogen produce only water as emissions, decreasing carbon output by as much as 90% (once energy used to produce hydrogen is taken into consideration). Thus, hydrogen vehicles create nearly no air pollution and are extremely quiet.

The U.S. government argues that turning to hydrogen for fuel would increase national security. The Bush administration turned to hydrogen, in part, in its explanation for not signing the Kyoto Protocol. If the government could invest in creating a hydrogen-based economy, not only would the U.S. resolve its dependence on foreign oil, but the need for reducing carbon emissions would be eliminated.

But hydrogen poses its own set of problems. First, it takes energy to create hydrogen, which is why hydrogen should properly be considered an energy carrier, rather than an energy source. Much of the current hydrogen used today is produced from natural gas through a process that emits, albeit less carbon than traditional fossils fuels, carbon nonetheless. Some  researchers have separated methods of hydrogen production into “black” and “green,” to denote those using sustainable methods and those relying on use of traditional fossil fuels. In addition, the production of hydrogen is not particularly efficient.

“One kilogram of hydrogen is equal to about one gallon worth of gas,” explains ACEP research director Dennis Witmer. “But using the electrolyzer is only about 60% efficient. You have to make hydrogen, compress it and store it. All that takes energy and you get less energy out than what you put in.”

But these inefficiencies have not deterred some researchers from pursuing what they see as an abundant, sustainable fuel source. One type of so-called green hydrogen is created from water using an electrolyzer to separate the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. It is just this type of hydrogen production that connected ACEP and St. Paul.

The study

Now enter Victoria Chang, an energetic physics graduate student from Stanford. After feeling somewhat isolated in her abstract research of quantum optics, Chang had begun reading popular literature on green manufacturing processes and architecture and began thinking about how she could change her degree focus to become more involved in this emerging field of study. Then something happened to bring it all together.

“I took a course called Renewable Energy Sources and Greener Energy Processes,” said Chang. “Halfway through the term the professor announced an opportunity to do an internship at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power to work on rural energy solutions. I jumped on it right away.”

Chang flew to Fairbanks for the summer and found herself immersed in the feasibility study for St. Paul at UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power.

Under the direction of Witmer, Chang explored the mechanics of producing hydrogen in such a remote area. She quickly discovered that not only do things like groceries and diesel fuel cost more in rural Alaska, so too do the pieces and parts required for the technology to produce hydrogen. But Chang kept her outlook upbeat.

“Even though there were tons of problems that were very specific to St. Paul Island that wouldn’t exist elsewhere, these clued me in to the type of problem that I might expect to encounter in any small community,” said Chang. “For instance, any small community will struggle to deal with high capital costs, as well as the training required to operate and maintain unfamiliar machinery and infrastructure.”

Chang and Witmer’s research found that producing hydrogen on the island, even with the benefit of free, excess wind power, is really not economically feasible. There are several reasons for this. The initial cost of obtaining, shipping and installing the specialized equipment to produce the hydrogen would have been extremely high. Currently, very few manufacturers produce the equipment needed to produce and store hydrogen from water, and the parts required to make the equipment function are very expensive. As an example, the electrolyzer alone would cost over a million dollars. Additionally, despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Energy has determined that hydrogen-powered vehicles are in many cases safer than gasoline-powered vehicles, there is a reluctance by insurance companies to insure them. Thus, hydrogen-powered vehicles must be leased from a manufacturer that is willing to self-insure them, and this comes at an extremely high premium.

The bottom line—even assuming an $8 per gallon cost for diesel fuel, the hydrogen vehicles would be about 15 times more expensive to operate than traditional diesel vehicles. Chang also explored the use of hybrid, compressed air and electric vehicles and found similar cost effectiveness issues.

“If they had gone ahead with the wind-to-vehicle project they would have spent a lot of money,” said Chang. “In the case of hydrogen—almost $2 million just in capital costs. That’s for a system that either wouldn’t have worked at all or would have been a huge burden on them. So I like to think that we saved them some time, money and trouble.”

The key is not to think about how we can find alternatives to continue to live the same way, but rather to examine the resources that are available to us and think about how we can use those to enrich, enliven and support the community.

Looking forward

Despite the outcome of the study being, perhaps, not what TDX or Chang had hoped for, both are enthusiastically optimistic about continuing to find a solution for the island.

“We’re undaunted,” said Fredenberg. “TDX will continue to explore other markets and uses for hydrogen on St. Paul to make the economics more favorable. Using liquid ammonia to displace or replace diesel for electric generation is a possibility. Fish processors on St. Paul import ammonia for their freezers.”

Chang concurs. “The key is not to think about how we can find alternatives to continue to live the same way,” she said, “but rather to examine the resources that are available to us and think about how we can use those to enrich, enliven and support the community.”

In fact, looking back on her visit to St. Paul, the idea of one local woman continues to resonate with Chang. Why not use the wind energy to run a greenhouse on the island? Such a resource could provide fresh produce year-round to a community that currently must rely on onions and potatoes during much of the year. 

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