**Title**: Energy in the North - Tim Kalke
**Date**: August 21, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Tim Kalke


00;00;00;00 - 00;00;33;29
[Tim Kalke] A wide variety of skills are needed to be able to, I guess, survive in a place like this. 

[Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, we continue our conversation with Tim Kalke of Sustainable Energy Galena, Alaska, or SEGA suggest renewable energy projects are looking to move the Yukon River community toward using less import diesel fuel. The devastating 2013 flood, which destroyed homes and infrastructure in the remote community, led to a much needed upgrade of the Galena Interior Learning Academy's heating system and with a new local workforce. Local homes could be rebuilt. We talked to him about how he got to Galena and some of the incredible impacts he's had on the community. 

[Tim Kalke] My wife and I came out, started our experience here in Galena, working for the Sidney Huntington High School Social Studies teacher, and quickly learned and adapted to life in remote Alaska and learned that a wide variety of skills are needed to be able to, I guess, survive in a place like this. So coming out to think you're going to teach in the classroom and sooner than later you find yourself doing all sorts of different activities that you probably didn't imagine you would be doing. Yeah, it's been a pretty wild ride since we've been out here. 

[Amanda Byrd] The U.S. Air Force closed their Galena Base in 2008. The buildings were then converted to a technical school and dormitories, and the 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel left behind for the community was not really seen as a solution, but a problem. The problem was what happens when the fuel runs out. 

[Tim Kalke] That community problem and the solution to the problem aligned with the 2013 flood and then my own studies and striving to get a master's of natural resource degree through Oregon State University's E Campus. The management plan for SEGA and the project was my ultimate. Ultimately my project for that degree. 

[Amanda Byrd] Is that how the biomass project came about? 

[Tim Kalke] That Galena biomass project really, at the end of it all should have a different name because it wasn't just installing a wood boiler. It became a process of converting the diesel boilers from steam generation to hydronic, installing a whole new heat distribution system again from steam to hydronic, a new domestic water line, and then, yeah, creating an entity that would take on the the challenge of winter mechanized harvesting to get the material and process it in the chip. So that's where Saga came along. And by 2018, I had become full time manager. I was teaching in the mornings for a few years and managing in the afternoons and ended up making a full time shift over.

[Amanda Byrd] That creation of SEGA and the whole biomass harvesting and heating endeavor. Must have been a really great way to create local jobs.

00;02;50;29 - 00;03;17;29
[Tim Kalke] Very fortunate to have a fantastic core crew of individuals who have been with us from the beginning, who operate the equipment and make all that effort happen in around 2018. We expanded our purposes, not just the the biomass support, but sustainable energy and natural resource education initiatives, as well as a broad category of other energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in the community. And so that's where our construction line of business came into play. And our first significant project there was building our own heavy equipment shop and then partnering with the tribe in helping them develop their housing program. Since 2021, we've been constructing homes for for their program, and we've done seven to date and an eighth well successfully be completed this season.

00;03;46;19 - 00;04;05;18
[Amanda Byrd] Tim Kalke is a general manager at Sustainable Energy, Galena, Alaska. I'm Amanda Bird, 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.