Integrating community voices in rural energy discussions

September 20, 2024

The Power Cost Equalization program benefits rural communities by lowering electricity costs for residential consumers and is an important piece of rural Alaska’s energy policy.

ACEP summer intern Chase Hetler explored how well PCE was understood by community members under the guidance of Gwen Holdmann and Magnus de Witt. She is a Colorado College senior majoring in environmental studies and political science with rural community development and environmental policy as her academic passions.

During her internship Hetler worked to identify many informal conversations occurring at the statewide level surrounding potential modernization efforts to PCE, teasing out whose voices are heard and whose perspectives are underrepresented. She identified a lack of academic input through formal research and a lack of community perspectives integrated into these conversations. To attempt to close these gaps, Hetler’s project focused on formally assessing and documenting the current conversations about PCE at both the state and local levels.

To this end, Hetler conducted two qualitative research projects: 1) gathering community perspectives on PCE and rural energy systems through conducting and analyzing surveys, and 2) gathering expert stakeholder perspectives through semi-structured interviews and using NVivo to code the responses.

For the first project, Hetler collaborated with the Teaching Through Technology program and the Village of Minto to assess Minto residents’ perspectives on PCE. She presented about PCE to the Minto Tribal Council meeting and set up an open tabling session to survey community members. Twenty-seven individuals participated, which amounts to about 30% of the village's adult population. Hetler analyzed the data and compiled it into a short white paper. She is now working on turning her analyses into deliverables for the Minto community and for statewide stakeholders.

A crucial step in research surrounding the PCE program is in integrating community perspectives into current conversations. Hetler’s research results help assess the current state of a rural community’s perceptions on energy and set the foundation for continuing to involve rural communities in state level conversations. Her work can potentially inform future efforts to support rural community energy systems.

This research also adopted the Community Engaged Research Framework, or CEnR, and qualitative research methods, which are just becoming more formally integrated into ACEP’s research efforts. Hetler used her research to develop guides for future social science ACEP interns to create more formal processes for conducting CEnR in a 10-week timeframe.

Hetler will also expand upon the summer’s research through writing her senior thesis. She hopes to integrate the data collected throughout the summer into a larger synthesis that places rural communities within the broader Alaska energy context.

Hetler gained invaluable social science research skills throughout her internship. Learning how to conduct research in a justice-focused and equitable way takes a lot of trust and relationship building with community partners. Hetler expressed her gratitude for the guidance and feedback provided by Minto Elders and community leaders and is grateful for her mentors’ guidance.

“My mentors placed a lot of trust and responsibility in my hands as I pieced my project together, and that pushed me to follow through on my research and accomplish more than I ever could have expected,” she said.

This internship is funded by the Office of Naval Research’s Alaska Regional Collaboration for Technology Innovation and Commercialization program through the ACEP Undergraduate Summer Internship program. View the final presentation for this project on ACEP’s YouTube Channel. For more information on this project, please contact Magnus de Witt at mdewitt9@alska.edu.