Breaking Free: Alaska’s Path Forward for Renewable Arctic Energy
A bald eagle looks over St. Paul Harbor in Kodiak, Alaska lined with wind turbines. Kodiak, Alaska runs on 99% renewable energy. Photo: Dennis Schroeder
This is a condensed version of the article ‘A new path in the last frontier state? Transforming energy geogragrahies of agency, sovereignty, and sustainability’, recently published in the anthology The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic: Reconfiguring Identity, Time and Space.
The book sets out a theoretical framework for understanding and analysing sustainability as a political concept, and provides a comprehensive empirical investigation of Arctic sustainability discourses. Presenting a range of case studies from a number of Arctic countries including Greenland, Norway and Canada, the essays in this volume analyse the concept of sustainability and how actors are employing and contesting this concept in specific regions within the Arctic. In doing so, the book demonstrates how sustainability is being given new meanings in the postcolonial Arctic and what the political implications are for postcoloniality, nature, and development more broadly. Beyond those interested in the Arctic, this book will also be of great value to students and scholars of sustainability, sustainable development, identity and environmental politics.
The Arctic Institute Sustainability in the Arctic Series 2018
- Sustainability as a Political Concept in the Arctic (Part I)
- Sustainability as a Political Concept in the Arctic (Part II)
- Sustainability Understandings of Arctic Shipping
- Breaking Free: Alaska’s Path Forward for Renewable Arctic Energy
- Sustainable Arctic Mining? A Comparative Analysis of Greenland and Nunavut Mining Discourses
Breaking Free: Alaska’s Path Forward for Renewable Arctic Energy
Path dependence dictates that previous processes alter the costs and benefits of particular choices, and consequently narrow current decisions.1) Applied to Arctic energy technologies and investments, path dependence theory contends that all actions are governed by history, in that previous choices create self-reinforcement and lock-in regardless of their efficiency. But just as there is path dependency for diesel, there is also path creation for alternative energy sources. Path creation can be understood as actors who attempt to shape an unfolding process in real time, with the omission that no one can fully determine the emergent ecology of socio-material entanglements. Karnøe and Garud2) argue that understanding path creation requires an ontological shift from the economic approach adopted in canonical path dependence theory to a sociological. While lock-in is driven by forces like technological, economic, and political self-reinforcement, the initial conditions that support new path creation are constructed by reflective agents such as entrepreneurs, policymakers, and newly empowered communities. Path dependencies serve to rob actors of agency as they find themselves pulled from one set of conditions to another, a phase shift wherein the parameters of engagement themselves change offer the opportunity to create a new path.
Arguably the most monumental phase shifts come when there is an opening up of agency. Agency here is an emergent attribute. It is a capacity to do certain things and not others based on the specifically socio-material entanglements that ensue. When parameters of engagement change, so too do socio-material entanglements, so that an emergence of new nets of agency is part of unfolding actions around particular issues or events.3) Agency is not uniformly distributed within these nets because an actor’s capacity to formulate new visions for the future and options to get there is still dependent on their specific, and at times previous, socio-material entanglements. Still, this shift in agency and entanglements, the interactions of actors and artefacts that constitute action nets within a new parameter for engagement, holds the immense potential to create a new path.4)
Agency also implicates temporal elements in path creation,5) and manifest in actors sensing appropriate moment strike to realise options value.6) This analysis centres on a moment in the recent history of the United States and the State of Alaska – 2009 to 2016. This time frame brought two events together – the creation of the Alaska Renewable Energy Fund and the Obama Administration’s suite of Alaska-specific initiatives for renewable energy – that changed the parameters of engagement for remote Native villages, which in turn created new nets of agency, and ultimately the creation of a new path. Public support is necessary to break the carbon lock-in,7) which both President Obama had in his 2008 and 2012 elections, and the State of Alaska had in its creation of the Renewable Energy Fund. And while exogenous shocks (like the 2009 recession and the campaign for change) may lay the foundation for aggressive public support for clean energy by changing the cost-benefit ratio of new energy policies, Native Alaskan remote communities used the temporal agency created in this period to cultivate serendipity,8) as epitomised in Pasteur’s dictum that “fortune favors the prepared mind”. In doing so, they mobilized the path created for them at the state and national scale towards energy sovereignty. As a recent study of Fort Yukon, a remote Alaska Native village in the Interior of the state, indicates, “remote, rural Indigenous communities are not solely motivated by government policies that encourage decreased dependence on a transition away from nonrenewable energies. Rather, rural Indigenous communities implement alternative energy projects like this as a course of action towards their sustainable future development”.9)
The reading strategy set forth by this volume’s editors can be used to understand the path creation for renewable energy penetration into remote Alaskan village electrical grids. We can view the opening up of agency during the 2008 – 2015-time period as the foundation upon which localized energy are made sustainable in relation to Native agency by the federal (U.S) and state (Alaska) governments. The sections to follow attempt to evaluate ‘what should be made sustainable in relation to what by whom’ at three different scales of actors: by the State of Alaska; by the Obama Administration; and by Native communities in Alaska.
State-Level Policy: Three Bills, Two Legislatures, One Alaska
This first section explores how Alaskan remote village energy systems were made sustainable in relation to economic stability by the State Government of Alaska. That shift of parameters for remote energy systems in Alaska can be narrowed down to three key bills from 2008 – 2010. House Bill 152 in 2008, which created the Renewable Energy Grant Fund; House Bill 306 in 2009, which introduced a roadmap for Alaska’s sustainable energy future; and Senate Bill 220 in 2010, which introduced a plan of action to achieve the goals set forth in HB 306. All three bills were instrumental in stimulating and coordinating government action on renewable energy. HB306 established an energy policy to guide the legislature, administration, utilities, conservation groups and Alaskans toward the goal of providing more affordable, abundant and reliable energy. The bill set a goal for Alaska to generate 50% of its electricity through renewable resources by 2025, primarily through hydroelectric projects with contributions from wind, solar, geothermal tidal, hydrokinetic and biomass energy. But it was HB 152, the Renewable Energy Fund, that positioned Alaska as a national leader in funding for renewable energy. The Alaska Renewable Energy Fund (REF) provides benefits to Alaskans by assisting communities across the state to reduce and stabilize the cost of energy. The program is designed to produce cost-effective renewable energy for heat and power to benefit Alaskans statewide. The program also creates jobs, uses local energy resources, and keeps money in local economies. Established in 2008, the REF has appropriated $259 million for 287 qualifying projects, which has been matched with more than $152 million from other sources. The REF was extended 10 years in 2012, until 2023. The REF is managed by the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) and provides public funding for the development of qualifying and competitively selected renewable energy projects in Alaska. The Alaska Energy Authority estimates that renewable energy projects constructed with funding from the REF displaced 30 million in 2016.
The importance of HB 152 lies not only in its catalyst to break financial and technical lock-in of diesel systems in remote communities; the Bill shifted the parameters for engagement by broadening the scope of which actors enjoyed agency in energy decisions, changed the interactions between actors, and in turn created the potential for a path the villages then took. The Bill itself was conceived and advocated for by a diverse group of stakeholders in Alaska led by the Renewable Energy Alaska Project rather than the State Legislature. REAP’s mission is to increase the development of renewable energy and promote energy efficiency in Alaska through collaboration, education, training, and advocacy. It currently includes more than 710 organizational and contributing members representing small and large Alaska electric utilities, environmental groups, consumer groups, businesses, Alaska Native organizations, and municipal, state and federal entities. Founded in 2004, REAP can be understood as a consensus building organisation,10) and importantly, these deliberations included the Alaska Federation of Natives. In a 2012 message, then AFN President Julie Kitka noted that, “AFN is very concerned about the high costs of energy to all Alaskans, especially those in rural Alaska. We all know that “energy is the oxygen of the economy,” so it is no surprise with our high cost of energy, that we have underdeveloped local economies. In order to address our energy needs, AFN felt it was important to develop new and healthy forms of collaboration that can cross boundaries, including national, public-private, cross industry, business–nonprofit, and tribal entities.” Those entanglements from this net of agency made the Renewable Energy Fund possible, but they were not the only emerging constellations of actors to come together during this timeframe. A similar parameter shift was occurring at the national level, the Obama Administration’s push for renewable energy and initiatives during the US Arctic Council Chairmanship (2015 – 2017).
National-Level Policy: The Obama Administration and America as an Arctic Nation
Moving up a level, the second portion of this brief survey into the transition of Arctic energy landscapes focuses on how Alaskan remote village energy systems were made sustainable in relation to climate change by the U.S. federal government of 2009-2016. President Obama took office during the most severe recession the United States had witnessed in modern history. Within the first month of his tenure in the White House, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, on February 17, 2009. The ARRA was a wide-ranging effort to jumpstart the weakened economy through investment in infrastructure, energy, education, and tax cuts. The ARRA included a large number of funding opportunities and tax incentives to support investment in clean energy at the local level. These incentives were “designed to strengthen the economy and to promote clean and renewable energy,” and as such, the White House boasted that “the Recovery Act made the largest single investment in clean energy in history, driving the deployment of clean energy, promoting energy efficiency, and supporting manufacturing”.11) The focus of this section is a particular moment six years after the passage of ARRA in President Obama’s second term where the Arctic moved from the periphery closer to the center of American climate and energy policymaking. Still, it is important to begin with the early days of the Obama Administration, showing its early commitment to path creation at the federal level for renewable energy.
The Obama Administration made the development of smart, renewable micro-grid technology and implementation a priority of the US Arctic Council Chairmanship (2015 – 2017). As part of President Obama’s journey to Alaska in 2015, he visited the Arctic town of Kotzebue to talk about the promise of renewables in Alaska. “We are the number-one producer of oil and gas. But we’re transitioning away from energy that creates the carbon that’s warming the planet and threatening our health and our environment, and we’re going all in on clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar. And Alaska has the natural resources to be a global leader in this effort,” the president said.12) While there, President Obama convened a meeting with Alaskan Governor Walker, the Denali Commission, the Alaska Energy Authority, and the Renewable Energy Alaska Project to launch the Clean Energy Solutions for Remote Communities (CESRC). The goal of CESRC is to expand investment in climate solutions by identifying technical, financial, and logistical challenges and opportunities in clean energy innovation.13)
President Obama’s 2015 commitments to clean energy in the North were followed by a number of financial and technical assistance programs.14) The most recent of these came in February 2016, when Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz traveled to Alaskan remote village of Oscarville and announced another seven million dollars for the tribal energy program for technical assistance and training for Native Alaskan and American Indian communities.15) Recipients of funds were chosen through a competitive process and received five weeks of intensive training with the Department of Energy, giving villages the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to implement successful strategic energy solutions, and ultimately to create a national network of regional, tribal energy experts who are able to provide technical energy assistance and information resources when an issue with the micro-grid technology arises. And at the regional level under the tenure of the US Arctic Council Chairmanship, the Arctic Remote Energy Networks Academy (ARENA) program seeks to establish professional, knowledge-sharing networks related to microgrids and integration of renewable energy resources for remote Arctic communities.
The prioritization of knowledge, funding, and technology transfer directly to Native communities by the Obama Administration provided a further catalyst for the emergence of agency as an attribute to remote communities in energy debates – in the present and in future sustainable pathways. Like the concept of sustainability, renewable energy transitions are fundamentally political. The Obama Administration strategically overfunded clean energy in Alaska when it was possible that the next Administration would be hostile to sustainable energy policies in order to exploit positive reinforcement to lock in its preferred energy policies for when a time came when his Administration would no longer be in power. By changing the framework for engagement to include positive feedbacks for renewable energy and a widened net of agency, it partly ensured the continuation of its renewable energy legacy beyond the tenure of President Obama.
Local-Level Action: Networks of Agency in Remote Alaska Native Villages
The final scale studied is one that is often overlooked in the path creation of renewable energy – small-scale communities, and specifically here remote Alaska Native villages. Here, Alaskan remote village energy systems were made sustainable in relation to Native agency by Alaskan communities. As Howitt16) observes, “sustainable Indigenous futures in communities and territories that are remote from mainstream markets and other institutional arrangements cannot arise from policy interventions” that rely on programs that promote a trickle down of wealth to local Indigenous communities for sustainable development. But what Howitt and other scholars miss is that the path creation in Alaska remote energy systems is a two-way exchange where both government and community have agency. Remote Native communities were not passive actors in this time frame; rather, they were empowered with agency and a vision for the future to pursue renewable energy sources as a means of further defining energy sovereignty on their terms. If agency is understood to be temporal it requires aspirations for the future, sense-making of the past, and a conceptualization and strategy for what is transpiring in the present. As Stewart et al. note, “the transition to a low carbon economy provides potential opportunities for Indigenous communities living in remote areas”.17) These communities have a high carbon footprint due to “a frequent reliance on diesel-powered electricity generators [and] fossil-fueled vehicles.” Some remote Indigenous communities are responding to this reliance on fossil fuels by pursuing innovative and sustainable approaches to meeting their energy needs, Alaska Natives included.18)
But more than an opportunity for electrical power transitions, making local energy systems sustainable is also a chance for political power transformations. Much like Whyte19) argues in his writings on Indigenous food sovereignty, renewable energy implementation is more than an aspiration of self-sufficiency, lowering costs, and raising public health standards. Making energy systems sustainable is relational to Alaska Native sovereignty – it is a strategy for communities to cultivate and repair social, cultural, and economic relationships that were damaged by colonialism. In a guide to restoring energy and food sovereignty in Native America, a publication of Honor the Earth,20) the call to pursing energy sovereignty through localized, low carbon production is framed as a decision about a future path by breaking the cycle of dependency: “We must decide whether we want to determine our own future or lease it out for royalties. In the end, developing food and energy sovereignty is a means to determine our own destiny.” Here, sustainability embodies the contours set forth by the editors of this volume. Implementing sustainable energy systems in Native communities is a political struggle between competition visions of the future – a vision of dependency, both on oil and on colonial systems of power, versus a vision of independence, wherein communities are able to create their own futures using renewable energy generation. Though the action to make an energy system sustainable transpires at the local level, sustainability, in the form of renewable energy, intervenes in the discursive struggle at the state level in Alaska over the future allocation of energy rights, resources, and Native sovereignty.
The village of Shaktoolik, Alaska is one of a number of remote Native villages to take advantage of the changing parameters for energy sovereignty by using sustainability to transform power, both political and electrical, relations. An Inupiat village of roughly 300 residents, Shaktoolik sits on the shore of the Norton Sound. In partnership with the Alaska Energy Authority, the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative completed the construction of a 200-kW wind farm in the village, with two 100kW Northern Power turbines, secondary heat loads, load controllers, and a new switchgear for the power house. The wind farm became operational in April 2012, with the estimated annual diesel fuel offset totaling 33,000 gallons at a fuel saving cost of $133,375 annually. This has cut utility bills by 50 percent. In March 2015, an update to the wind farm began transferring heat to the community’s water plant, which offsets up to 10,100 gallons of heating fuel every year with an annual saving of $20,034 (Alaska Tribal Health Consortium 2015). The stated objectives of this project “were to displace diesel fuel and provide the community of Shaktoolik with a renewable, reliable, and cost-effective energy source”.21)
This objective was a key aim for the community. But in interviews in Shaktoolik, residents and leaders spoke of the wind farm as a community-driven project. Eugene Asicksik, Shaktoolik’s Mayor, noted in an interview that ““This community put in our own water and sewer, and we’ve got windmills with 200 kilowatts generating capacity…. If the village wants something, it has to come from the village. There needs to be blood, sweat, and tears.” In relation to the other actors involved, Eugene noted, “The government comes in here and has preconceived ideas and plans and their own workers, with no community engagement. But there’s always another way to solve a problem and get other benefits.”
Alaska at a Budget Crossroad: The Staying Power of Renewable Energy Path Creation
There is, of course, one stark external shock not mentioned in this analysis. Globally, oil prices have fallen steeply since the final months of 2014. Alaska’s state budget for 2015 was based on oil at $105 a barrel; the actual price of oil in March 2015 was just under $50 a barrel.22) With a sixty percent decline in price, the state government faced a $3.5 billion shortfall in spending in 2016. Governor Bill Walker has proposed a cut in government spending of between five and eight percent this year, with a total cut of twenty-five percent over the next four years if prices stay low.23) As noted in the 2015 report The Economy of the North (Glomsrød, Duhaime and Aslaksen), “The backbone of the economy is the petroleum industry. However, the giant oil field of Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope is in the decline phase and uncertainty around future oil prices and international climate policies question the sustainability of petroleum income level.” While the report offers other sectors of growth as potential paths forward in Alaska, such as mining, the seafood industry, and tourism, it is still “among the arctic regions that are most exposed to the green transition.” This is perhaps the next chapter to be written on the transformation of Alaska’s renewable energy landscape at the nexus of post-colonial politics, sustainable futures, and energy sovereignty – a chapter that is still unfolding, and will continue to unfold for many years to come. Here, a new discursive struggle emerges over the future allocation of rights and resources that moves beyond energy sustainability towards economic sustainability for the state in its entirety. Future scholars thus may take this as a point of departure for future scholarship to delve further into the political struggle Alaska currently finds itself entangled in over competing visions of the future and which co-existing strategies to pursue in order to create those futures.24) Expanding from energy sustainability and sovereignty, forthcoming research might explore how the state economy should be made sustainable in relation to budget necessities by any number of actors, including but not limited to the legislative branch of Alaska; the executive branch of Alaska; Native corporations; and so on.
But for now, with low state revenues in recent years, Alaska Energy Authority has been working with the Renewable Energy Fund Advisory Committee (REFAC) to adapt the program to changing times. Recent years have seen additional emphasis placed on funding early-stages of development that cannot easily be financed and providing assistance to applicants and financing options to construct feasible projects. In 2017, it was announced that the Fund would not seek new applications. In each State budget discussion, renewable energy support is on the chopping block.
Still, in spite of state funding shortfalls, the analysis of path creation above ultimately reveals two catalysts for renewable energy deployment in Alaska – the widened networking of agency and the multi-scalar policy at the national, state, and local levels. These two catalysts also hold the power to continue pushing the path creation of Alaskan remote renewables. At the national level, Senate Energy Bill S. 2012 currently being conferenced with the House includes multiple provisions to help state and tribal governments finance and deploy renewable and efficiency projects. Alaska’s Senior Senator Lisa Murkowski is an advocate of the bill, and Chris Rose has been a vocal supporter of language in the legislation clarifying that the Department of Energy can provide federal loan guarantees to states for projects that employ innovative technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as something that would be particularly helpful for Alaska. A second key provision in the bill would reauthorize the Department of Energy’s state energy program, which provides federal funds for renewable and efficiency projects. Locally, Alaska Native Corporations have been weathering the state’s economic hardships relatively well, and play a vital diversifying role in the state’s economy by returning outside profits to Alaska. University of Alaska Professor Bob Poe has termed them “the unsung economic heroes, holding twenty-one spots on the Alaska Business Monthly’s Top 49er list, making up 69 percent of the Alaska jobs generated, 86 percent of the total jobs created, and 75 percent of the income produced by Alaska’s top companies. Now, if only Alaska’s Legislature could get its act together.” To Professor Poe, the ongoing success and growth of Alaska Native Corporations positions them as a “critical component of ensuring a sustainable future for our state.” Combined with the net of agency created between 2009 and 2016 at the intersection of Native rights and energy sovereignty, Alaska Native Corporations could play a larger role in extending the path of renewable energy development in remote communities.
As REAP Executive Director put it in a media interview, “The grant era is over for the time being”.25) While the reduction in funding for the Alaska Energy Authority, the Renewable Energy Fund, and the Emerging Energy Technology Fund may risk losing momentum on renewable energy and a sustainable future, the foundations of an expanded network of agency and a path to break dependency have already been laid. “You can keep momentum going by education, people being aware of the opportunities,” Governor Bill Walker said in a 2016 interview after the annual renewable energy expo at the Chena Hot Springs Resort outside Fairbanks.26) “So we have to fix our budget, there’s no question about that, and we will. It doesn’t mean we stop being Alaskans, and stop doing what’s happening here because we need to fix our budget”.27) With the help of the national and local scale, the future of renewables in remote Alaskan communities may still well be a bright one.
References