**Title**: Energy in the North - Brad Scotton
**Date**: August 7, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Brad Scotton




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[Brad Scotton] The current design will help us save around 100,000 gallons of diesel a year 

[Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North. We speak with Brett Scotton, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife pilot biologist and member of the Galena City Council, about the cost of generating electricity in the remote Yukon River community. 

[Amanda Byrd] So where is Galena? 

[Brad Scotton] 270 miles west of Fairbanks on the Yukon River.

00;00;24;04 - 00;00;45;08
[Amanda Byrd] How do you get here? 

[Brad Scotton] You can fly in from Fairbanks, which is about an hour long flight, and a Cessna caravan. Or you can boat here from Fairbanks or Nenana down the Tanana to the Yukon, ten hour boat ride in a fast boat and all the all the equipment and and a lot of the supplies and whatnot come in on barges. So there's a river barge system that operates from Nenana that serves all the communities on the Yukon and Koyukuk Rivers. 

[Amanda Byrd] How does Galena generate power? 

[Brad Scotton] Historically, it's been 100% diesel powered engines that that run generators and then that power is distributed throughout the community. So the electrical power is is an old, you know, 1980s vintage diesel engines that burn diesel and produce electricity.that's been sort of the most efficient and dependable way to do things for a very long time. 

[Amanda Byrd] How much does electricity cost right now as a resident? 

[Brad Scotton] So currently the rate is 67.2 cents per kilowatt hour, which my guess is 3 to 4 times what it is in Fairbanks. The PCE program Power Cost Equalization run by the state does subsidize to some extent like homeowners and personal households on that rate. So that reduces that somewhat, making it somewhat more affordable. But still on the order of $0.40 or more per kilowatt hour that the residents are paying. But PCE doesn't help businesses, doesn't help the school district. Electric bills are extremely high. It's not uncommon for household utilities. You know, rates, you know, to be paying two or three $400 a month in electric bills and the school district. You can just imagine the costs for a large buildings, lots of lighting, lots of pumps, lots of fans. I like to tell people that electricity is sort of that that thread that runs through everything. I mean, everything in the community is connected by the power grid. So the better we can do that utility, the more efficient we can make it and the lower costs that we can get into it. It helps every entity and every, you know, group function, you know, more efficiently and the whole community. 

[Amanda Byrd] And so will this large scale solar array. Do you think it will alleviate costs for power? 

[Brad Scotton] Well, it's going to reduce the fuel costs to the city dramatically. The current design will help us save around 100,000 gallons of diesel a year. So the community burns about close to 400,000 gallons a year to run the electric grid through the the diesel gensets, depending on how many hours of diesel-off time you can get. So but it not only saves on fuel costs, it it potentially saves and the wear and tear on those engines. So if there's 8600 hours in a year and you reduce the runtimes by 1000 hours every year, you're you're increasing the interval between when you need rebuilds. And every time you rebuild a diesel engine in a rural place, you know, it's 250,000 to a half a million dollars just to rebuild that engine. So of course, it has to be run well and done right. And then, you know, the distribution of those benefits. So what do we you know, that's one of the questions sort of ongoing is how do we pass those savings along within the community or do we use those savings to do other projects to make the community better, you know, to fix the roads or to work on the ball field or help near the swimming pool or these other things that we operate?

00;03;46;28 - 00;04;06;12
[Amanda Byrd] Brad Scotton is a member of the Galena City Council. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Find more stories and information about ACEP at uaf.edu/acep.