**Title**: Energy in the North - Vanessa Raymond
**Date**: February 18, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Vanessa Raymond

00;00;00;13 - 00;00;09;24 [Vanessa Raymond] If you want to make a plan to install a new system in a remote community today, you might want some more recent data.

00;00;09;24 - 00;01;04;25 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak to Vanessa Raymond, ACEP's deputy director for Strategic initiatives, about the newly revamped Alaska Energy Data Gateway. When communities are planning energy system upgrades in Alaska, they need access to reliable and up to date energy and socioeconomic information. Especially on energy use, population and costs. A lot of that information is collected by different agencies, but it hasn't always been readily accessible. In 2013, the first Alaska Energy Data Gateway was developed by the Alaska Center for Energy and Power and UAA’s Institute of Social and Economic Research. And just recently, a whole new, totally revamped platform was launched, giving a totally new and easy to understand user experience. I started the conversation with Vanessa by asking, what is the Alaska Energy Data Gateway?

00;01;04;25 - 00;01;53;058 [Vanessa Raymond] The Alaska Energy Data Gateway is really bringing statewide data together. Now, some of that data lives in federal databases. Some of it lives with the utility and everything in between. And so shaping energy decisions, making big investments, thinking about economic development, those require good data to make good decisions. So the gateway is pulling all that information together. It's checking it and putting it in one place so that communities and policymakers can look at the same picture and really trust what they're seeing. Now, this isn't magic. It takes a team. It takes subject matter experts. There's a lot of work involved, which is why UAA through ISER and UAF through ACEP are at the heart of this.

00;01;53;05 - 00;02;00;12 [Amanda Byrd] And, the new platform features interactive elements that create a pretty user friendly experience.

00;02;00;12 - 00;02;30;13 [Vanessa Raymond] Well, you know, some people love to dig through spreadsheets and do their own analysis, and we love them, and they can continue to do that. But most people want to see a chart or a graph, something they can make 1 or 2 changes to. The new platform does that. So we understand that not everyone has all the time in their day to look at energy data. The goal is to present you with the information you need to draw the insights and move on with your planning.

00;02;30;13 - 00;02;46;13 [Amanda Byrd] Some of those charts are really cool that you can get a pie chart, or you could get the data in a table. You can break it down, you can look at it monthly. You can kind of look at timelines. It's really cool. It's not just a static website.

00;02;46;00 - 00;03;03;20 [Vanessa Raymond] Yeah. We don't know what every user wants to do with that data. And so, we wanted to make it flexible but trustworthy. That's why we made all the charts and graphs interactive. You can screenshot them. You can download them. You can download the original data if you need to go that far. But we understand most people won’t.

00;03;03;20 - 00;03;21;07 [Amanda Byrd] Like you said earlier, it takes a team to collect, correct, validate and synthesize millions of rows of data coming in from the all the different sources. That team is not, as you said, magic. Those are people that actually working hard on this.

00;03;21;07 - 00;04;34;09 [Vanessa Raymond] Well, the state made a big investment in 2025, in revitalizing the Alaska Energy Data Gateway because they realized that something like this is needed. This is not the first time it's been revamped. It's the third time. It requires subject matter experts, people who know how to manage this type of complex data, people who can build interactive, user friendly tools. And frankly, it's hard to keep those types of expertise in this state. And so we're really grateful that we have a team like that right now at ACEP. We also have a team like that at ISER. We're collaborating and bringing in our network, so that we can validate all the information that's going into the site. Now, a project like this does require sustained funding. It's not a one and done because time marches on. We have data from 2021. Well, it's 2026. If you want to make a plan to install a new system in a remote community today, you might want some more recent data. And it doesn't happen magically, as we said. But people forget that right? It takes real experts.

00;04;34;09 - 00;04;58;10 [Amanda Byrd] Visit the Alaska Energy Data Gateway at AKEnergyGateway.alaska.edu and look for your community or a community that interests you. Vanessa Raymond is the Alaska Center for Energy and Power's deputy director for strategic initiatives. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.