Beyond Power: Heating, Waste Heat Recovery, and Integrated Energy Systems

Lani, it's great to be here. What a— I'm humbled by the knowledge on this panel and really excited about the opportunity to talk about heat, a topic I think we are all intimately familiar with here in Alaska, especially after a winter we've had developed a strong yearning for more of it. So my name is Griffin Forster. I have the privilege of serving as the executive director of the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities. I'm going to talk about housing from a little bit of a different lens here.

My work straddles a lot of the energy field as well, but I want to start out asking if I've got any Amory Lovins fans in this crowd here. Yes, Mark. That's it? Oh, okay. Famous philosopher, engineer, economist.

It just— I really appreciate his framing for how to talk about heat and energy in these topics. It's really the end uses that people get value from. Comfort, the mobility, not the kilowatt hours, not the lumps of sticky black goo or whatever, right? So in a housing context, housing is very tangible and emotional for people. I really appreciate that kind of thinking.

So who am I? So AAHA is the Association of Alaska Housing Authorities. We're a nonprofit consortium of the 14 regional housing authorities. And if you're not familiar with these organizations, please get familiar with them. They do great work all across Alaska.

I work for 15 of the most diligent, innovative, and resourceful people in the state I know. We've got the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation on our board as well. Appreciate them being in the room. I also have the honor of serving as the chair of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center based up in Fairbanks in the furthest north LEED Platinum building, I believe, in the world. I have some really good news to share about that organization that I can't yet until some paperwork is done.

But very excited about our— yeah, yeah, yeah. And I serve as the vice chair of the Building Performance Association, which is organizing a conference here, workforce development aimed conference around energy efficient housing here in the fall, thanks to Alaska Housing Finance Corporation. So pleased to kind of represent all these different organizations in various capacities. How do I know what I do about this stuff? Because I have really put my marriage to the test learning it, is the short answer there, right?

My toxic trait is taking on overly ambitious home improvement projects. And I renovated a 1950s Cape Cod in Rogers Park, lowered the energy usage about 80% on site, got all the data, can send that to you. You can see that black star in the middle there represents my house compared to the Anchorage average on that line and other energy usage intensity index is across the state. Before I moved to Anchorage, I spent the first 6 years in Alaska in Utqia vik, a town formerly known as Barrow, up in the North Slope. And I had the privilege of serving as CEO of the regional housing authority up there.

At one point we had a multifamily project we looked at doing a combined heat and power system for. Our COO was an engineer, a mechanical engineer by training. Unfortunately, this is right after the pandemic, and like, who remembers what supply chains were like in 2021 and 2022? It was really tough. So even like though we had the designs, we had a really good use case for it with cheap natural gas and a way to lower electricity bills for tenants, low-income tenants in that building, while improving redundancy and outages, we couldn't move forward because of just how wacky supply chains were.

I'm not going to talk too much about heat pumps. I think Michelle covered that really well. My member of the Tlingit and Haida Regional Housing Authority down in Juneau does a bunch of them. I just returned from Kodiak, got my cup filled celebrating some successes with our member there. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, Tyler, but it seems like a pretty rich territory for heat pump deployment.

We kind of have like a belt where the economics of it makes sense. Fantastic technology. And I think I should have seen every hand in the room go up when Michelle asked that question, who has one, right? Because you all have one in your home. It's your refrigerator.

It's the same thing, right? It's just like that compressor that's bolted onto a bigger box that makes your house refrigerator. And it goes both ways and it can put out heat below zero. But the price signals in a lot of the state aren't really realistic for adoption right now. You need an electricity to you know, natural gas or, or fossil price gap of around 3 or less to make a heat pump pencil for you.

And I, I put one in my house, but I'm an outlier, right? Just wanted to see what it looked like. Um, like to talk about energy efficiency not just as like this noble goal that we should do as a society because it makes us feel good, but also a hard procurable resource that helps us address some of the, um, the challenges we know we're going to deal with with cooking gas supply and other things like that. So with cold climate housing, you know, we have data from the past state-assisted weatherization program that shows that for roughly every 3 to 4 single-family homes you weatherize, you preserve another home's worth of supply on the gas distribution grid. You do that enough times, right, and that's less boats of LNG that have to be imported at a high cost from wherever they're coming from.

There's all sorts of other reasons to you're making your home more durable, safer during power outages, more comfortable, less risky to insure, healthier to live in, the list goes on and on. And there's some really interesting modeling from the Alaska Energy Blog showing the impact of a hypothetical phase-in of a 15% improvement in building efficiency in Southcentral over the next 10 years. That's what that top, top wedge on that chart is. Another— The way I like to think about this stuff is it's health, it's jobs, and resilience. If you guys want to really dig into the data about, you know, the previous round of big weatherization investment in the state, you know, HFC and CCHRC have those numbers.

I also really like this chart, which is hours of thermal safety during a power outage in cold weather. And those different lines represent— the blue one on the bottom is like a 1950s home built to 1950s code. The top one in the light green is a Passive House. And so the difference between your home getting to distress temperatures when it's 20 below and the power goes out can be 8 hours to like 144 hours between how homes are built. So like, I'm not like a big fan of like saying we all need to build green homes and sustainable and high performing.

There's all these different terms you can use. I just think in a place like Alaska especially, This is a way we need to build more of. And I'll just say for our members, they build the most energy-efficient, durable, comfortable homes in this state, and I think they should have more, more resources to do that. So that's my pitch. This is who I am.

Thank you. This is how you get a hold of me, and happy to take questions.

Excellent. All right. We'll get all of our faces back up on the screen so that if you have pointed questions for one of the presenters, you will know— that's my contact. There we go. You'll know who to ask of.

All right.

To get us warmed up— sound still good in the back? Excellent. Thank you. To get us warmed up with questions, I'm first going to ask all of you for some participation. So please raise your hand if you're here on behalf of a tribal organization.

Okay. A few folks. Local government, elected officials or workers, employees. Fantastic. Utilities, co-ops.

Okay. Investors, developers, contractors. Not too many. Regional or statewide support organizations?

And then anyone who didn't raise their hand or maybe wasn't paying attention until this moment? That's the majority. Excellent. Thank you all. All right, panelists, before we turn it over to this fantastic room that is now paying attention, what are some of the misconceptions or misunderstandings misunderstandings about these projects, heating projects, either in your experience or with partners that you might have worked with.

Whoever wants to go first.

And red means on for these mics.

I— yeah, I can start off. So with heat recovery projects, they're generally one of the most cost-effective project that you can do to save energy. But one of the common misconceptions is that if you have a diesel power plant that's not already completely tapped out for heat recovery, you've got a project. In general, the further you go away from the power plant, the more heat loss there is, the more challenging it is to make it work. But even, even within 1,000 feet is typically where you know it's— the heat loss is not going to be too great to where the project's going to work.

There can be so many little factors that can derail it. And once they're built and commissioned, and controls become a huge part of the equation, even though there's not a whole lot of moving parts, the right valves have to open at the right times and everything just has to work properly. Once they're set up, they, they really run with not a lot of maintenance. But I can say that even this, the simplest projects that, that seem like they should be very, uh, just, just a slam dunk don't always work out the way they're intended. So maybe that's, yeah, that's That's a misconception, I'd say.

I will say a misconception, and I'm speaking from municipal government, so it may be different for private sector, is that it is not a simple, quick solution. It is something that takes a lot of commitment and dedication, and I would say that I would actually discourage people from starting a biomass project unless you know you have the follow-through, the buy-in, the commitment, and you're really in it for the long haul. Because it's not a quick plug-and-play type thing. It's also not something that you can easily walk away from. It's not like an oil boiler that you get it installed and you don't have to look at it for 5 or 6 months.

It is something that requires daily monitoring, and we are getting a PLC control system to help with us be able to monitor it, including temperatures and speeds and controls and other things, which will be great. But it, it's got a lot of moving parts, and there's a reason why if it was, if it was so simple, everybody would have it. The trade-off for the lower cost is the— it's a bit laborious and a lot of responsibility. So do, do research, learn from others. That's one of the things we did is we hired the project manager who did Toke's biomass project so that we weren't starting from scratch.

And he had a lot of things that he said, we don't want to do this, we would like to do this. And, and he, he did a few others as well. So learning from somebody who's already been around around the block.

I don't know if my answer is exactly around misconceptions, but more like missing or gaps in the knowledge. One of the things we're really interested in our research is how some of these electrified loads can be grid resources. And especially with most of what we've been talking about are mini-split heat pumps, so not these whole-house ducted systems. And they generally are controlled with like a remote control and not a smart thermostat or something. So how you control those, you know, if you're on a microgrid and you want to turn the heat pump off as soon as there isn't wind anymore, or it's cold and you're afraid that you're going to be really kind of overloading diesel generators or whatever, or even you're on a larger grid and you want to do some sort of demand response for, you know, whatever reasons, how do you control these mini splits?

And we're actively, you know, trying to look into how we would do that research. You know, electric resistance heater, you know, a box of rocks, energy storage one like they have in some of the communities in Alaska, or even just a simple, you know, your backup below or, you know, plug-in electric heater, you know, those you can just cut power to generally and turn them back on. But with the heat pump, you might need to keep oil pans warm or things to keep them working well. And so, so how do you make that part of a grid resource? So that's something we're really interested in as far as, you know, the misconception might be that they're really easy to use as a resource because you've got the whole house as a thermal battery.

But Maybe not so much.

So I think the misconception I would share relates to how we think about how heat, air, and moisture interact in our homes sometimes. Who's heard the phrase that a house has to breathe? Like, yeah, we've probably heard contractors very confidently just like rattle that off, right? And what we prefer to say is that you need to build tight and ventilate it right. And that has been a big— that's the legacy, in some ways, of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center, which has been around 25 years.

And you see home builders now, you know, incorporating a lot more of these building science practices into their construction approaches. But that's a big one. And it's important if we're going to, you know, adopt more mini-split heat pumps and things like that, that we really understand how those dynamics within structures interact as a system. So.

Seeing how fast time is moving, I'll open it up to the room. Where might our first question come from? Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, Katie.

If you'll say your name, your organization, and then your question, please. Thank you. Emmanuel Borromeo, I'm with the Kuskokwim Corporation. My question is for Josh. What makes your boiler capable of burning green wood?

What's different about it?

So I think a lot of it is the temperature. It burns at extremely high temperature, and it's designed actually for the production of biochar and the low oxygen is what creates a clean burn through pyrolysis. But burning it at 2,000 degrees— and I probably can't get into the specifics because I don't know them, but from what I understand, it's the way that the air, the temperature, and the moisture all work together. So probably not the greatest answer, but this is what, this is what BET specializes in, is biochar production. With heat as a byproduct.

Are you guys the first ones in Alaska? Yes. But College Utilities in Fairbanks just purchased a BET boiler system that is far bigger than ours that they are hoping to do an experiment to eradicate PFAS by mixing their PFAS-contaminated sludge with wood chips and run it through this boiler. So I'm excited about that. Awesome.

All right. Next question up here and then we'll go to the back. Oh, sorry, Katie. I could have made that easier for you. You're good.

She took the back first. Well, she's almost next to you now. Thank you. I love that you brought that up, actually, because I— sorry, my name is Erin Shue. I work—.

I'm the environmental coordinator for the Native Village of Eyak in Cordova. And we have a ton of contaminated lands that cost us a lot of money to backhaul, basically. You know, for example, some of the— I think it was $40,000 econex to backhaul soil last summer, and $38,000 of that was shipping fees. So it would be awesome. You know, we've been thinking about getting incinerator.

And yeah, I'm very curious if there is technology out there that can both eliminate diesel and petroleum products but also produce energy. Yeah. So, the other use of this boiler that we have, we aren't using it for it, but I toured their facility in Missouri and they are using it also to burn certain types of waste, shredded plastic, paper, cardboard, other items that have glue and things in them. And it takes about 1,600 degrees to fully consume those products. So it doesn't burn mixed waste, although we have another project we're starting with a different system for a solid waste incinerator.

But this particular boiler can take shredded paper and plastic and cardboard and other things mixed with wood chips. And so that's— that's one of the things that is cool about it. It meets all of the Phase II EPA emission requirements. And it— these plastics, especially these microplastics, never go away. And so the, the goal of BET is to help communities become zero-waste communities.

And the president of the company said that he believes within the next 10 to 20 years, people will be mining landfills as a fuel source because it's a way to end the plastics.

Next question. Uh, one selfish question to the Nanana heat pump or the biomass project. How long does it take to fill the hopper? And like, how long is that duration between fill and hopper? Just curious.

So it varies, uh, depending on the time of year. Of course, we're still operational even though it's about 50 or 60 degrees, and we probably will be until, um, until it's in the 70s. But when it's in the middle of the wintertime, it's a 30 or 40 below, we've got to refill the hopper about every other day. And just an interesting fact is 10 yards of wood chips turns to 1 yard of biochar. So it's a 10% of what we burn in wood chips becomes biochar.

Yeah, I was just curious. So the real question is, in thinking through— and this is Jimmy with the Los Gatos Inflants Corporation— integrated energy systems. I was earlier this year at an international builder show and one of the things they talked about at that show was when they're building new housing, and this could be the same for all housing and buildings, they really like the idea of having the distribution of the heat throughout the house be water or some coolant because then you could hook up any heating system to that distribution system. So you could have like an air-to-water heat pump, or you have a boiler that burns fuel oil or natural gas, but the system in the house was hydronic. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts in thinking through integrated energy systems in Alaska, what that— that thought process would be like to go through that exercise.

Well, I'm really curious what Griffin says, but I am going to jump in there briefly and say that the temperature of the water matters for what type of hydronic system you have. So one of the projects we've been involved in is that Alaska Heat Smart and Alan Mitchell with Analysis North have helped us monitor— well, they did all the work, and we're helping write the report is all. But looking at one of the first high-temperature air-to-water heat pumps that has been put in in Juneau and looking at that performance. And the test house may not be the most perfect situation, but if you're trying to drop in for baseboard hydronic heating because you had an oil or gas boiler and you need a high-temperature resource, there aren't as many options. You have to have kind of a dual-stage heat pump.

And it's looking like it's not the most efficient option. The low temperature is great for, you know, high mass, like in-slab heating. Heat. So you would have to have that planned as you're building the house, like what temperature is your resource. So I guess you could do that in slab.

Um, those mini splits are highly efficient, really, you know, as far as, as how they're using your resource. So there are some benefits to having that air source heat pump when you're not trying to also get domestic hot water or other things out of it. And also, like, I like the idea of not having water pipes throughout my whole house from a resiliency standpoint, you know, keeping those localized into certain wet areas that might be further from the envelope edges if you do have an outage or something, personally.

You stole my idea, Michelle. Exactly. Yeah, the water temperature matters for the design of the emitters and the distribution system. One other thought I would add to that is hydronic systems can be great, One of the benefits you lose there compared to forced air is the ability to control indoor environmental quality. And so even if you have those designs, having a whole home ventilation strategy is ideal.

It's something that you get with a furnace or, to some extent, a mini-split heat pump. But that's something to be aware of. You have a sand-in-air-to-water, right? Am I wrong? I do.

Next question up here.

Thank you. Liam Zolt with ASRC. I actually have one for Tyler. So you noted that the, like, one of the biggest parts of the construction cost is trenching in the glycol lines. Can you talk a little bit more about what the challenges are there?

Because I feel like with a backhoe, you can make a lot of ground in a day. And it looked in your picture like you were using plastic lines. Is there permafrost considerations, insulation on the line, and stuff like that? What makes it hard? Yeah, well, part of it is just the logistics of rural construction.

So other than the transfer line, if it's buried, it would mostly be just plumbing and electrical work in the end-user buildings. But because you've got to get the lines between the buildings, that means bringing in a piece of equipment if it's not already there. So there's that piece. In some cases, it can't be buried. If a lot of Western Alaska, the lines aren't buried.

And so then it has to be protected with metal jackets. And supported. And it's just, just the lines might be 2 inches to 4 inches. It's not huge piping, but then you're wrapping it with typically 6 inches of insulation and then a jacket around that. So it's just the cost of materials is huge.

Some of these systems use PEX, some of them use to what we call Arctic pipe. And the Arctic pipe's a lot more expensive. It's a little more durable. But it's just the cost of burying the pipe, if it's buried, and the materials themselves.

One last question for our panelists. Yes.

Thanks. Um, I've got two questions if we squeeze it in, but I'll start with, um, with district heating, what solutions have you found worked best for communities where, you know, school maybe relies on the district heat but other generations coming in and there's opportunities to go diesel off? So kind of implementing those backup technologies maybe fits in with some of the other technologies on here, but kind of how have you all responded in those situations?

Yeah, I can, I can address that. It's, it's a, I mean, it's a something that a lot of people are thinking about for sure, because as, uh, as a lot of these communities get more electrified and more renewable, um, yeah, diesel generators going off is a reality. And, uh, we're running into that exact issue in Chungnak.

One solution is putting in an electric boiler if there's enough power to support an electric boiler to supplement.

In general, with solar, you might be losing heat recovery for maybe a month or two, April, May, so the impact is not huge. With wind, it could be a lot bigger because you're 'cause you're generating a lot more in the coldest parts of the year. But that is a, yeah, yeah, huge challenge that has to be considered. Was there another part to the question? Melanie, go for it now.

Okay, it's kind of a different question, but I'm with the Laken Peninsula Borough, so out on the Alaska Peninsula, and I noticed that the heat pump belt kind of didn't stretch into the Aleutians, Alaska Peninsula, and I'm curious if that was kind of the scope if the scope of the analysis was, you know, out to Kodiak or if the kind of data doesn't work when you go farther west. Thanks. I'm going to blame the robots that drew that picture for maybe not being like, you know, as detailed as they were conceptual. But generally, my understanding is, you know, where you've got diesel fire gen sets powering the community, a heat pump is not going to give you the price signal you want. Yeah, you have to be a lot more careful about how and when you would use it and under what circumstances.

I mean, it might still work out, but the Goldilocks zone is not so cold that your heat pump doesn't function or have super low COPs, coefficients of performance. And cheap hydro really helps with the economics.

Thank you very much. All right, one last question for our panelists. If there is one thought, suggestion, or inspiring words that you want to share with this audience as they move forward to try and make their communities heated better, what would it be? We'll start with Griffin.

And turn your mic on.

I would say Be careful about not falling into the low-hanging fruit fallacy with energy efficiency. Go deeper, you know. Don't just stop at sealing up your sockets and doing the things you get in the mail from the utility, you know. Think more holistically.

I'll say use every bit of energy that that's available. That's kind of the goal with heat recovery, like I talked about. But I love the idea of mining a landfill for energy.

I would say work with the entities that do this. There's a lot of resources, I think, that go unutilized. And we started this project on our own with the support of the project manager from TOAK, but we didn't realize that there was a lot of support waiting for us from Alaska Energy Authority, from the Denali Commission, from U.S. Forest Service, from USDA, Rasmussen Foundation. There was a lot of entities that we were able to get assistance from, and what we actually did was set up a monthly call with that group to kind of move us along and get us connected with all the right folks. And I think we saved ourselves a lot of time and money and heartache from gleaning the information off of— or from them, including them just seeing what we were trying to do and saying, "This is a good idea, but make sure to do this or include that." So those resources are there, and I think it's a lot better than learning from trial and error and probably a lot more— a lot less expensive.

Well, I really liked many of Griffin's slides about energy efficiency, and when the envelope of your home is better, you have more resilience before you're losing temperature. And as we're looking at heated buildings as a grid resource, if they have an electric heat component, being able to move that, that electric heating around more, maybe because you have a different source of heating, a backup heat source, but maybe also because because you have a really good envelope or thermal mass or other components of the house. So, you know, the energy efficiency first, but deep energy efficiency first, I think, is something to keep in mind with your projects. Thank you very much, panelists. And the next session— there's a break right now.

The next session in the main ballroom will be at 3:45. Once those contents are over, there is a networking reception in the hallway near the exhibitors' starting at 5 o'clock. So hope to see many of you there. Come up and say hi to our fantastic panelists. Lower your costs by coming and talking to Josh about his projects and absorbing that knowledge from his team and the other panelists.

And thank you all for joining us here today.

Yes, our Cape Coast pool, our Water Sanctuary, and our—.