Resilience in Practice: Planning for Extreme Weather and Infrastructure Failure

It's a new type of form, but there's not a great word for that. Most of the work that we've done is in Western, West Coast, and the ones on the West Coast have a lot of Japanese words. It's like all of them are from Japan. You know, like, uh, "kawa" is "kawa" in Japanese. "Mama" is "mama" in Japanese.

And "kawa" is scattered across the world, and they say, "Oh, we're gonna add "shizuka" to the vocabulary." In terms of energy, it's like the connections are like the community has a little bit of trade, but they're not really like a lot of trade. It's just like how they grow their own power. The fishing season's over, so I think it's all being designed to have like a steady power. That's a common philosophy in the community is we're building a farm for the future without attaching Good morning, everyone. We're going to get started in a moment.

It looks like folks are still transitioning from the previous activities.

Welcome to Resilience in Practice. This is a panel. My name is Max Neil. I'm moderating. I'm with Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

To give our panelists a better idea of their audience, can you all raise your hand if you're coming from outside of Alaska today?

Thank you. Okay, and then for Alaska residents, how many of you live off the road system in rural Alaska? Okay, thank you. How many of you have worked on a village power system before? Okay, a good number.

So we have a mixed, a mixed audience. Some have probably a lot of expertise in this area and some maybe have little. The goal of our session today is to talk about resilience and natural hazards, how to prevent impacts to our energy infrastructure, and also how to make it more resilient. So a little bit of background. I work with a team at ANTHC that helps communities to address erosion and flooding and permafrost degradation.

So I'm here to just facilitate the conversation. One thing that I wanted to share is across Alaska we have a lot of— we have a lot of infrastructure, but energy infrastructure is actually critical infrastructure. Back in 2009 when the Army Corps was doing the baseline erosion assessment, which was a look at hazards across Alaska to infrastructure from erosion, they picked two infrastructure types that are actually critical— critical infrastructure. One is schools. And the other is energy infrastructure, the power system.

So what I'd like to do next is introduce our panelists. Bill, you've got some slides. Do you want to come up here and share your visuals first?

Okay.

Max has got a—. Excuse me—. Max has got a lot of questions for us, so I have to make this very brief. I just wanted to give an introduction to Alaska Village Electric Cooperative. Pausing on this slide—.

How do I advance? Is it this one?

Pausing on this slide, this is just a picture of a typical community in western Alaska. This is actually Savoonga out on St. Lawrence Island. The distribution system is similar to what you would see in lots of other places. Maybe a subdivision in your hometown if you're not from rural Alaska, but those are our power lines and we don't really have any high-tension, high-voltage transmission lines. So just keep that as a visual.

Communities that AVEX serves is mostly along the West Coast. We also serve down in Southeast, Yakutat, Kodiak Island, Old Harbor, but we're pretty much spread out around the West Coast of Alaska and the rivers that flow into the west—. Or out of the west coast of Alaska. By the numbers, AVEC is a 501 rural electric cooperative, so we are owned by the members we serve. Everybody that spins a meter for AVEC is a part owner of the cooperative.

We serve 58 communities with 46 power plants, primarily diesel generation. Usually our power plants are relatively small with diesel truck engines that are mounted to generators. To supply power, we burn over 9 million gallons of diesel fuel a year. We've got about 500 miles of distribution, again spread out all over Alaska in these small pockets where the communities are. We've been integrating renewables since 2000.

We've got 13 wind sites with 33 wind turbines serving 22 communities, and we've started to integrate wind, solar, and also energy storage over the last 3 or 4 years. Um, cost of service last year was $74 million. Another highlighted number on there is our cost of fuel. You'll see that the cost of fuel is more than half of our total cost of generation and distribution. So that $74 million comes from our cooperative members.

There is a program in Alaska called Power Cost Equalization that helps support residential and community facilities to the tune of about $15 to $16 million, so about 20% of Avex revenue. Is paid for through PCE. Total kilowatt-hour sales in 2025, 126 megawatt-hours, is relatively small. Population served is about 31,000 people, similar to Juneau or Fairbanks, but it's about a third of the load that you might see in a community like that. This is just a shot pulling back in that same community of Savoonga.

This is what it looks like out the plane when you're arriving sometime in the winter. For 8 months out of the year, the only way you get materials in and out of this community is on that airstrip you see in the background. Whoop, sorry. In the summertime, the Bering Sea, which is up front here, melts and you can bring barge traffic in to deliver fuel and large— larger goods.

Avek operates with a main headquarters in Anchorage. We've got 90 full-time employees, about another 120 part-time part-time employees that are our plant operators in each of the communities that we serve. This is just a shot of a typical power plant in Stebbins. I've got a graphic a little bit later that shows kind of the breadth of size of communities that we serve. This is kind of closer to the top of a larger community.

There's 4 diesel units in that generation building. The distribution system takes off. There's pad mount transformers that step the voltage up from 480 volts to 7200 volts. And every community has some level of diesel storage to get through the winter. This is that graphic I was talking about.

Basically, you probably can't read any of the numbers, but the gorilla in the room is Bethel on the right-hand side of that graphic. That is a community of about 6,300 people. Sorry. That's a community of about 6,300 people. Sorry if I wasn't being clear.

Close enough to the mic. The rest of the communities, the other 57 of those communities, are all more similar in size, but yet they are pretty small. The reason I wanted to emphasize this graphic is because I've also put in various buildings that are in Juneau. So if you've been to Alaska, you've been to the capital. Those buildings on an annual basis use the same amount of power as these communities as they're listed there.

So we have very small communities serving very small loads. That's it.

Jocelyn, off to you.

Hi, good morning. I am Jocelyn Fenton, Director of Programs for the Denali Commission. We are an independent federal agency headquartered in Alaska, the only federal agency headquartered in Alaska, and we focus on rural infrastructure. Today and this week, you know, with this energy conference, I will try to have some energy focus, but in general, you know, I want to tell you a little bit about the Denali Commission.

We have special tools in our toolbox. We have broad authority where we can operate in any number of arenas, and if you go to a rural Alaskan village, Denali Commission is most likely involved in some element of some project in those communities. Our power and bulk fuel program is 1/3 to 1/2 of our annual appropriations that we receive. And so we'll definitely, you know, have our name on some of those bulk fuel facilities and power plants that Bill had showed you in some of those slides. Along with the broad authority where we can do energy and power housing, sanitation, water, waste, broadband, and transportation.

We have no-year funding. So a lot of other federal agencies have 1-year, 2-year, or 5-year funds. The Denali Commission receives our fund and they're available until spent. And so that makes them— we have no-year funding. We also have match authority.

The U.S. federal government typically requires a non-federal match to other federal funds in construction projects. It's not required for planning and design, but infrastructure projects typically do require even a 2, 5, 10%, sometimes up to 50% or a 1-to-1 match with federal funds. And Denali Commission funds can be used as that non-federal match because there are so many communities in the state of Alaska that don't have a tax base and have no real ability to come up with that match, at least not the full match. We love it when communities have skin in the game and they can come up with some of the funds to participate in that project, but sometimes it's cost prohibitive in order to get to, you know, even a 10% match on a large capital infrastructure project. With those tools, we also have transfer authority, so we receive quite a bit of funding through other agencies.

So while, you know, we're currently in the House bill for $18 million annual appropriation for FY '27, which could be— could change, we receive transfers from other agencies that want to partner with the Denali Commission where we have mutual interests.

And whenever they do come to the Denali Commission, it becomes, you know, has a little bit broader authority. We have our interagency agreements. We decide on what type of work we want to do, but it becomes no-year funding, and it can be used as that non-federal match as well. We went through an external review last year and were determined to be a model of efficiency before efficiency was cool in the federal government, and this team said that we were right-sized that we did good work. And once they saw, you know, this— the transfer mechanism and that efficiency that we do implement projects in Alaska using these other federal funds, they essentially gave us a clean bill of health, although we're not into putting anything on paper.

Our—. I mentioned our energy program and that it's a fair amount of our annual appropriations. It's the largest program we have at the Denali Commission, and that's before we received an influx of a transfer— EPA, thank you. We received $100 million, and we were able to repurpose it through some of the administration adjustments last year to focus on a bulk fuel program. We like to call it Phase 1 of bulk fuel program focused on upgrading bulk fuel infrastructure in 10 communities across the state of Alaska.

Now, for those coming from outside, so bulk fuel are basically large fuel tanks to where it allows a community to buy in bulk in order to get that cost down. In very basic terms, I believe. We also have our Village Infrastructure Protection Program, and that is, I think, the nexus of energy, power, and this conversation we're having this afternoon. Where in 2015, President Obama visited Alaska and said the Denali Commission will be in charge of relocation activities. However, that came with no new authorities and no additional appropriations.

So our commissioners at the time carved out a piece of our funding, a percentage of our funding, and focused it into a new program called the Village Infrastructure Protection. We're looking at protecting the public investment, you know, all of our public dollars that go into the federal government and protecting that investment in Alaska in terms of permafrost thaw, flooding, and erosion. Those were the things we were focused on. At that time in 2016, we set up the Center for Environmentally Threatened Communities that Max is a part of and has led his team from just a few to— how many did you say? 26.

26, Which is incredible. And they have been our technical arm to the commission, along with their own, you know, climate program that Max will tell you about.

In 2019, we published the statewide threat assessment, and we are currently undergoing an update to that. And that was looking at communities at risk, the flooding, erosion, and permafrost thaw, and then that combination of all three, or USTEC, is that catastrophic loss of land that we see in communities, some communities in western Alaska. But it's a ranking of communities with, you know, 1 being the highest risk, 3 being still having a risk, but less severe. And we're going through this update, adding in wildfire, volcano, earthquake, and tsunami into this 2026 new statewide threat assessment. So be on the lookout this fall if you have any interest in that.

We will have a draft document, I hope, by September. And I'll leave it at that for now, and then we can get into some of the questions that Max has. Thank you. Vanessa, do you want to share your visuals or just do a verbal? I'll do that.

Yeah. Hi everyone, good morning. I'm Lea'asi Vanessa Lee Raymond. I'm from Alaska Center for Energy and Power, which is a part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I see some of my colleagues here.

Thank you guys. Hi. You can raise your hands if you would like to. We have people in the room who are both staff members who are PhD students and also run some of our programs. So we're an applied energy research center.

We work with communities across the state and we work at multiple scales. So some of the research that we're doing happens at the household level, where we're putting a data logger in someone's house and understanding how they use heating fuel to heat their homes. Then we work at the utility level. We have utility partners here in and so we answer and help answer research questions that the utility itself has. How do they add a battery to their microgrid?

How do they look at rates, for example? We also work at the borough and regional level, and we have borough partners here as well. You know, we sit on committees and we help advise where we can, where our research is useful. We also work at the state level. The national level, interregional level.

So Arctic and Pacific exchange is one of our focuses right now, because the Pacific has similar microgrid systems to Alaska. There's a lot of knowledge that we can share and strengthen both regions at the same time. A lot of people think that ACEP as an energy research center is like 100 engineers sitting in a room. That's not quite true. We have economists, we have political scientists, we have storytellers, we have educators.

So we take a really broad approach to how energy is researched and discussed in the state. Our goal is cost-effective, accessible power for all communities to support community flourishing, whatever that means at the community level. Maybe it means a fish processing plant, maybe it means a mine, maybe it means a clinic, maybe it means a school. That's really not for us to decide or weigh in on. We just want to be a part of whatever that solution space is for people.

I am the Deputy Director for Strategic Initiatives, and so I oversee our strategic initiatives. What is that? That's things we historically haven't done. So historically, we were a small research unit, just like the one that Max is growing right now. We, I think, were founded in 2016.

We've grown to about 100 people in our research center across the world. So one of our Icelandic one of our staff members is here, a PhD student. So it spans across the state and across the circumpolar Arctic. Strategic initiatives are education and workforce development. We have our education and workforce development lead in the back of the room.

Cyber infrastructure, so we really need to underpin this research with robust capacity for storing data, sharing data, and protecting data. To that end, we also have an information security unit. So those are the, the units that I take care of, we have really strong leads there and I advocate for them. We also have large research programs, complex ones that span multiple years, multiple communities, and that's also the strategic initiatives part of my role. Nice to meet all of you.

So next we have some rapid-fire questions for our panelists. They aim to— first we're going to cover what the problem is, talk about vision, talk about some next steps and recommendations, and then we'll do Q&A with all of you. So if you all can join us in some rapid-fire responses, that would be great. Yes. Vanessa, let's jump back to you.

What do you see as the problem here related to, from your perspective, resilience and natural hazards and impacts to energy infrastructure? One of the things I'm thinking about these days is that when we do energy planning, we are using historical data and historical baselines which no longer match the reality that we're planning for. We're building energy systems for the next 50 years, 100 years, but we're looking at data from 2008.

Yeah, I would echo a little bit about the, the history of Natural disasters. I looked up, you know, how many 100-year storms we had in the last 15 years in western Alaska, and they say, well, there's not enough data from western Alaska to actually determine that. But certainly we've seen a lot. Greater increase in permafrost degradation, erosion, all the things that these folks are working on all the time. And the impact, because there is a loss of ice in the sea so that warmer Weather is coming further north.

We're having ex-typhoons hit western Alaska. There's no ice in order to dampen the water surge, and communities are being inundated with pretty strong winds, high flooding, and it's getting— the cycle repeats itself a lot quicker than anybody had anticipated. I would say a number of our communities are, if not maybe all, were crafted, built up with, you know, some of this Western-style infrastructure before NEPA. And so there was not an environmental assessment done on these community locations to consider both the human impact to the environment, but also the environment's impact to the people. So that's one thing I would say.

We need site-specific data. New would be great, to— in order to avoid some of these impacts. And then we don't have consistent funding focused on environmental threats to infrastructure, and that makes it very difficult for that planning and implementation work.

Thanks, Noelle. How about for the vision for the future? Can you paint a little picture of what you'd like to see in how many years or generations forward?

I don't know that my vision gets that specific, Max, but the vision of ACEP, the research center that I work for, is cost-effective, reliable access to energy that supports community flourishing. And I really want to emphasize that flourishing part. We're not just surviving, we're thriving. And so what does that look like and how do we support that? And it's not for me to say what what each community's vision is.

For AVEC, it's really, you know, has always been providing safe, reliable power for the communities that we serve. And part of that is being able to help generate the economy in those communities so the economy does thrive. We've talked a lot about the liability of the location for communities and the impact that they're seeing from weather, but it's really system operations and right designs for the right places in order to make things last for the future.

And I would say, in general, just integration of new technology while keeping that simple system that works, you know, until which time— you know, having innovation, but that's also easily managed. Onsite and reliable. All those new— it's funny, we get equipment requests and they want old equipment. They don't want the new equipment with those LCD screens, touch screens, and I can completely agree with them. They drive me crazy in my car.

The old mechanical and hydraulic equipment and easily replaceable and manageable. Serviceable. Thanks. You all attack this problem from different perspectives, like the funding perspective, I'd say the implementation perspective, Bill, and then the research perspective. Jocelyn, can you start us out?

What are some of the top priorities for your organization right now related to preparing for resilience and infrastructure threats? The preparation is— it's in the plannings, you know. We need to have plans to you know, that both have us ready. We're always getting ready. So what kind of plans do we have in place in the face of some disasters or even some of the slow-moving threats?

What kind of facilities or support do we have with supplies or in a warm storage? So, you know, Genali Commission looks at, you know, the planning, the design, some facility space in order to have facilities some of those spaces, the training, you know, it's both the workforce, but also the training of the various response organizations. And then there is some momentum here on putting together an Alaska recovery plan for that after the storm with all of the really great lessons learned that we're seeing. Some are not good things, but we, you know, need to document what has been done and what worked as well, and documenting some of those best practices here after the Typhoon Halong storm last fall. And then I would say another priority is, you know, we as a federal agency headquartered in Alaska, we work very closely with our congressional delegation for their support and for federal policy.

And, you know, if there's any suggestions or collaborations that we can assist with, please let us know about that too.

Can you mention the statewide threat assessment a little bit more? So it's a— basically a ranking of communities based on threat across multiple hazards. How do you hope others will use that, and how will you use it? Yeah. So statewide threat assessment is designed to be a priority list of communities most at risk.

And that kind of feeds into I think Max's next question, on how do, does our organization make decisions about our work and initiatives. And we really prefer to use priority lists. We have priority lists for bulk fuel and power plants across the state. We have these priority from the statewide threat assessment, recognizing that competitive opportunities are not always the best way to apply grant funding. So I would say, you know, statewide threat assessment is designed to paint a bullseye on what communities need assistance now in order to protect their infrastructure and where the data needs are.

You know, when we talk about site-specific data, the conclusion of the 2019 statewide threat assessment was that more site-specific data is necessary. And I suspect that the 2026 iteration of this report And the report will say a similar story of more data is needed in order for a local community— or a community to make decisions locally on what infrastructure may need to be moved. You know, is it a managed retreat? Is it we need some sort of protection if there's, you know, an appropriate application for their situation, or if it's a full relocation? Yeah.

Thanks. Bill, how about you? How about the top priorities for AVAC right now? Well, I guess being an electric utility, we always build for the long haul. Every time we go into a design or make a repair, it's looking at it— how long can we make this last?

And being the purveyor of 46 power plants for 58 communities, we get a lot of practice for emergencies.

And the general effort in order to keep facilities running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, knowing that we want to be in the game for 50, 60, 70 years, really speaks to how we design things, how we— to Jocelyn's point— develop a workforce that can operate and maintain the facilities that we build. Being able to have sufficient spares availability, you have to look at supply chains, you have to figure out, do we have enough fuel, but also do you have enough poles, transformers, wires in order to fix things in a reasonable fashion when the worst does happen. We have ice storms all the time. We have winds over 75 miles an hour, which would, you know, make the national news for most people. And it's just another day in western Alaska.

So there's kind of a rigorous environment that we live and operate in already. So we're already trying to build very hardened systems. But there is that continual need for fuel efficiency. And again, to Jocelyn's point, trying to figure out the balance between how technical and integrated can we get with new technology and still maintain and support facilities that are going to be in it for the long haul. Did Ex-Typhoon Halong change your organization's priorities related to resilience, or are there any— did it change how you think about this problem?

It did for about a month, just responding to those immediate needs and trying to figure out how do we get the resources that we need applied to such a wide swath because that was something that, you know, usually you have a few communities that might be impacted by a large storm, but we had 23 of our 58 communities that, you know, were going dark for periods of time just because distribution systems were really that much impacted. We did not have the devastation of complete community, you know, removal and houses floating away, those sorts of things, but still just the facilities, not only AVACS facilities, but the facilities of the state, even when we did have a lineman that was able to travel from one community to another, there was no aircraft available to move them because they were evacuating people from damaged areas. And you realize just how close you are to the edge of all of the capacity of everything that you rely on to be there. Thanks. Vanessa, how about you?

What is ACEP doing to prepare for resilience and natural hazards? Yeah, we're not part of the direct response like Bill is, and so the way that we address resiliency is knowledge sharing networks, and we do that in multiple different ways. It can be peer cohorts of people who are energy champions in their community. It can be specific data sets that help us assess or analyze a fault or a disturbance or a system that's not performing like someone anticipated. And really just trying to keep our fingers on the pulse at all times because we don't know when or where we'll need to be able to quickly come together in a flexible team and try to understand a problem quickly.

So we also always try to be leveling up our own knowledge of the state of, every system that we can, all of the people and experts across the Circumpolar Arctic really who might be able to come all hands on deck to help understand something at a moment in time. How about, can you speak a little bit to the decision making at ACEP regarding this space? How do you make decisions about what to research, what projects to pursue, any new info that you need to inform your future work? Mm-hmm. So ACEP is pretty decentralized and democratized about how we make decisions, and so we often come together in flexible teams that are pulled together at any moment's notice to say, okay, you know this, you know this, did you know that person, you have that data set, can you come together, bring your student and their model, and let's try and troubleshoot this right now.

We do— we try to be really responsive, and that requires us to be very flexible. So it can look a little opaque, I think, from the outside, like, who should I talk to about what? But really, I think if you talk to anyone at ACEP, we will help, like, concierge guide you to the right set of people. I will say that one thing that's really important in that type of structure is you need a champion within ACEP because we need to be able to mobilize resources, we need to be able to align work with our funders that we already have. And so there is a little bit of coordination on our end that helps smooth that process forward.

Bill, I'm curious if you can speak to how AVEC prioritizes, like, do you have a priority list for, say, this community's tank farm is threatened, we need to move it? How do you make decisions and be proactive? Yeah, there's continual assessment of the facilities that we have and where they rank in our our list of things that need to be done. And if you look at it, it's like there's probably a barrier between all the wants and needs and getting things done. As things get removed from that barrier list, a big one is funding.

To Vanessa's point, having a champion in the community, somebody that's going to be ushering the right people to the decision makers in order to figure out what actually can be done in a community, especially if you are talking about a relocation or a large infrastructure project that is going to require property and those sorts of things. But the list of things that have to happen to come together to actually make a project happen is being worked on, on many different facets. And when the stars start to align in one area, then that is when a project gets built.

Jocelyn. I can speak more too about priorities. We love priority lists. Again, you know, trying to keep funding opportunities outside of the competitive field. When you can really say these are the top needs of Alaska, it makes it easier to apply funding to those things.

We've had priority lists, you know, for bulk fuel and power, but also health clinics clinics, a barge landing assessment done through the Corps of Engineers. I'd like to see more expansion of transportation priorities in Alaska, and we have many different layers. We've got the STIP, we've got regional transportation plans, we have community priority transportation needs, etc. One exciting project that Denali Commission has partnered with Alaska Federation of Natives on is to unlock Alaska's resource potential and focused on what kind of projects can tribes use to leverage their own resources. And it doesn't just have to be oil and gas or mining or timber.

It can also be subsistence resources. But what can we look at in terms of roads, bridges, barge landings to give additional access to lands in order to to have a better chance at, you know, some local economy across the state. I did want to mention— oh, we do do competitive opportunities from time to time, as much as I'm downplaying them. We love the competitive funding opportunity because that is a transparent way of applying our funding. We have various evaluation criteria and capacity criteria and leveraged funds that all feed into applications.

But it— that is, it's a good process. We try to uplift communities that have— that are considered economically distressed across the state, and then again some of those communities that are considered environmentally threatened when they have project needs. And then the third way— so we've got priority lists, we have competitive opportunities, and then we have, you know, directed spending or partnership-directed type spending. That's where, you know, we're getting funds either from Congress or from another federal agency, and we have projects funded into a, you know, a certain category or mission area.

And I did want to mention the unmet needs report that Center for Environmentally Threatened Communities, ANTHC, put together mentioned an $80 million need per year for avoiding impacts to infrastructure in the state of Alaska. And so one thing we're doing is asking what would that look like if we were able to peel off $80 million off of some other existing program? That's what the congressional delegation is asking. So if anyone has any bright ideas, we're looking, you know, at various programs, but, you know, with the Department of Homeland Security or even HUD's you know, imminent disaster, imminent threat program, NRCS, you know, USDA has some various programs that can support, you know, what does it look like if Alaska had $80 million coming to try to help protect existing infrastructure?

Bill, I'm wondering if we can jump into, say, a disaster scenario. What does it look like on the ground after disaster strikes, and how does AVAC help a community, say there's a big flood or some other disaster? Can you give us a boots-on-the-ground perspective? Yeah. Depending on the scale of the disaster, if it's just a single community, obviously we're in trying to get our facilities back up and running.

As you had mentioned, energy kind of is an underpinning for, for the whole community. It's not unlike or unlikely that if the energy is out for any period of time that you could then lose communications within that community and then lose water and sewer, especially if it's cold out. So our primary response is always get the lights back on as quickly as possible. As far as the cleanup after the fact, it is really— oftentimes, AVEC is moving out to the next location that has a critical infrastructure need. The money that we have in order to spend to build and develop our power projects and maintain them comes from the communities and the people that we serve.

And we're not necessarily stretching out and taking care of housing or taking care of water and sewer. Those sorts of things. But we do partner with the communities. I guess just anecdotally, there's— in Noatak, there's— it's a community that's on a river system, very braided river system. Degradation of permafrost continues to erode.

It's threatening both the airport, the fuel storage, the power plant, the water supply for that community. And, you know, it's something that's come up for 20 years. Is the river going to— start carving away. And 2 years ago, about August timeframe, there was a change in the Braided River upstream, and that created a little different flow in front of the community, so it really started carving away quickly. AVEC moved a standby generator in there for the emergency short-term because we were thinking we're going to have to move our tank farm, our power plant, everything very quickly.

You can't do that without having backup generation because it's going to take more months in order to move that stuff. And we continue to work with that community and the Department of Transportation who is making great strides to build a new airport 2 miles out of town with funding that came from the EPA through the Denali Commission, ANTHC, in order to rebuild the tank farm at a location close to the airport because they don't have barge service anymore, so the tank farm needs to be near the airport where the fuel gets flown in. And now we're looking for funding to relocate the power plant. And all of that is being worked in conjunction with the tribe and the city and federal agencies in order to get that done. Can you explain who pays for some of the emergency response efforts, like, say, a no-attack?

If you need to do something really quickly, does that cost get borne to ratepayers, or do you— applying to grants? We are applying for grants. To date, most of the work that we've done in Noatak over the last 2 years for this emergency response has just been on us. It was nice to have this windfall of the EPA funding for bulk fuel tank farms. It's actually 10 communities.

Noatak was named as one of them because it was such a priority. But all of the, you know, renting a Herc in order to fly in a generator at $100,000 is on AVAC and gets borne by the the people. Thanks. So looking out to the future, what are some recommendations that you all have related to increasing the resilience of infrastructure in remote communities or avoiding natural hazards? Jocelyn, to you.

I guess I would start off with it's always great to have good governance in a community. You know, those communities that have the tribal organizations that all get along and they can their priorities, and then they can act upon them is incredible to witness. So, I throw that out there. And then, you know, the reliability of the system is only as good as your operators that are there maintaining the system. So, it's always appreciative whenever, you know, we do have local champions that want to see their systems work in a continuous way, and then, you know, best— best case, they have a backup person.

Sometimes it's, you know, one person that we're all really depending on, and that's a lot of pressure. So having a backup system is always good. I would say the partnerships on some of these multifaceted projects, you know, Bill reminded me of the Noatak Project where, yeah, we are working with a number of, you know, state and federal agencies for both the airport, but also the bulk fuel and now the power plants out there. And it's good to have those relationships with those other partners and the funding that comes along with them. It's always good to have— get that funding in bulk too to maximize the efficiency.

Yeah, the bulk funding. I got to keep that one in mind. And then I would just say, you know, the public input. We are a federal agency. We publish a work plan.

Plan every year. No one seems to read it, but we— it's a public input period. Thank you. And we appreciate the public's input into that. We are governed by our own Board of Commissioners, and that's on our website at Denali.gov.

But that includes the president— that includes the governor or their delegate, which is Rachel Balsma, the Deputy Chief of Staff, the president of the University of Alaska the president or executive director of Alaska Municipal League, executive director of Alaska General Contractors, AFL-CIO, and AFN. So, you know, reach out to your contacts if you have any input into, you know, various commission activities or even other federal actions. And I think, you know, partnerships make us stronger going forward.

I guess, if I'm remembering the question, what is the suggestion for being more resilient and what would we do with our communities, what would we say to the communities? And I think that is, you know, being able to provide backup generation and survive limited outages. Obviously, we want to be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We do have overlapping issues that gets to a point where we cannot supply power all the time. Again, I'll go back to Noatak this last winter.

There was an extended outage there where the plant operator was not able to get the power plant back online. We needed to get a technician in there. It was 40 below. Planes were not flying. They don't like to fly when it's really cold out.

They were able to convince a local carrier to get the guy there, but it was probably 7 or 8 hours later, and at 40 below, lots of things fail. Usually the place of refuge is the school, but unfortunately the school's backup generator was not running. Another backup would be the clinic, but the clinic's backup generator was not running.

So there's, you know, it's a catch-22 if you're providing very reliable power, people just take it for granted. Eventually, you can't provide that power, and people have to be ready when that occurs. Do you have a recommendation for something at the state or federal level that would help AVEC or villages, like a policy change or obviously more funding? Is there anything that stands out to you at a higher level that would make a big difference?

Yeah, funding always seems to come to the top of my mind. There's a lot of things that we could do, but also workforce development. One of the things of keeping these systems running is having adequate manpower and trained technicians that can operate and maintain these systems.

I'd be lying if I said some of the faults— it's not all weather-related. Obviously, it's maintenance and maintaining systems. And if you have talented people that know how to take care of things, then you have less outages.

Vanessa. I think you can just advance them.

Okay, I think this works. I wanted to take a minute to kind of provide a provocation to all of you, not necessarily a recommendation. Let's see, I got to skip through some things.

So the question I have for all of you is, what do we know about the future that can help us today? And I wanted to share a little bit about an experiment we're doing. It is not actionable. It is very theoretical, which typically ACEP doesn't do. But we're working with climate forecasting modelers at IARC, the International Arctic Research Center, also at UAF, in this, like, again, a flexible adaptive team that came together with ACEP's energy modelers.

And the question we're asking is, can we take climate forecast data and put it into an energy model system and look at what future conditions may dictate a system that we built today? What we found is this is technically very difficult to do, and we haven't found anyone who's done it. So we feel like we're at the edge something, maybe no one's done it because it's a terrible idea. There's also that.

And so as I said at the beginning, right, we're taking resource availability, solar, wind, wind intensity duration from the past, and we're using it to model our systems. What if we went into the future and use that to model our systems? Okay, you do not need to know about the nitty-gritty, but just to say that at UEF we have some of the world's leading experts in Arctic climate modeling. And so it's a real privilege to be able to work with them alongside ACEP's experts who are also able to ground truth the energy models with people like Kotzebue Electric, Northwest Arctic Borough, we are able to validate models, which I think many people outside of the North wouldn't have the relationships to do that. And so I'll just also skip to this animation.

Yes, it's playing. We don't need to only do like highly technical and theoretical work. We can also look at the data we already have. And so that's my second provocation for you. We have lots of data that is underutilized.

This is an animation from Beaded Cloud with Eric Williams, who's in the back of the room, where they're taking sensor data, already exists, putting it into a dashboard to say, hey, how's the permafrost thaw look today? Well, today it looks good, so that's great. Kudos to them for that type of work. So my provocations are What do we know about the future that can help us today? And how can we use all the data we have now?

Thank you. Now we're going to pass the mic to you all for questions for our panelists. I think we have a— Cheryl in the back has a mic. And I'm happy to pass this one. Who has a question?

Hi, my name is Jane. And a number of you mentioned the need for site-specific data. My question is, if you are able to get the site-specific data you need, do you envision that the stewards of that data would be like a single organization or a partnership of organization— of organizations depending on the data? Or do you envision that that data would be collected, maintained, and accessed through the sites themselves. Do you mean hazard data, or do you mean energy data?

Either, but mostly energy data, but either works.

For the communities we serve, AVEC is, you know, the the resident expert on the energy data that we need. Certainly, load growth projections or anything like that would rely on what is— it looks like for the economic development of that community. As far as weather data, there used to be a division of the U.S. government called USGS that had a lot of information about weather and flooding, those sorts of things. A lot of that information was never historically collected in the West Coast of Alaska. When we try to develop locations and say, what's the flood elevation or expected flood elevation for this location, there really is minimal data.

And you go out, and you look at the buildings that have been there for more than 50 or 60 years. And you look at the high-water mark, and you add a foot. And that's kind of the data we're working with.

Max, do you want— I mean— You could probably better speak to some of the housing of the data. You know, the state has a StoryMap site-specific data register.

It's alphabetical. You can go and see, you know, which communities have data, those communities that have chosen to share that information. It's kind of an extension from their community database online, which is so great, wonderful resource at the state. But essentially, you know, it's community-driven, community-led data collection. You know, they may hire a consultant, but that consultant provides those reports to the community.

It's up to the community whether they want to, you know, share that information. Most of the time, it is a good idea to share it, and so they have. And then that can feed into whether it's applications for additional, you know, planning or implementation projects, you know, Center for Environmentally Threatened Communities can work with them too on preparing some of those reports or finding recommendations to turn it into a fundable project or even just a project to move forward on. Vanessa, go for it. I love that you used the word stewardship.

I think there's a lot of models between stewardship and ownership. That we forget about when we talk about data. So how many of you parked your car at an airport parking lot to come here? How many of you got a dog sitter? How many of you got a house sitter?

When you go back home from the conference, is your house, your dog, and your, your car still yours? You assume that it is, right? You had someone steward your house and dog and car for a weekend. But it's still yours. And so, I think there's some nuance there in your question about who owns it versus who stewards it for you.

Those are not mutually exclusive things. And so, you— the tribe, the village can still own the data, but someone else can hold it for them, give them access, walk it, feed it, all of that. So, I think we should really lean into all the models of stewardship and ownership we have in our lives, the Airbnbs, the Rovers, the airport, the valet, and bring those into our data relationships as well. Thank you.

My name is Sean Williams. I am an interdisciplinary PhD student, VP of Government Affairs and Strategy for a company called Pacific DataPort, and former Assistant Commissioner of Commerce for the State of Alaska. My question is centered around broadband resilience. And I realize that this is energy and, but they go, they pretty much go hand in hand. And when you start talking about the typhoon and the results, I think we can all admit that one of the first things that happened was everybody started sending Starlinks to the communities that were affected.

I think that's great. We know that there are somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 Starlink terminals throughout the state of Alaska at the moment. So it's, it's being adopted very well. Um, my question for you is, is simply this: as you do all of this planning and preparation for the next big disaster, are we putting pressure on our ISPs to make sure to ensure that their systems, their networks are backed up and ready to go at a moment's notice. Not, okay, we're going to fly in 500 Starlinks and hope this works.

But, but they could be investing in the future to make sure that their systems are more resilient. And I'm not saying that you have to give them the money. They've gotten plenty of money. Are they being asked to back up their networks? Thank you.

I don't know if any of us can. Thank you for your input. Yeah, no, I think that's a critical point. AVAC has just gotten into the broadband realm in the last 4 or 5 years. I mean, we've used— terrestrial-based broadband communication that's been developed over the last 15 or 20 years.

We've used satellite and those sorts of things, but we have shifted primarily to Starlink just because it is the lower cost, easily deployable, easily repairable or replaceable, I guess, not necessarily repairable, but allows us to continue to have communication in places where we haven't had that before. So, I guess I haven't really put the pressure on other ISPs to say you have to have full-time backup because we're really— they don't get much communication going when the lights go out. It used to be a difficulty just getting a phone connection or anything because there were, you know, limited battery capacity in the earth stations that were at these locations. So the lights would go out and they might have had a battery system that was supposed to be good for 8 hours, but that's 20 years old and now it's good for 20 minutes. And it's difficult to troubleshoot a problem when you can't communicate with, with the community.

But now there's a variety of other vendors and providers, and there's broadband technology, so, uh, somebody with a 12-volt battery and a Starlink can actually communicate with us. Back at the home office. So it's been a, it's been a boon as far as being able to assist in, uh, these difficult times. And especially when everything else is wiped out, it doesn't take much to make that satellite connection now.

And I guess there's no question that redundancy of communications would be great, um, especially during a storm. So, yeah. Hello, my name is Sophie Tiddler. I'm a new associate at a law firm called Schwab Williamson and Wyatt in town here, and I used to be an engineer for ANTHC and had the good fortune of working with Max Neil there, and also am a UAF alum. I think my question is probably more directed to Jocelyn because you touched on it a little bit, but it's about like the level of cohesive governance when you are trying to implement your programs and your planning.

And I'm wondering what kind of agreements you're relying on when you are, yeah, working with specific communities. And maybe also, William, with your utilities, what sort of engagement with communities you're working with.

Well, I would say— I'm thinking, are you— the agreements like tribal resolutions for a specific project or priority, and then also coordinating, you know, the federal agencies that may be partnering on a particular project, all of that. There's a lot, you know, and then sprinkling in some, you know, subject matter expertise expertise from Max's group and ANTHC and then boots on the ground with some of the utilities and whatnot. So there could be a lot of coordination necessary and, yeah, definitely having agreements in place and plans in place. It seems like the overarching kind of theme of a number of Max's questions were kind of pointing to we need to have an existing existing plan and procedures in place for many of these projects to really be completed.

Bill, do you want to share anything? We have been fortunate enough to work with Denali Commission quite a bit and there are lots of— a variety of different agreements, you know, locally with tribes and communities that we're working with. They could be as simple as a memorandum of understanding that we're going to develop this project and in the end if we do get funding it's going to result in this and we all agree to abide by these basic tenets. Or it could be a very formal contract that is with contractors or even the tribe that we spelled out that these are, you know, the absolute requirements and You know, this is the legal recourse if you don't follow by these tenants. But with the Denali Commission, it really is or has been for us a, you know, we've tried every avenue that they allow for obtaining funding and those agreements which are innumerable.

Outline what our responsibilities are as a funded individual. And we have to present all of those other memorandums of understanding and agreements that we have built up in order to make the project go forward for their review and approval in order to get funding. So there's a number of them. I would like to add one success story that Denali Commission was doing was helping communities find an IDIQ contractor, the Indefinite delivery and definite quantity. And we were able to kind of piece together some various scopes that this community may encounter of projects they want to do, and they may need some, you know, engineering assistance, professional services.

And we helped walk 5 communities through that process to get a contractor on board in order to implement some of the projects moving forward. Since then, CETC has been helping out with that, and I think that is something I would really love to share with the group that has been a success case. And before we close, I do need to let people know we will have an energy program manager posting probably out next week. Our dear Katie Conway has moved on to another organization, and we miss her, but we also have a large energy program, and we are looking for a new program manager. We have time for one more question.

Go for it. Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm with Cognac Energy and Water. I know we're short on time, so I'll be brief. Is there a greater conversation about centralizing site-specific controls?

I know several of you talked about having redundant operators, and, you know, when a site goes down, are there conversations happening about centralizing control systems to help at least from an overarching perspective, what's happening on those specific sites. I could start off a little high level where we've seen a lot of success with regional assistance groups, especially in the utility. You know, there's the Regional Utility Cooperative, the RUAC, and various organizations in subject areas. You know, that regional model where you have some of that administration, administrative capacity, you know, you're making it a more efficient model. You know, your bookkeeper, some of your project managers can be at this, in this regional group where you have your boots on the ground that can, you know, reach back and get some of that additional assistance.

And that can help with turnover too, and having that backup person.

And I think maybe you were asking the question about maybe broadly for a community across utilities, because it sounds like you might be serving different communities. And really the glue that holds that together is going to be the community leaders themselves, whether that be the tribe or the city, sometimes even the corporation. For AVEC, we are pretty narrow-minded. We have to draw batter boards on what we do, and a lot of it is just focused around energy. Even though we get involved in heat recovery, we usually draw the line at the power plant door and say heat recovery is something this community is going to have to operate on.

We have communication and coordination with other utilities, AROC that Joselyn had mentioned, ANTHC, and the communities themselves. But really there's not, aside from AVAC being a regional provider, We don't really mess with other people's utilities.

Thank you all for coming. The next session is the future of renewable energy. It's a lunch session that's at 12:45. I think some of us may still be here if you want to ask the panelists questions. Can we get a little round of applause?

Thanks. Thanks, you all, for coming.