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A roughly $50 million grant from the Biden administration will pay for the installation of new heating technology in every village home in Northwest Alaska, as well as 10 new solar farms and battery storage projects.
The U.S. Department of Energy grant will help pay for some 850 heat pumps in 10 villages in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic Borough — a cold, remote region off the road system where residents face prices for flown-in heating fuel that can reach $16 a gallon.
The 850 heat pumps represent one for “every residence” in the villages of Ambler, Buckland, Deering, Kiana, Kivalina, Kobuk, Noatak, Noorvik, Selawik and Shungnak, according to the borough’s application.
The heat pumps, which run on electricity, will allow village residents to keep their homes warm using power generated by the solar farms, or with electricity produced by utility-scale diesel generators, rather than expensive home heating fuel, said Ingemar Mathiasson, the borough’s energy manager. Yearly savings for residents could be $2,000, he said, while that figure could reach $2 million for the full region, according to the Department of Energy.
The new solar farms will be owned and operated by the tribal governments in each of the villages, which will sell the power into the communities’ electrical grids.
NANA, the regional Alaska Native-owned corporation, is contributing $5 million for the project in matching funds, it said in a press release.
The grant builds on pre-existing efforts by the borough to build renewable energy projects and electrify home heating systems. A $2.2 million solar farm was recently built in the village of Shungnak, while dozens of heat pumps have already been installed in homes in the village of Ambler.
Nathaniel Herz is an Anchorage-based journalist and the author of Northern Journal. To support Northern Journal, subscribe here.