Spreading awareness of Power Cost Equalization
ACEP summer intern Talia Huddleston, second to right, enjoyed her summer internship working with the ACEP Anchorage team.
August 22, 2024
As an ACEP summer intern, Talia Huddleston worked to tell the story and spread awareness about the Power Cost Equalization program under the mentorship of Michelle Wilber and Chris Pike.
Huddleston’s focus was on the impacts of PCE in rural communities in Alaska. Faced with the lack of knowledge about the PCE program in these communities, she realized the importance of having an educational resource about PCE and created a multimedia presentation to spread PCE information throughout Alaska.
In Alaska, residential electric rates in rural areas can be three to five times higher than in urban areas. Most rural communities use diesel to generate their electricity because many of them are off the road system and transportation of fuel is expensive.
While the PCE program is designed to financially assist rural residents, other state funds are used for energy projects that benefit urban residents. In order to address this discrepancy, there are some efforts to investigate ways to update the program to make it most beneficial for rural residents.
As a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Huddleston was thrilled to have an opportunity to learn more about electricity in rural communities.
The knowledge of how the PCE program interacts with renewable energy, beneficial electrification and community-owned energy resources is growing rapidly, Huddleston explained. “There is excitement about finding new ways to optimize this new energy.”
Huddleston initially spent countless hours understanding the history, formulas and concepts of PCE. She then put it all together, creating an educational video. Through the process, she learned the impact the PCE program has on rural communities and found herself passionate about spreading the awareness of PCE. She also gained more knowledge with storytelling and stronger research skills along the way.
Huddleston is thankful for her mentors for their guidance and visual explanations and for the ACEP team for the empowering conversations about PCE.
“I’ve learned that many people aren’t actually aware of PCE. I even didn’t know what it was. I’m glad I was given this opportunity to help others be more aware of PCE,” she said.
This internship is funded by Sloan Foundation 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 Michelle Wilber at mmwilber@alaska.edu.