A sudden snowstorm in a far Northwest arctic locale, sleeping in a laundromat (for no better place) and practical jokes were only some of the challenges facing Grass Valley, Calif.-based BoxPower in deploying a new solar/storage microgrid in the indigenous village of Deering in remote Northwest Alaska.
The installation is the second microgrid for the company in Alaska and second involving NANA, a regional corporation made up of 14,500 Iñupiat shareholders, or descendants, who live in or have roots in the region. The Iñupiat are people with close ties to the land and to each other, according to its website, and the word “Iñupiat” means “real people,” in its language.
Deering residents number 160 people that have seen their hunting patterns altered by climate change and had been burning about 46,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year to power their homes and other structures and facilities. They also face extremely high costs for food, electricity and freight, as well as low levels of employment.
The three solar/storage units installed by BoxPower are 16 kW each, for a total capacity of 48 kW being fed into the main grid, offsetting diesel generation, and enabling diesel generators to turn off during sunny and windy conditions. Wind turbines were previously installed in 2015.
The new installation had difficult supply chain logistics due to the remote location, but a breakthrough method of anchoring the systems to the ground led to big savings, according to Boxpower CEO Angelo Campus.
Cutting microgrid costs by near half
“We learned that logistics and supply chain are the most difficult part of Alaskan microgrids,” Campus said in a phone interview. He detailed lessons learned since the company’s first installation in Buckland, Alaska, another northwestern arctic city, in 2018. One of these was that a significant portion of the cost and construction time at Buckland came from building the foundation for the units.
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