2026 Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference Wednesday

There's no doubt I am an oil and gas guy. I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We grew up on anthracite coal. Part of our job as one of 4 boys was to take out the ashes out of the stoker and make sure that the coal in the coal bin was going to make it to the works so we could have hot water, we could have heat. But nonetheless, you know, technology's evolved and where we are today, not just on wind but on solar, solar.

So some people may be thinking, well, solar in Alaska, how's that, how's that possible? I've got to say, and I don't know this for a fact, but I may be the only governor in the country that has a 50-panel array, solar array, at my residence. And I can tell you from my own experience, even in the shortest day of the year, December 21st, especially up here in Alaska, we generate electricity. We actually generate a lot of electricity, for example, the months of February and March, because with the snow on the ground and the angle of the panels, we pick up a lot of sunlight. And so what's my point in all this?

For Alaska, it's an all-in energy approach. It's not selected upon what perceived politics are or social engineering, etc. In some parts of Alaska, there's no doubt that gas is going to be crucial and the backbone for energy. Hydro is going to be the backbone for energy in many of our communities on the coast. When we go along the coast as well, the western coast, northern coast, and in a town that I used to live in, Kotzebue, Alaska, we've had wind for decades, windmills up in Kotzebue, and now there's solar moving further north.

And so if you think about it, and I'm going to end here shortly, but if you think about Alaska, In some respects, the further north you go, oftentimes solar itself really provides value because if you're going to use your diesel as your battery during the winter months, especially near the Arctic Circle or north of the Arctic Circle, especially February, March, April, you cut that use of diesel. So many of our communities that have a combination of diesel power wind power, now solar power, and then battery, um, you're able to cut down on the cost of diesel. And that's important, especially when we talk about today, because many of our communities, over 220 off the road system, are going to have to order our— or are ordering and have ordered their fuel for this coming fall and winter and going into next year. And some of that is being ordered at high prices. So you can see where some of this technology, including solar, which I'm part of, really, really makes sense.

And so I'm just— I'm honored to have Katie. Katie's got a podcast. Katie can talk about herself better than anybody. But nonetheless, I think you're going to find this conversation very interesting, you know, as to why myself and Katie especially and others view solar as something to not be dismissed but that has a role in in the entire energy base. So with that, I'm gonna turn it back to you, please.

Thank you, Governor, and Katie, thank you again for joining us. I don't know if you can see the crowd here or if you're seeing the stage online. We've got a pretty full room here coming to you from the Dena'ina Center in downtown Anchorage. And if you don't mind, would you give a brief self-introduction to the crowd here? Sure.

Hi everyone, and thank you so much, Governor, for those kind words. My name is Katie Miller. I have a, I would say, mildly but fairly very successful podcast that I launched last summer. It's my own name, The Katie Miller Podcast. It's aimed at reaching suburban and young women amongst conservatives because I think it is very important that we talk to future women voters and talk to women in a life and lifestyle podcast, not just about politics all day long because quite frankly when I'm raising my 3 children who are 5, 4, and 2, you don't want to hear politics all day.

You want to hear about other people's lives and how do they parent similarly to your morals and your values. I'm so sorry I couldn't be with you all in person today. I am actually 36 weeks pregnant with my 4th child in 5 years, so that's quite a feat in and of itself. But some of my professional background beyond the podcast is I was Mike Pence's communications director in President Trump's first term. I was press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security handling FEMA and immigration when President Trump's first term as well.

And then I like to joke that I've had my 3 kids in the off-season between President Trump's first and second term. And then I was an advisor to Elon Musk during the days of Doge. And now here I am. I launched a podcast, and I am an outspoken proponent of solar energy while still understanding that coal and natural gas play an integral role in powering our grid across the United States, especially in the age of data centers. By understanding that the future of electricity generation across the globe and specifically in the United States will play a large part in renewable energy— and I don't mean that's wind, I'm talking solar generation— and I've been been probably one of the few Republicans right up here with the governor who have said we can and should do both.

It should no longer be a choice. We subsidize a lot of forms of energy in this country, and I believe that this is one of the forms that doesn't necessarily need to be subsidized, but that we should invest in pretty heavily from the private sector. Because if you look at what China's doing today, I believe this is a national security imperative for us to be able to create and generate solar electricity here in the United States. It's because I think there's a statistic: by 2030, China will generate more solar electricity than we will provide all electricity in the United States. And if that isn't alarming, especially as our needs of electricity gen go up because of data centers that we see these alarming headlines every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, I don't know what is.

Um, and so that's a bit about my background, I would say my other shining point is that my husband, Stephen Miller, who's one of Donald Trump's longest-serving senior advisors— we met in Trump's first term, and it has been a very interesting conversation. And as I've talked very publicly about my love of solar energy and what he does in the White House, and I like to joke to everyone that I am an outspoken proponent, and as the Governor mentioned that you guys have had Secretary Wright and Secretary Burgum speak, all of whom I admire so deeply, but that this is something that I praise to all of them in the administration about the importance of having this all-of-the-above approach and not just dismissing renewables outright. Thank you so much again, Gwen. Thank you, Katie. And I did— I've had a chance to listen to your podcast.

I've enjoyed— I really enjoy your sort of hard-hitting, direct style of just sort of asking questions. I really appreciated that approach. And I particularly enjoyed your interview with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and his wife. I thought that was a really interesting dialogue between the two of you. And you brought up in that one, you said, "Solar is actually my favorite topic.

This is what I like to, really like to talk about." And, you know, you mentioned in that episode about your concern learns about China's leadership in this area, not just on the production, but really on the development of the technology, on the construction, on the building of the infrastructure. Because even a lot of the panels that we have here in the US and Alaska, you see they're made in China, right? So they really have a corner on this industry. Do you have any more comments on that? Over 90% of solar panels and solar equipment that we use across the world today are made in China.

Particularly if you look at what's going on with Cuba, as the Trump administration and the world has kind of starved Cuba from oil and the ability to produce electricity in that country for national security implications, you have China moving their excess supply of solar equipment to Cuba for them to be able to produce electricity. And as we've seen with rare earth magnets and other critical supplies that China produces right now, is that if we aren't getting ahead of producing those materials in the United States today, what happens should there ever be a trade war with China that goes so deeply that they don't provide and don't export those critical equipment we need to be ahead here in the United States? I just looked at a study, I think it was from Bloomberg NEF, that says the world is going to produce 1/3 solar energy by 2050, and that'll be the leading producer of energy by, I think it's 2032. And so that's not possible if China withholds and bans exports of that equipment today. And I think it's incredibly important that other countries, not just the United States, whether that be Germany or elsewhere, also produce this incredibly important equipment so that we're able to not only send satellites up to the sky to harness electricity in space, but that we're able to harness it here on Earth, and that we're also able to produce the relevant batteries so that way during times of peak demand, we're able to fulfill that need from the grid.

Thanks, Katie. Governor Dunleavy, let's just stick with the topic of, of solar since I realize that's something that you're both I know you're pretty passionate about. You recently sponsored a net metering bill here in Alaska. You've been a proponent of renewables since your first administration, actually supported an RPS bill in your first administration, your first term. And I'm just kind of curious, you know, you really describe solar in particular as something that really appeals to all different, you know, folks.

There's a lot of reasons in terms of like personal energy security, energy security at the community level, like you were talking about. Many of our Northwest Arctic communities are investing heavily in solar right now. You know, what do you see as the future of solar energy in Alaska, and what do we need to do to continue to see adoption of solar? That's a great question. Great question.

So, you know, my journey on— well, energy's been the basis for basically all of our journeys in various forms. As I mentioned, coal as a young person coming from Scranton. Scranton was once termed the Electric City. Why was that? So much coal was there that they produced electricity in such abundance that we had trams, we had all kinds of economic activity as a result of that coal that electrified the entire city.

And so when you move to a place like Alaska, the first place I moved to was a very rural community, beautiful place, great people called Point Alaska. The first thing that struck me was the cost of fuel. And this is back in the early '80s. The cost of fuel was much greater than what I was used to in Pennsylvania. And so you begin to think, you know, is there a different way, a different approach to to energize a small, especially a small rural community that does not have the benefit of large-scale cheap fossil fuels such as oil and gas, and even coal in the case of, in the case of oil.

And so for Alaska, you know, and for, I would even say, you know, I'm going to talk just slightly political here, but for conservatives, many of those folks that want to live off the grid, want to be independent, Solar and the advancement in solar technology has really been a boon to that approach. And so what I see happening with solar, especially in Alaska— and I don't, I don't know if people realize this— but solar actually performs better in cold weather. So when you have a sunny day, for example, in Fairbanks, Alaska in February, your output on your solar panel is going to be better than it would be if it was a 90-degree day in a desert in a similar situation. So what I think you're going to see with solar over time, I think you're going to see continued advancements. Um, I think you're going to see, you know, it's bifacial solar panels now, but I think you're going to see more and more advancement in technology which will raise the ability to produce, uh, watts and kilowatts, uh, with the same, uh, amount of sunlight you might have today with the same technology.

So I see it progressing steadily, if not dramatically. I see the technology evolving greatly, everything from smaller panels that will produce as much electricity as you have today, panels that are going to be able to— I think even using what we— I mean, what we were doing, we've done last year here when we had a snowy season, tilting those panels to to get the right angle here in Alaska and maximizing every moment for sun. Storage and what you're going to do with that solar, that's another discussion. But I would say from my perspective, having the 50 solar panels on my property, we planned it out really well. We marked where the sun was going to rise and set on December 21st, which in Alaska, obviously, that particular day is important.

That's the shortest day of the year. And then how you set the panels up. We actually have a pretty large outfit that you can actually tilt and get different angles throughout the year so you can maximize the sun. So again, I would say for a lot of our rural communities, for a lot of our individuals that live off the grid, solar is definitely something to consider, especially especially as, you know, as you go into the lighter months of the year. But even as I mentioned, we were producing electricity in the dead of winter.

I know we have solar panels further north. I know they're in Fairbanks. You see them everywhere. And I know they're in Kotzebue now, which is above the Arctic Circle. So again, combination of technologies for especially our rural communities using at this time, and we hope the technology advances so that there'll be other methods of storage But at this time, using your diesel backup generators as your battery and using solar and possibly wind, as we do in Costa View, I think, I think it could cut, cut costs dramatically.

I think it can make it more affordable to live in those places, which is what, you know, our goal and my goal as governor is.

Or do you think that that's really gonna be a challenge for, um, for those that are looking to develop projects, whether on an individual basis or through, um, more community-scale or utility-scale solar projects? What are your thoughts on that?

Generally, I'm a conservative who's principled in the belief that government should not engage in subsidy of just about anything, that a free market and/or capital market should work in a way where you incentivize the creation of something via these private companies. And I believe as you create scale and more and more generation is created thereby by solar energy, whether that's the importation of these Chinese, you know, solar equipment prices and creating more scale, I think while it is probably going to cause a short-term dip, in the long term, as the governor just mentioned, I believe solar generation, solar electricity, will lower the cost of energy bills and create more of an incentive for large power companies to incentivize their consumers to purchase and to install these on their homes for personal use and as part of their electricity generation. That will ultimately lower costs, especially as I keep mentioning this increased demand that we're seeing at an unprecedented scale across the United States as it relates to data centers. So whether it is whether these large companies are investing in them to upgrade their grid, which will in turn thereby lower consumer prices. I think that's what President Trump has certainly been working on here.

A couple of months ago, he had a pledge that all these AI companies would invest to not raise the prices of a homeowner's electricity bill. I think this solar renewable push will be part of that. You know, I just want to, I just want to I just want to add on what Katie was saying and look at a couple, a couple interesting angles. So the thing about solar, which to me is also fascinating, is there's no mechanical parts. There's nothing wrong with wind.

I mean, wind has its place, but if you're a homeowner and you, you know, you have a residential home, you don't have to service or worry about mechanical parts and solar panels. It's basically plug and you get electricity. You need to clean the panels every once in a while. You gotta take it, you know, make sure you see that. But you don't have to worry about the guts of the panels falling apart because of a high wind incident.

You don't have to worry about other mechanical aspects of other types of energy, once again like wind. And I'm not downplaying wind, but for the residential homeowner, I think that's a plus. You don't have to be a mechanic to be able to have solar panels solar panels. The other thing to think about, which I also think is fascinating, is if you remember back when technology in, in things such as early TVs, black and white and then color, and cameras and computers— those early types of that technology cost a lot of money. They were new to the world, they cost a lot of money.

You look at buying a TV today, you look at buying an iPad today, and you compare that with, you know, what the cost of those items would have been several years ago, you'll find the costs are dramatically lower. And I think that's exactly what's going to happen with solar. I think you're going to get better technology, better delivery, better performance at a much lower price going on. And so what, you know, to what Katie was saying, you, you, I think in a short period of time, the idea of subsidizing it, it's not going to be necessary because the technology itself will actually reduce the cost the overall panel and improve the performance. And so that's the stuff I'm excited about.

Thank you, Governor, and thank you, Katie. You're welcome to hang on and continue to join the conversation. I know that you both have other things that you need to run off to, so we would love to have you join us. But I'm going to transition now to our in-person panelists here. So first of all, let's give the two of you a round of applause.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you very much. And so with that, I'd like to transition over to Nicole and Serge and Brian. I'm going to ask you to do a real brief self-introduction to yourself and your organization, if you don't mind. Everyone, you can actually see a full bio for everyone. You've got that on your app.

But I'm going to start with you, Nicole, down on the end there. And so just an introduction, and then What is one— this kind of as a teaser— what is one thing in the energy space that you're paying close attention to right now? Just in a word or a phrase, we can get into it a little bit more later. So thank you. Great.

Thank you, Gwen. Thank you all for hosting this amazing event. I've been incredibly impressed with this, with this conference. I am from Oregon. However, my family is from Alaska.

My family lives in Juneau. And when the opportunity was floated by me to come up here to participate, I jumped on it right away. Any chance to come back to Alaska is an opportunity I won't overlook. So my name is Nicole Hughes. I am the executive director of an organization called Renewable Northwest.

We do clean energy advocacy. So the work we do is mostly in the 4 states of the Pacific Northwest— Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho. For those who are familiar with that region, it's significant from an electricity perspective because that is also the footprint of the Bonneville Power Administration, which is our federal PMA in the region. So our organization was formed originally to try and convince BPA that if you interconnected a wind generator to the federal transmission system, it wasn't gonna blow the whole thing up. And we've come a long way since then.

We have, you know, over 3,000 megawatts of operating. We renewables in the region that have brought significant economic development. Our members include renewable energy industry, so buyers, manufacturers, developers. We have the hyperscaler data centers in our membership now because they also have very strong clean energy procurement goals. And we also have nonprofits in our membership.

So we're kind of a partnership between for-profits and nonprofits.

Oh, and one thing that I'm thinking of. So I was just kind of inspired by this conversation about solar. And so I will say I'm keeping an eye on supply chain. It's— we're still reeling from impacts of COVID and there have been additional considerations layered on the industry recently that are causing some constrictions. So that's one thing I'm keeping an eye on.

Thank you, Nicole. I'm testing my mic now. I'm sitting— I'm joining you guys here in the chairs. But would you— I know that your Your organization, it's about 30 years old now, I think, right? And you guys were really an inspiration for Renewable Energy Alaska.

Énergie Québec is a state-owned utility in Québec. It's hydro-rich. We have 62 hydropower generating stations. They're about 37,000 megawatts in total, an average of 500 and some each. The largest one is about 5,000, so they're sizable.

We have a lot of hydropower in Québec, not because we're especially smart when it came to climate change, but because we— that's the resources we've had for over 100 years. Lots of water, lots of good topography, same here as Alaska. And it just made a lot of sense. And so we've been adding these resources through the years, through the past 100 years almost. And these create great rates, great legacy rates, because you have these assets that are paid that you maintain.

You and I were talking before, we're paying about 5 cents a kilowatt hour over there in rates, so it's very low. And obviously—. Are there any Alaskans here who would like to pay 5 cents a kilowatt hour for their electric? I'm just checking, like, Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Yeah, that's the benefit of having invested in these long— these resources have very long life. And we've built, you know, since the early 2000s until today, we've kept building them. There's about 14 new ones since early 2000s until today. And so there's this history of just adding resources to the grid. And with that, having strong close ties to our neighbors to the south as well, just trading a lot with the US market.

And that's to your question, what keeps me very focused and preoccupied these days is transmission, because we are building transmission from Quebec, from Canada, to the US. Okay, so transmission supply lines. Brian, can you introduce yourself? Yeah, thanks, Gwen. Uh, my name is Brian Solon, uh, Vice President Business Development at Ameresco.

So a quick blurb on MRV.

MRV is a principal— to large-scale renewables. We are also an all of the above. So we are engaged in solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, clear, you know, gas plants on cogeneration. So we kind of fit in that Alaska model of all of the above. And we've been active in Alaska for 20-plus years through federal contracts at some of the military bases and working on conservation and generation projects.

We have some wind projects going now, hydro projects as well. And yeah, Alaska. I'm a Montana guy, but I kind of manage the western part of the US, including Alaska. And I've been working here, oh, going on 10+ years, and I've been recreating here for 20. So I'm a big hunter.

So I've spent some time in the Alaska Range and the Chugach and the Wrangels and Alaska is unique in a lot of ways. And one of the— I remember being on a mountaintop hunting Dall sheep with a guide, and he described Alaska as the last foreign country still friendly to Americans, which I thought was pretty unique and somewhat accurate. But yeah, so appreciate you having us and looking forward to this discussion. Thank you, Brian. So Serge, have you been to Alaska before?

Is this your first trip here? This is my first visit. Oh, so, okay, you're with all these people that are pretty familiar with Alaska, but, you know, you mentioned transmission being something that you're thinking about. But actually Hydro-Québec has quite a bit of off-grid communities too that are not connected via transmission lines. And that's something that you have in common with Alaska.

There's lots of commonalities. I mean, We are— I think we share this sort of northern identity. Territory goes way far north, 2.5 times the size of Texas. I think the same size— pretty much the same size as Texas, as Alaska here. And most of our consumption is to the south, but as you can imagine, we have mining in the north.

We have these remote communities. I think you've got many more here, but we've got about 22 off-grid communities that are to the north, native communities, mostly if you think of the far north of Quebec, so James Bay, Hudson Bay, very, you know, moving close to the Arctic, and then some on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Those obviously represent challenges and have real concerns when it comes to reliability and cost of energy. And so, very similar to what, you know, the governor was talking about, I think earlier on and some of the comments we heard were, how do we help these people? Lower the cost, make their grids more reliable, and certainly make their grids cleaner as well.

And so we've done different initiatives. Some of them have been sort of straightforward, whereas we can bring a transmission line, sometimes 60 miles or 120 miles, to a community that's off the grid. We've done some of these, but also some of them have been just transforming diesel, essentially communities that are reliant on diesel generation to hybrid communities where we bring solar, we bring wind, battery storage, and we use the diesel as the battery, as the governor was saying. And it's really proven to be quite effective at reducing the cost, because you're looking at upwards of 60 cents a kilowatt hour on these communities versus the 5 cents I was talking about, you know, to the people to the south. Yeah, just to— just if you could just follow up for a minute before before we go on to Nicole and Brian on that, how do you handle rates for these remote communities?

Do you have a postage stamp rate, or are they paying 60 cents a kilowatt hour for—. They're not. So the way— the savings we achieve with these northern communities are reflected in everyone's rates. So we have one rate in Quebec, one obligation to serve. Everyone pays the 5 cents.

But if you have 50, 60 cents in the northern areas, when you do your rate case every, in our case, every 3 years, you're really pushing everyone's rates up. So there's a real incentive, a shared incentive for everyone in the province that's benefiting from these rates to, for us to minimize the cost of these resources to the north. Are people in remote communities heating with electricity? No, no, they're not. And so that's been a topic of debate because you're trying to— in some cases you have certain groups and, you know, there's a willingness to clean the grid.

And in Quebec, this is something we strongly believe in. Of course, we've got the hydropower that to most Quebecers, except for those northern communities, probably 90% plus of them will heat with electricity. So heat pumps, electric furnaces. But when you move to the The more, obviously, it's harder because you don't have access to grid. You're not— it doesn't make sense to use a diesel generator to have an electric baseboard in your house.

So you have an oil-burning furnace or some sort of oil-burning system, and that's what they rely on. But if I had 5-cent power, I'd be doing electric heat. Well—. I'm just saying, okay. Then we get into— there are programs for that.

Yes. Okay.

Utility trend managed to lower the average? I'll just say, I don't want to go too far down this hole, but I have observed that like the— that the loads are quite high on some of these provincial remote communities, and the reason is because there is, you know, there's electricity being used like for heat and things like that, which makes sense when you have low rates. It doesn't make sense from producing power to make—. To—. For heating then, you know, the efficiency Diseases just aren't there.

But there's many things that I think that we have in common. And I think what's interesting is that you have this postage stamp rate. And so people in your remote communities are paying the same rate as everybody else. And it's to the benefit of the whole society to find ways to remove— to reduce the cost of diesel thermal-based communities, the cost of generating power. Yeah.

It is. With the one difference— and I recognize here in Alaska, what I'm learning, you have over 200 communities that are off the grid or something like that, if I'm not mistaken, but that's obviously a scale is different. We for years have been sort of trying to connect as many of the off-grid communities as we can, at least the ones that were where we could. We've even built some small hydropower generating stations in communities that were close to rivers where that made sense. So there's been all sorts of initiatives, but I I recognize the scale of things here is a little different than what we have.

Yes. So this is the future of renewables, not the future of diesel power. So I do want to pivot here. So Nicole, I'm going to come back to you. So how do you— how for your organization have things really changed over, like, maybe both just the last year or so, but also, like, the last 5 years?

The challenges that we're trying to solve today in terms of increasing uptake of renewables are different today than they were a year ago, than they were 5 years ago, than they were 10 years ago. Are there things that you're working on today that you wouldn't have expected that you were working on 10 years ago? Like, are there things that you're a little bit surprised about in terms of either the progress we've made or progress that we haven't made? Any thoughts on that? Well, I think what really caught us all off guard was the increased in load that we are seeing in our region and projecting much more.

We have 20% load growth coming over the next 10 years. Most of that load growth is coming from data centers, just industrial electrification. You know, I think transportation electrification is a very small part of that. But if you just think about the number of electric components everyone has in their home now. And every time you pick up your cell phone, you're scrolling on your cell phone, you're compelling a data center somewhere to operate, and that needs electricity.

And we— it just kind of hit us like a brick wall. I mean, 5 years ago, 4 years ago, we were asking legislatures in 2 states to pass clean energy mandates, and we had a clear path on how we were going to meet those mandates. That is completely blown out of the water now. With the slow growth. But I want to put this in context of something that I think Alaska should be thinking about.

We're a couple years ahead of you on this, but these data centers will be coming to Alaska. They will see the opportunity of cheap land, water, and they will figure out how to solve the electricity problem with you. And that's where I see the opportunity. So the last growth in the energy sector we've seen like this was like industrial growth after the war with the aluminum smelters. And what did we do to meet that demand?

The federal government built the Bonneville Dam and they built a massive transmission system that electrified the rural West. That was billions of dollars of investment in today's money. This is the new wave. We are on the precipice of a new wave of demand growth that we have never seen before. And there are deep pockets behind it.

So I encourage you all to be thinking about how to take take this opportunity to envision a sustainable grid, envision investment in a grid that's gonna be here for the long run and that's gonna be sustainable and it's gonna meet the needs of the growth in your rural communities. And I think these data center partners, these hyperscalers, can be good partners for that. Thank you, Nicole. Brian, so as a, as an organization that has been very active as an independent power producer, This is something Alaska is interested in attracting more organizations like AMORESCO to come here to the state and to, to help us build out new generation in the future. We have typically had a difficult time attracting IPPs to Alaska.

When I've spoken with others, they talk about us being a little bit too remote, too many— too much uncertainty around the costs associated with doing business in Alaska. Why are you here and what are your thoughts on that? So Alaska is unique and it is challenging and it's some of the cost implications of being remote and those are part of the equation.

We've kind of established here from those core projects that we've been able to do with with the federal government and built an office. And while the market here is overall much smaller, the projects necessarily aren't. So project by project, I mean, yesterday we talked about the gas pipeline. That's the biggest project ever. So there's opportunity in a targeted way to do that.

And, you know, in some ways everything is bigger in Alaska. The projects tend to be bigger, more costly, that kind of stuff. So we've been pretty targeted on the projects we're pursuing. We kind of pride ourselves on the right application. So certain projects, you know, hydropower, when there's an opportunity, there's just not those opportunities in the in the lower 48 to build new hydro.

And as Serge and I were talking before, the cheapest form of power is old hydro. And, you know, you don't get there without building new. But there's, you know, the challenges to get there in that timeline to get there is so long, 10 years plus to get a hydro project permitted. So we've been, we've been able to kind of focus on those projects that make sense in those certain markets. For instance, we've got a wind project in the, in the GBA area that capitalizes on winter wind.

It produces 80% of the power in the winter 3 months and perfectly aligns with their high consumption. So those kind of targeted approach and kind of finding those good fits for the community and for the IPPs to be able to participate participate, I think is the key. But I think that— I think it is opening up in general from a market standpoint to be able to find more projects. And it's— I, you know, Alaska is kind of the center of the energy world right now. It really is.

A lot of talk about the gas pipeline, but with that becomes other development, other projects that are able to come online. Thanks. I'm going to go back to Nicole. I want to talk with you about hydro here in a minute. But I am kind of curious, you know, related to Brian and your comments earlier about concerns around supply chain.

I am going to ask a little bit of a provocative question here, if you don't mind. So, you know, I think I've been in the renewable space for a very long time, and one of my observations is is that we often say in a knee-jerk way, you know, wind and solar is the cheapest, cheapest energy that you can— it's the cheapest thing that you can build, so we should just be doing it, right? We should just do it, because it's the cheapest thing that you can build. And I think that sometimes that message is actually getting in the way of building good projects up here in Alaska, because it's not necessarily the cheapest source of power today, especially not when you're considering what it costs to integrate integrate it into our grid, you know, potentially needing additional storage, all these kinds of additional costs associated with it. And I'm curious, you know, especially as we're looking at supply chain issues, I'm starting to see a lot of these IPP contracts go quite a bit higher, escalate quite a bit.

Have we made a mistake in sort of positioning renewables as the cheapest thing that we can do? Because by doing so, renew— utilities can be like, well, I'm not getting a contract from an IPP that's cheaper than coal, so I don't need to build it, right? Because it's not cheaper. So show me the cheaper project and then we'll build it. But, but I wonder if we've kind of had a little issue with the messaging there.

I'm curious about your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I, I do think that, that Originally, when we started building out renewables in the region I work in, a lot of it was about decarbonization. That was the focus back then. And our utilities in the Pacific Northwest all have their own goals for cleaning the grid. And we were well aligned with that.

Over time, the LCOE, the levelized cost of energy for renewables has come to be parity with other traditional forms of generation. But there are intermittency issues that require you to have some other backup storage or other sorts of capacity on the system. So now we differentiate between energy cost and capacity cost. In our region, we are seeing a capacity shortfall. There's a, there's a very specific thing that happens in the winter in the Northwest where we have these cold snaps.

For you guys, it's just a typical winter day, but for us, it's like Armageddon, and everybody's turning on their heaters, and that happens to be the time when the hydro system is at its lowest capacity, and the solar that we're importing from California and Arizona is also needed there, and if we don't have wind, then we're in big trouble. So now we see after we've had years of integration of renewables on the grid, we've been able to see the other benefits that these generations bring— these generators bring. There is a huge amount of benefit to having a diversity of resources on your system. Even if you have a resource which is very abundant in your state, like you have gas here, we have hydro in our region, there will be times when there are constraints on that system, and if you don't you don't have redundancy on your system, it will cause price spikes. And so we talk about having a diverse set of generators.

We also talk about having a big grid. Now, you guys have a unique situation here where you're not able to electrically connect to some of the other western markets. I do know that in your rail belt electricity system, you'll be undergoing your first IRP here recently. That's really exciting. But the saying that we have in the West is we need to build a grid that's bigger than the weather.

So we need to be able to tap into resources in other regions so that when we have these localized weather events that are impacting generation, we can pull from other areas. So I do think diversity is an important consideration. I think, you know, there is no fuel risk with renewables like there is with other forms of generation. It's the zero marginal cost resource. It's free.

If the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, you're not paying for it. So I think there's a number of values that we need to be considering. I promise I'm coming to you, but I just want to give Brian an opportunity to just chime in on that question. I've seen the— I've seen contracts for IPPs going up quite a lot, and it's been since COVID really, I feel like, or even a little bit before that. I'm not sure.

You would probably know better than me. But can you talk a little bit about that? Is renewables always the cheapest? Well, I'd add a little nuance to that. So, you know, we talked a little bit about inflationary costs.

And some of the ideas behind what does a power cost right now, it really depends on how fast you can get it on the grid. Speed to power. So in a lot of ways, renewables can be faster to deploy— solar, wind, provided we can get through some wind permitting. But when we drag them out for a decade—. But with a hydro project or maybe even a nuclear project, you're looking at decades, and that increases that cost of the project.

I think inflationary, you mentioned after COVID, we were seeing 12, 20, 25% inflation annually. I think over the last 10 years, it's closer to that 7 to 8% construction inflation. When you look at that, a project more than doubles every 10 years in cost. So if you look at that cost of power, the quicker you can get something on the grid, the more economical it can be. So I think that's a nuance.

There's no doubt that that the IPP price point is going up. Specifically, the removal of the investment tax credit for solar and wind, that has a big factor on it. We've got a little more runway with battery storage. So there's some nuance to that discussion, but—. Thank you, Serge.

So talking about hydro again, so Alaska, you know, we don't have an integrated grid. So communities— we did make a lot of investments in hydro. There are still some hydro projects that we can develop in this state. We've developed a lot of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to hydro. The communities that have especially storage hydro have our lowest cost of power anywhere in the state.

A lot of those are in Southeast Alaska. I am curious, you know, there's been talk of developing additional hydro here on the rail belt. There are some potential for additional more run-of-river hydro, but there's also been talk about a large dam, the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dam. I think you seem to be familiar with that when we talked a little bit earlier. What are your thoughts on that?

Like, what advice would you give us? What would be the advantages of looking to develop a project like that? Canada has continued to develop some large hydro projects. You've learned a lot when it comes environmental impacts and how to mitigate those. What's your advice to us?

Well, I mean, the first thing I want to say is it's hard to build big projects today. And I don't want this to turn into like a therapy session of how it's hard and board transmission and hydro, but it is. And that's— but eventually we succeed because we persevere at what we do. We have long-term objectives and that's, you know, we set out to accomplish. And we get there.

The benefits of hydro are generational, so when you build these assets and understanding it wind, we've got some solar coming online as well, and we're still looking at future hydro resources. On top of that, another added benefit to having hydro, as we're talking about here in Alaska, and I don't know the specifics of the projects you're talking about, but when you replace your turbines every 50 years or so, You optimize. New technology, new designs, you get about— right now we're refurbishing some of ours that are 50 years old, and we're getting about 10, 15% extra power out of these things. So you get more from what you have in the future, which is interesting because there's not a whole lot of sources of power where you can actually take that asset you've got, refurbish it, and get more. So all this to say, if you mitigate manage the impacts in the right way, and there's— obviously there's ways to do this, it's not invisible, this asset will bring benefits to your communities for generations.

And that's something that we value. Thanks. So part of what I heard you say is that it's not really an either/or, that like hydro and variable renewables can be complementary, both in terms of the timelines under which they can be built and also how they complement each other in terms of dispatchability. Is that true? I mean, we have reservoir hydro, so it— so I will make that distinction.

The reservoirs are the battery that the governor was talking about. This is our ability to be there at a given time, at a given place. But if you think of your waters as a very— if you look to the future and you say, well, water is a precious resource, why? Because you have these gap intermittency and your networks all around you, even in the U.S., northeast. How do you fill these gaps in the most efficient way?

Well, that's what— by using water as efficiently as possible. So you optimize the use of that water. The way to optimize it is really to not use it if there's intermittent resources on the grid that are available that you're not going to store. You're just going to use it for your consumption. I want to sort of— we still have a few more minutes, but I want to wrap up our panel by asking each of you the same question, if I can.

I'd like to ask you both, what is something that you're really excited about, either personally or as an organization? And secondly, what is something that you don't feel people are paying enough attention to right now? So Nicole, do you mind if I start with you again? Sure. Battery storage is having its moment.

It's super exciting. Every utility plan I've looked at across across the country has battery storage in it. So super, like, interested in seeing all the different ways we can use batteries to improve grid flexibility as a transmission resource, as a peaking resource. Super excited about that. The thing that I don't think people understand, which is very troubling to our industry right now, is the challenges we're having on the permitting front.

Now, earlier this morning, Malcolm Wolfe, who runs the National Hydro— Hydro Association was talking about the challenges of permitting hydro facility and having to mitigate for impacts that the project has nothing to do with. We face the same thing, but more currently our permitting challenges are being caused by decisions that were made by the White House. There are over 20 or 200 solar and wind projects right now that are able to deliver power within the next 12 12 months that are stuck in permitting because those permits are being withheld by federal agencies. That was a policy decision that was handed down to these agencies by the White House. Now, I know Alaska has similar— has had similar experiences here where you have experienced what happens when a White House administration decides that one of your resources should not, should not be considered or should not be obtained.

My ask to everyone going forward, and I say this in every conference that I speak in, is it is time to stop politicizing energy. We, we need to be fundamentally centering the important things like reliability and affordability. We, we don't need to be waffling back and forth between what type of generation we decide to build based on who's in the White House at the time. When that happens, it It costs consumers and it wastes billions of dollars. So the permitting challenges that we're facing right now are being litigated in federal court, and we're hopeful that we're going to get these projects over the, over the line soon so that they can deliver low cost to consumers.

But it's critically important for us to stop politicizing electricity generation.

Am I up? Do you want to go next? Actually, I think the Delta Wind Farm has had some hiccups in terms of federal permitting. Is that true? We have, yeah.

Interesting enough, some eagle take permits have been the challenge to get that one across the finish line, you know, ready to go and start construction. It's just kind of hung up in that regard. So share some of those permitting challenges and kind of on all fronts. And totally agree with the all of the above approach. You know, opening it up to all forms of energy no matter what it is.

And, you know, I think what I'm most excited about is the variety. That I do think that conversation is opening up now. 10 Years ago, I wouldn't have thought we were working going on geothermal and nuclear and, you know, there's even some tidal discussions going on. That variety and new look at energy as all of the above is really, I think, starting to change. Maybe the permitting and politicizing of it isn't quite there yet, but I think, you know, from our standpoint, from a, you know, an IPP or a contractor standpoint, having that Looking at that variety is exciting for everyone.

I think the challenges we've faced are costs. Our costs are— and that timing of projects, getting on projects faster has the biggest impact. That inflationary cost, we talk about inflation like it's, you know, everybody complains about taxes and inflation. It has a huge impact on the price of power by the time it gets to the consumer. That's the biggest challenge.

Thanks, Brian. Serge, I'm going to give you the last word here. And I'm looking at the little clock we got. Don't worry. You— don't worry.

All right. I've got 5 seconds.

The thing I think is interesting as we think of how we interact between between regions is how we optimize. And I'll just give an example to illustrate this, but in Quebec we have our neighbors to the south, Vermont, that at certain hours curtail solar power, because there's lots of— there's areas with rooftop solar right on the border, and March, during the spring, there's little population there, and they're curtailing solar power. And so can we get that power across the border to 5 million customers in Quebec back so we don't waste it, and can we send back hydropower when they need it? You know, and so how do we think together to optimize? This is, you know, something that I think is of great value and potential.

And then last thing that I think is really not so— not as popular in terms of discussions we're having is all these— this progress we're making on DSM, all this technology that's out there, this ability to essentially get into someone's house, not literally, but get into go to someone's house, reduce— lower their heat, you know, if they're not home. You lower their heat by 1 or 2 Fahrenheit, big deal. But it's really having a huge impact on the grid. And we can do this today. So there's all that untapped potential, and I know this is something we're starting to try and figure out.

Thank you so much, Serge. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Brian. Let's give them a big, big round of applause. We really appreciate your Time.

So, all right, once again, please join me in thanking all of our speakers for a great discussion about the future of renewables, both in Alaska and around the world.

And because she is occasionally on my softball team, for DeAntha Crockett of the Alaska Miners Association, without mining there is no renewable energy.

Oh, you can clap a little louder for mining, for crying out loud. We do have a break coming up, but before we do, I would ask you to turn your attention to the screens for a short message from our sponsor, ConocoPhillips Alaska. For over 50 For over 50 years, ConocoPhillips has safely and reliably developed Alaska's oil resources, creating economic opportunity and enhancing America's energy security. As Alaska's largest producer, we have interest in major production hubs of Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk, and the Western North Slope, including Willow, our project located in the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, which is on track for first oil in early 2029. Willow is the largest project in size the North Slope in more than 20 years.

Construction is now over 50% complete. The last winter season included construction of gravel roads and pads, as well as two bridges. The Willow permanent camp is now fully operational, enabling year-round work. The world will need reliable and responsibly developed oil and gas resources for decades to come. That's why our commitment to Alaska goes beyond Willow, moving further north further west into the NPRA, where we are actively pursuing new exploration opportunities.

ConocoPhillips also continues to look to the future, further growing our significant interest in the NPRA, all while continuing to maintain the highest standards of safety and reliability in our operations. Minimizing environmental impact remains a cornerstone of our approach to ensure responsible stewardship as we develop Alaska's natural resources. ConocoPhillips, committed to Alaska for more than 50 years.

We will now take our short afternoon break, a great time to visit the exhibit hall, grab some coffee at the ConocoPhillips coffee cart, and connect with fellow attendees. If you're looking for a place to hold a meeting, there is the Polar LNG Energy Lounge just on the other side of the wall. After the break, we'll have another round of breakout session— or After the break, the breakout sessions will begin in the conference rooms on the second floor. And then back here at 3:45, we'll reconvene for closing sessions of the day, followed by the networking reception right outside in the foyer. Enjoy your break, and we'll see you back here at 3:45.