ACEP publishes the 2024 Alaska Electricity Trends Report
By: ACEP Data Team
Energy data in Alaska is fragmented. No one agency is in charge of maintaining records from all communities in the state. In other places, federal reporting requirements mean that most data are accessible via the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). However, in Alaska, some communities report to the EIA, but most others report only to the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) because their operations are not large enough to require federal reporting. Therefore, it is challenging for policy makers and researchers to view the entirety of Alaska’s electric generation sector in one place. The process of seeking out individual data sources, requesting data, and correcting errors can lead to misrepresentations of the whole picture.
In the past, the State of Alaska has largely relied on energy statistics reports created by various federal and state entities to make up for the lack of a centralized energy data authority. Multiple generations of reports have been produced since 1969 -- all trying to accurately portray the energy landscape in Alaska. However, these reports, known colloquially as the Alaska Energy Statistics Report Series, have not been produced since 2015 (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The timeline of historic energy reports in Alaska.
Recently, society’s increased dependence on data for forecasting and planning reveals the growing need for vetted and up-to-date statistics on the state’s energy trends. In response, the long dormant Alaska Energy Statistics Report was resurrected to include data from 2011 to 2021. Niel McMahon at DOWL assembled the new dataset and the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) assumed the responsibility of creating a simplified version of the report to showcase it. In contrast to other reports, the new data can now be accessed through interactive visualizations that were not previously customary. But it also has to be easily updatable as data are added and corrected in order to assure the accuracy that is needed for higher level analysis.
“The lack of clear and reliable information about trends in Alaska’s electric sector is a point of friction in policy spaces. However, ACEP is uniquely positioned to contribute to the energy dialogue in the state. This report is one of these contributions and we find that it helps to alleviate a lot of that friction by providing accessible and transparent information about our state’s electric sector.” - Jesse Kaczmarski
The new dataset includes 10 more years of recent data. For help with this influx of new data, ACEP’s Energy Transitions Initiative collaborated with the Data and Cyberinfrastructure Management (DCM) team. DCM team members Jesse Kaczmarski and Ian MacDougall got to work right away analyzing data, creating plots, and writing text. Meanwhile, DCM team lead, Elizabeth Dobbins, developed a structure that would automate report generation, making generation of new versions easier in the future. She knew that organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that produce regular annual reports use computer code to standardize figures and even publish text.
The resulting solution is a “web-book”-- an online document that provides high-level information that can be immediately updated or corrected as needed. The 2024 Alaska Electricity Trends Report (AETR) covers data years 2011-2021 and is available for viewing at https://acep-uaf.github.io/aetr-web-book-2024/. A brochure describing the report’s key takeaways was prepared by ACEP and distributed at the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference in May 2024. The brochure includes a QR code that leads viewers back to the online report where they can explore the data for themselves.
“We knew early on that the traditional report format was going to be a limiting factor for us. When visualizing data, small but significant changes in capacity across the state, such as rooftop solar, are not going to show up on paper. By moving to a dynamic report, users can interact with the graphics and see every detail, no matter how small.” - Jesse Kaczmarski
Figure 2. This cartographic relationship between energy regions as defined by AEA and ACEP is a now-static example of an interactive figure from AETR.
Creating the 2024 Alaska Electricity Trends Report has unlocked a range of new technological capacity for the DCM team. It creates a bridge between the static reports of the past and the dynamic dashboards of the evolving Alaska Energy Data Gateway. Be sure to check out AETR to learn more about how electricity has been generated, used, and priced over the last decade in Alaska.
Funding support for this report was provided by leveraging support from multiple partners that include: Office of Naval Research’s Alaska Regional Collaboration for Technology Innovation and Commercialization (ARCTIC) program (award #N00014-19-1-2235), Denali Commission - Alaska Energy Project Partnerships (award #1659), State of Alaska. The report and research was a collaboration between Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Alaska Energy Authority, and DOWL.