Community Solar Helps Alaskans With Fuel Costs — Episode 279 of Local Energy Rules

Philip Wight:
Every electron that we can bring online that is not gas is really indispensable for keeping the lights on and bills reasonable.

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John Farrell:
A natural gas supply crisis pushed Alaska utilities to look for alternatives to supply the region’s electricity, and community energy came calling. Joining me in July 2026, professor and cooperative utility board member Dr. Philip Wight explained how Alaska’s community solar policy came into being and how it will help the utilities of Alaska’s Railbelt manage high prices amid a shortage of natural gas. Although he comes well credentialed to the conversation, Phillip speaks only for himself in this interview.
I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

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John Farrell:
Phil, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Philip Wight:
John, thank you so much for having me. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast and I’m thrilled to be on today.

John Farrell:
So I like to ask people when they come on if what they’re doing right now is sort of like what you wanted to be when you grew up. Obviously you sort of have different hats as we alluded to in the introduction as a university professor, as a co-op board member, and presumably also just as an interested citizen in clean energy to be following the path of community solar legislation. Is this what you dreamed that you’d be doing? Was there something else in mind when young Phil was thinking about his future?

Philip Wight:
In many ways, actually, yes. Not necessarily the energy part of my job, but certainly the history part. When I was a young kid, I loved hearing stories about World War II from my grandfather who served in the Pacific that gave me this hunger and this interest in history. And from high school all through my professional degree, really pursued history and all my degrees are in history, culminating in a PhD from Brandeis University.
Fortunately, now I have my dream job. I get to teach Alaska history and environmental history every day up here in beautiful Fairbanks, Alaska. But the energy part of it, I did not expect when I was younger. I had no particular interest or fascination in energy. And it was only when I was older that I came to understand how indispensable energy was and how problematic it could be, especially with global climate change.
But really, as part of my history education, I was actually in Washington DC, and I happened to be walking in front of the White House and witnessed this spectacle where there were over 150 people who had chained themselves to the White House fence. This was in 2011, and they were protesting this thing I knew almost nothing about called the Keystone XL Pipeline. And as a historian, I became really fascinated in this, and it made me wonder, have we as a nation ever debated whether or not we should build one of these fossil energy projects before in our history? And if so, how did it turn out? That actually led me to Alaska. It led me to study the history of the TransAlaska pipeline system, which I argue is the nation’s first environmental battle over fossil fuel infrastructure. And certainly that was an infrastructure which was built.
And so that’s what I ended up writing my dissertation on and moved to Alaska and fell in love with the place because of that, and really became fascinated with all things energy as part of that process.
And it was really only when I got up to Alaska that I came to have an appreciation for the indispensability of electricity. And this was probably 2018, 2019, came to be exposed to Saul Griffith’s work on Electrify Everything and really became, I don’t know what you’d want to call it, electro-pilled. I’m thinking about friends on the DER podcast who talk about DER-pilled for distributed energy resources. But just to wrap this up, really became fascinated with electricity and electrification and had the great fortune to work for the Alaska Public Interest Research Group or AKPERG right about the same time I got my job at the University of Alaska. And so I worked part-time for ACPERG for six years.
And as part of working for ACPERG, led the effort along with dedicated colleagues like Natalie Kelly Bergen and Alex Petkanas, who you had on the program before, to pass community solar legislation. And we achieved this in 2024 when Senate Bill 152 was passed. So this was really my entry into the world of energy and electrification. And then I’ll also just note that, as you mentioned in your introduction, I became hyper involved in my local electric cooperative, recognizing that electricity is the quintessential commodity, not only of decarbonization, but I would say of energy prosperity into the future. And so for the past six years, became very involved with that local electric cooperative, Golden Valley Electric Association. And I ended up serving on the member advisory committee. And then ultimately as of, gosh, just two months ago was elected to the board of directors and have been really leaning into that new position ever since.

John Farrell:
Well, thank you so much for that. I think your arc of your life’s interest in this actually really helps to set the table for people who are curious about how community solar is playing a role in Alaska. Obviously a state that has had a long history in the fossil fuel industry with oil extraction. So let’s dive into that.
When I spoke with your colleagues, Natalie and Alex, last year in episode 236 about Alaska’s newly adopted community solar policy, although I think you corrected me, I think I was saying the policy passed in 2025. It was actually 2024, so thank you. But one fascinating element of this policy was that it was motivated in part by a pending natural gas shortage, and that it’s also a policy for the so-called Railbelt of rural electric cooperatives that serve most Alaska electricity customers, very different from most of the other states that have passed policies that target investor-owned utilities.
So could you just maybe give us a refresh for folks who didn’t listen to that episode or who might go listen to it later, but on this rather unique utility structure and situation in which community solar was applied?

Philip Wight:
Absolutely. So this is where I think the historical perspective is really indispensable. And as most of your listeners know, Alaska is quite unique, quite different from the lower 48. And so the majority of the state’s population actually is along this corridor that we call the Railbelt. It stretches from Fairbanks here in interior Alaska down to Anchorage and South Central Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. This is where we have 75% of the state’s population and also the vast majority of our carbon emissions as a state.
And this follows the route of the Alaska Railroad, actually the only railroad built owned and operated by the federal government in American history. And so as much as Alaskans have this long streak of antagonism towards the federal government, we have been reliant upon the federal government and federal largess going back to the very, very origins of this state.
So the Railbelt is actually the largest power grid in terms of line miles outside of the lower 48. And yet it is this weekly connected grid that does not function like the grids in the lower 48. And on this grid, we have four rural electric cooperatives stretching from the north here, Golden Valley Electric Association down to Anchorage to Gatch Electric Association. And then there are two other co-ops as part of the grid as well. And these are quite different because unlike in the lower 48 where you really have over 800 distribution cooperatives and a smaller number, maybe 75 generation and transmission cooperatives, here in Alaska, our cooperatives by and large are what we call GT&Ds, generation, transmission and distribution.
And so really there’s only one other GT&D in the nation, and that’s Kauai Electric Cooperative in Hawaii, which gives you an appreciation that these GT&Ds really emerge in places that are quite isolated and have to provide for their own generation.
And so what we see in the history of this is that these rural electric cooperatives, they emerge in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they end up becoming the powerhouses of Alaska’s grid. And for most of our history, these co-ops along the Railbelt had access to cheap natural gas. I’m simplifying here. I’d be happy to link to a history that I wrote on this for the podcast. But Alaska actually discovered commercial quantities of oil and gas in the 1950s in COOK INLET south of Anchorage. So this is separate from the big north slope discoveries, which happened in 1968. And in 1962, Alaska brings its first gas turbine online on the Railbelt, and Anchorage emerges as one of the first American cities that is primarily powered and heated by natural gas. And that was a great asset for much of our early history.
But now I would argue it is a looming liability because for so much of our history, we have oriented our utilities around just consuming gas and we have not diversified our portfolio. And so the Railbelt still relies something like 80% on natural gas. And this is a resource and a reservoir that has been declining quite precipitously. And so we now are facing looming blackouts and the need to actually import gas, which is quite a paradox in a state as energy and petroleum rich as Alaska.

John Farrell:
Wow, this is great. I really appreciate the context. Maybe it’s because I am the son of a history professor that I am particularly drawn into getting some of the longer history here behind where Alaska was in this situation.
So the legislation then was aimed at creating a program that would deploy solar, but deploy community solar, which in most states has been done under a subscription model. So now you have people, for example, the policy was adopted in part I know to aid the one-third of Alaskans who rent as well as the somewhat overlapping one-third that are lower moderate income. Could you talk a little bit about what’s the scale of the program in terms of helping to meet the energy need that is becoming very real given the shortfall of natural gas? And did the aim of aiding those constituents end upholding up in the development of the program rules?

Philip Wight:
All right, great question. Thank you, John. So from what we found creating this legislation, the vast majority of Alaskans support solar. But unfortunately, the majority of Alaskans actually cannot deploy solar on their own. They don’t own their own home or their homes are shaded or they don’t have the requisite capital to install a rooftop solar array. These are the same conditions which gave rise to community solar in so many other states. And our hope with this legislation now with the tariffs that are on the books, which we can talk about, is that this will enable the majority of Alaskans, again, who live on the Railbelt, to subscribe to one of these community solar arrays and get the benefits of the cheapest electricity humanity has ever figured out how to create, which is solar PV. And I would make an important distinction here between the value of that solar to the individual customer or member owner, because again, all of these folks are member owners of a cooperative versus the value to the grid.
And we are in a place right now where every single electron that we can bring on line is essential for displacing gas because we are running out of that methane gas from the Cook Inlet.
However, this is also Alaska, right? I’m sitting here at 65 degrees north latitude. And I can tell you from my own personal solar, there is very little value to solar in the middle of winter, which shouldn’t surprise anybody, but somehow we still need to remind skeptics that the sun doesn’t produce any power in the middle of the night or it produces very little power in the middle of an Alaskan winter. And so solar provides significant value for eight months of the year, and it will be an asset to our grid, but we really need to bring online larger winter peaking resources or resources that can help meet our winter peaking loads.
But what I would say is that the solar that we bring online from the community solar, that can make a tremendous difference to the average member owner. And we are facing really high rates right now. So down in Anchorage, they’re looking at 23, 24 cents per kilowatt hour. Up here in Fairbanks, our most recent power prices because of the war with Iran are 37 cents per kilowatt hour. We have some of the highest electricity prices in the state of Alaska. Part of the reason for that is that my electric cooperative, GVA, was the first of these co-ops to lose access to cook inlet natural gas as it’s declining. And so we have been burning phenomenal volumes of diesel to keep the lights on. 250,000 to 300 gallons every single day this winter. And so when you’re dealing with 37 cents per kilowatt hour, a subscription to a community solar array can make a significant difference on a member owner’s bill.

John Farrell:
That’s remarkable. And I really appreciate you highlighting this sort of context with the fossil fuel dependence. I have kind of a very specific follow-up question, which is I don’t imagine that you can burn diesel in the same power plant that you burn natural gas necessarily. So do they have to scramble to build new infrastructure or were these backup power plants that are now essentially running as your frontline resource?

Philip Wight:
Up until last year, a significant chunk of the power of GVA was actually burned in South Central Alaska, burned in turbines in Anchorage that burned that gas and sent it up our intertie. Basically, we have one transmission line that connects the two cities. And so when GVA lost access to that, we have been burning diesel in these old GE frame seven units that date back to the 1970s. And for South Central Alaska, as they are looking at running low or running out of gas, there are discussions about building new units.
And there are also some units. One of the utilities down there has these engines which can run either gas or diesel. So there is some fuel switching that’s going to be happening, but this is a real wake-up call for the Railbelt. And this is a moment when I hope more and more folks are understanding every electron that we can bring online that is not gas is really indispensable for keeping the lights on and bills reasonable for Alaska for the near future.

John Farrell:
So the policy that has been adopted was, or the legislation was notable for including technologies other than solar. It had wind farms and hydro, which I think is interesting to your point earlier about winter peaking, that you need some resources that are coming online that also produce electricity in the winter. I thought it was also really notable that this was a very collaborative process of developing the legislation, that the advocates and member-owned utilities were really working together. It sounds like the conditions that help to encourage that collaboration, the shortage of gas are still in place. So has the collaborative approach held up throughout the rulemaking and establishing the program? And are there opportunities then to do these other technologies that might have some complimentary value to the solar?

Philip Wight:
Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, we believe this is the first community, we don’t even call it community solar legislation, we call it community energy legislation because it includes not just solar, but also small hydro, wind, battery storage. There are specific provisions in the legislation that allow for a compensation rate for storage or capacity.
And part of the reason for that is this is Alaska. Just as you mentioned, we have a winter peaking grid. We need to bring online these other resources. Historically, the vast majority of renewable energy that has been brought online in the state has been hydro. We do have some significant wind farms here. We’re hoping to build out more wind here in the near future. And at the end of the day, this program came about because member owners of our cooperatives wanted this power.
Chugatch Electric Association down in Anchorage was actually the first to pursue this. And unfortunately, their proposal down in 2018, 2019 was rejected by our Public Utility Commission, the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. So that set the scene where the utilities themselves wanted regulatory certainty. They knew that they had to pursue a legislative pathway in order to provide their members the community solar that they wanted. And so absolutely a collaborative process. We could not have done this without staff management and board members in the utilities. And I should say again, when I was spearheading this effort, it was with my hat on as a policy analyst for the Alaska Public Interest Research Group. And today, what’s been really fascinating for me is that I got to be part of the process all the way basically from the beginning of drafting the legislation, finding a bill sponsor, putting it through the ledge legal and actually drafting it into the legislation, passing the legislation.
And then we had a technical conference with the regulatory commission, and then those regulations were drafted, were finalized at the regulatory commission. And now we are going through the final steps of the process, which is that the utilities have now submitted their tariffs, and those tariffs are being reviewed and finalized by the regulatory commission.
And I think this is a really important detail to accentuate. Many electric cooperatives in the lower 48 are not economically regulated. They do not have a public utility commission overseeing and approving what they do.
Alaskan co-ops are somewhat unique in the nation in that they are economically regulated. So our regulatory commission needs to review the major decisions that they move forward with. So we are in this process, this kind of final process right now where we are waiting to see if the regulatory commission is going to approve the utilities tariffs. And then hopefully we’re off to the races and we will be building a dozen of these community energy facilities all up and down the railbelt and bringing online the much needed energy that Alaskans need to prosper in the far north.

John Farrell:
It’s funny, earlier you mentioned that the cooperatives in Alaska are the GT&D, right? They’re generation transmission distribution and that there’s only one other utility in the US, Kauai Island, that is similar because of that isolation.
Was there any outreach to your knowledge to Kauai Island? Because I’ve interviewed their CEO before about their development. They didn’t have the same resource availability problem, but they were paying arm and a leg for burning oil, imported fuel oil, for their electricity. They’re now about 70% using renewable energy resources, and it has inverted the relationship where previously they were one of the more expensive places to get electricity on the Hawaiian islands, and now they’re one of the least expensive. So I’m kind of curious if any folks from there were helpful to anyone to your knowledge in the development of this program.

Philip Wight:
Kauai continues to be a source of inspiration for us here in Alaska. What they’ve done both over the past five to 10 years, and honestly since their inception in the early 2000s, has been really inspiring from a cooperative perspective. Personally, I did not reach out and talk to anybody at that co-op. I don’t recall them having a community solar array online. This was maybe five years ago.
But what I will say to the credit of you and ILSR, I recall having a very constructive meeting with you as we were leaning in and trying to understand community solar on the national landscape and really appreciate your time and your expertise because that’s the moment in time I realized that Alaska was operating in a fairly unique regulatory context in so far that our co-ops were economically regulated, which you helpfully pointed out was not the case in most of the lower 48.

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John Farrell:
We are going to take a short break. When we come back, I asked Philip to dive into the program details such as who can participate and how much energy they can get from community energy projects. We also discussed the compromises accepted in getting the program to launch and how much it can help address the region’s gas shortage.
You’re listening to a Local Energy Rules podcast with Dr. Philip Wight. Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now back to the program.

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John Farrell:
Now I know you said that we’re kind of waiting for approval soon, hopefully, from the state’s Public Utilities Commission over the tariffs, which are kind of the final piece to make this go. Could you just run us through some of the basics of how that program will work? How large will the projects be? We’ve kind of already covered the technology, but then how does the subscription benefit for participants, maybe just based on what the utilities filed, since I understand you’re waiting for approval, how might that compare compared to what they would be paying otherwise? You said 24 cents in Anchorage, 37 cents where you are now, or how might that compare if they had solar on their own rooftop, if you ever did that comparison?

Philip Wight:
Yeah, great question. And just with the caveat that we’re waiting to see what gets finalized here. What we are looking at is we followed some national best practice and really appreciate collaboration with groups like CCSA, the Coalition for Community Solar Access who are indispensable with helping us with this legislation. But we’re looking at arrays that can be up to five megawatts in size. And each individual utility is filing their own separate tariffs, so this may range a little bit. So relatively large individual array sizes, which is best practice throughout the country. But also in order to get the legislation passed, the original version of this legislation I think said that we were aiming for 50 megawatts, which is sizable on Alaska’s Railbelt, which just to give some context, our peak load on the railbelt is something like 750 megawatts, which anywhere else in the lower 48 is like one power plant.
Yet we have dozens of power plants. We probably have more power plants per capita than anywhere else in the United States, which is interesting. Part of that is due to inefficiency. Part of that is due to heat. A lot of them are cogen units because we really need the heat up here.
So we’re looking at a relatively small program size to start. I think it’ll be something like 20 or 25 megawatts up and down the Railbelt. Utilities can increase that over time. So hopefully we have a lot of interest in the beginning. These facilities can either be constructed by the utilities themselves or they can be constructed by third parties, by private developers. And so personally, I am hoping that this is an opportunity to bring more private developers into the state. We historically have not had much competition, and I would love to see two or three new firms come up here and build this clean power that we need.
And by the way, if you’re a clean power developer listening to this podcast, I think there’s quite a good value proposition here because a developer, when you’re dealing with 37 cent power, 37 cents per kilowatt hour, there is significant value there for both the developer and the member owner, the customer.
And so the way that this will work, and I think this is a really important distinction to point out, is when one of these arrays gets constructed, it’s going to need to be somewhat subscribed before it can interconnect to the system and be constructed. Once it’s up and running, let’s just take GVA for example. And I should remind listeners here, I’m speaking as a university professor, not with my GVA board hat on. But once these arrays get up and running, and for the sake of simplicity, let’s say you just have a hundred people who are subscribing to this, each of those subscriptions, the value of that power will be 37 cents up to the amount of power each of those individuals is consuming within their own homes.
And our goal of this was to have parity so that folks who subscribe to a community solar array can get the same value as somebody who installs a rooftop solar array.
Now, the devil’s in the details there because if you install rooftop solar in Alaska, you are typically shelling out $30,000 of your own money. So there’s a certain payback time on that, typically eight to 10 years. So there’s a time value of that money that has to be factored into it.
But I am hopeful what we will see for the folks who subscribe to these facilities is that they will get at least close to the value for rooftop solar. And what makes this a little tricky is obviously the developer needs to make some money to make this worthwhile. So of that 37 cent value, I don’t know how much of that is going to be taken by the developer, but a certain chunk.
So it may well be that up here in GVA, maybe a consumer, a member owner is getting 30 cents of value for that electricity. That is still a pretty darn good deal, especially if it is a model where individuals don’t need to put much money upfront in order to secure that subscription.

John Farrell:
We sort of prefaced that this program came about because of the pending, or I guess already in place, natural gas shortage from the Cook Inlet. With the scale of the program or at least the initial size of the program, you said 20 to 25 megawatts against a peak on the system that’s 750 megawatts. I guess this next question kind of feels a little more pointed, which is do the adopted rules mean that you’re going to have a program that actually can help address that problem? I mean, it seems like it’s going to take a little bite out of it, but depending, I mean, I think about the development timelines we saw in Minnesota when the community solar program was first adopted. It was probably 18 months in between rules finalized till the first program comes online. You’re already burning diesel at tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of gallons rate that’s very expensive. Is this going to be able to make a dent?

Philip Wight:
This is absolutely not as big as it needs to be. And again, this was the original inception of the bill. The legislation had a much larger program. We were forced to compromise. I mean, maybe something that we can talk about here at the end in terms of lessons learned, but we were forced to compromise to get this over the finish line in the legislative process.
And we made the conclusion that it It was better to just get a program up and running, even if it was smaller than we ideally wanted it to be, and grow it over time. The regulations do allow for this. The utilities can come back and increase the amount of size that they permit on their systems, but the utilities were also, there was some concern about the amount of variable resources on their system. Unfortunately, this was just the compromise.
But to your larger question, we need every electron that we can get, and we are facing an energy shortage right now.
In some ways, we really are out of time. We need to do this as quickly as possible. What I would say, the bigger picture here is that community energy facilities are one valuable tool in the toolbox. This program is not going to redress Alaska’s gas shortage or the energy crisis that we are facing right now. However, it can deliver significant value to member owners. It can bring in more private capital that can help us build the larger installations that we need. It can demonstrate to Alaskans that we can build renewable energy that provides value, and even year-round value. I envision some of these community energy facilities that have a battery attached to them. Even if you’re not getting much solar energy in the middle of January, that battery is a really significant resource that can add capacity to the grid at the exact moment that we need it.
But the bigger picture here is the Railbelt in Alaska, I would say, needs a much more comprehensive energy policy that is valuing non-fuel resources like hydro, like wind, like geothermal, because we have been trapped in this petroculture paradigm for too long, and it is not delivering for Alaskans, and we are just witnessing the cost of energy get higher and higher and higher because we have not innovated to a new model that looks beyond petroleum.

John Farrell:
I want to ask you one follow-up about the legislative process. You mentioned that you had to compromise on the scale of the program in a legislative process. Is that connected to what you said after that about the utilities being a little nervous about integration of variable resources? Was it the utilities themselves that were saying, “Yes, we think we need this, but we want to start smaller?” I guess just to make a comment on that, there’s a part of me that gets so frustrated hearing that because it was 15 years ago that Hawaii utilities were saying our limit on the amount. There’s this hard limit on how much solar we can put on our system. We couldn’t possibly go past 15%. And now one in three homes has solar. It’s just like the scale has completely changed from those initial reactions. I feel like if that’s the justification, sometimes I wish they would just hire an engineer from somewhere that’s already dealt with it rather than feeling like each utility is its own special, unique place.
I mean, I get that they are, right? Grids, they’re not identical, but sometimes if that’s the reason, it makes me a little frustrated.

Philip Wight:
Sure. I would point out two factors that led to that. I think one is squarely on the legislative side in that there were legislators in the various committees that the bill had to make its way through who were skeptical. It wasn’t necessarily that they were just hewing the utility line. But as you know, there is a whole politics and culture around renewable energy, and so that’s some of the pushback we got in the beginning.
Then on the utility side, I should also mention we’re dealing with four different GT&D utilities, each of which have their different politics. Let me just highlight two of the utilities that I think did a really good job here, both Chugach Electric Association and Anchorage and Golden Valley Electric Association here in Fairbanks. They worked really collaboratively to help bring about this legislation. There were concerns by some other folks about, oh, if we saw 50 megawatts of variable renewable energy on the system, that’s too much and we couldn’t handle it. There certainly were some utility voices outside of GVA and Chugach that I think pushed the needle, but it’s a diverse environment here.
The last thing I’d say that makes this complicated is that the Railbelt is not acting as a single load balancing area. So you go to any other grid in the lower 48 and it’s a single load balancing area. Whether we want to talk about PJM or MISO or New York or California ISO, here, unfortunately, each of those four Railbelt cooperatives is basically acting as its own utility with its own grid, even though we are interconnected. There’s some asterisks here. We do have one small tight power pool, but ideally we should have one larger generation and transmission cooperative on the Railbelt that is effective at sharing resources because when you are dealing with these smaller co-ops and these smaller grids, no wonder they are more concerned about a higher percentage of variable renewable resources. As soon as you step back and see the bigger system, you recognize this is really not much variable power that we’re talking about.

John Farrell:
It’s so interesting too though, because while it would be nice if that infrastructure was already in place because then you would have that balancing capability between the different entities, the lesson from Kauai seems to be if you’re isolated and your power’s super expensive, just chuck batteries at the problem and you can probably get there. Anyway, I don’t want to be too critical of it. I just think it’s interesting to see how that negotiation plays out. And who knows? 12 months from now, the utilities might be, “This is working out great. Let’s double and triple the size of this program because it’s really helping members.” So it’s nice to give a little deference to the engineers who obviously work very hard to make sure the power stays on.
So I guess let’s globally think about the lessons learned here. You have a few layers. One might just be about the process of developing it in which every state has had a unique legislative process, and we’ve talked a lot about the role that the cooperatives are playing.
You also have that dynamic here where, and it kind of ties into them being rate regulated or economically regulated, as you said, the cooperatives, and that’s not true in the lower 48. Are there any lessons learned here about how cooperative members can help push for community energy programs? Because the 20-odd states in the lower 48 that have had community solar programs, they’re all requiring investor-owned utilities, and rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities are usually exempted from those bills and then typically don’t have programs that do community energy. So I’m curious if there’s any lessons learned that might help translate back to these other places where you have non-regulated co-ops and munis whose members might still see value in this kind of program, and any other lessons learned you see from this process that folks in other states could benefit from?

Philip Wight:
Yeah, to your point, I mean, there are so many co-ops in the Lower 48 who are operating in a different context here. As you know, the co-op world is its own beast, its own ecosystem and environment. Largely, I find it very inspiring because it is not about profit at the end of the day. It’s really centering the needs of the members.
Two clear lessons that I would underscore here. One is it’s all about your local context. What is happening in your community? What is happening in your grid? Today, we are dealing with communities that are facing data centers coming in. We are dealing with communities that have any number of energy challenges or environmental problems. And so each state, each cooperative has its own different context, and advocates really need to tailor the program to meet their specific needs.
So that would be number one. And I’ve had conversations with community solar advocates in places like Montana and other states who are trying to learn from Alaska to integrate our best practices because obviously Alaska is not the state that you typically think about when you think about solar or community solar.
The second lesson I think really applies to all cooperatives, which is that the way the co-op works is that day-to-day it is being run by staff, it is being run by management. The CEO really is running the organization. But at the end of the day, let’s remember that co-ops were created, electric co-ops were created in the 1930s as a middle ground, a compromise between capitalism and socialism, between investor-owned for-profit utilities and fully public municipal utilities. And so because of that, the board is a democratically elected body who is responsible for hiring and firing the CEO and setting the strategic direction of the cooperative.
Why this matters for community solar is what we saw in Alaska is that these programs really came about because there was strong board support. If you can get the majority of board members to support this initiative and to continue putting pressure on staff and management to make it happen, that’s how these programs come about in a cooperative context.

John Farrell:
Well, Phil, it has been so great to have you to give us not only the what’s happening now, but sort of the way that history has played into the development of this community energy program in Alaska. And I’m very excited to see, hopefully quite soon, that that program will be up and running and to start to see the developments that are coming about from it. Is there anything else that you think we should know about Alaska’s community energy program before we let you go?

Philip Wight:
Really appreciate the opportunity to be on today, John. I think I would just conclude by saying that we are at this tremendously exciting moment in time when the technology is available to us. And really it comes down to how do we make these extremely valuable energy resources available to people? And so for me, I not only think about community solar or streamlining rooftop solar, we’re also now really interested in plugin solar and balcony solar. And I know you had Cora Stryker on the program and I’ve been so inspired to see what she and Brightsaver have been doing throughout the country. And really at the end of the day, this is about creating more choices for member owners, for consumers, because for my money, I think the majority of energy that we are going to add to the grid probably for the rest of our lifetimes is going to be solar because it is cheap, because it is quick and easy to deploy.
And so from my perspective, we just need to reduce those barriers to bring more solar, more storage onto the system, to bring value to the people who need it the most, and at the end of the day, really empower people.

John Farrell:
Phil, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you and all the work that’s gone into the efforts to bring community energy to Alaska. Thanks again.

Philip Wight:
Thank you, John.

*****

John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Dr. Phillip Wight speaking for himself, but also an associate professor at the University of Alaska and board member of the Golden Valley Cooperative.
On the show page, look for the tariff filings from at least three of the state’s cooperative utilities. The promise rules were dropped, and the general outline is that each utility will accept up to five megawatts of community energy projects, with subscribers getting one-to-one bill credits for energy that doesn’t exceed their own use. All residential and small commercial customers can participate. It’s a great start, but the cumulative capacity of the programs will pale in comparison to the peak energy demand of 750 megawatts for the region.
Also on the show page, look for a link to ILSR’s panoply of community solar resources, including our quarterly tracker, state-by-state policy review, and of course, Alaska’s state page with details about this new program.
We’ll also have a link to Local Energy Rules episode 236, where Natalie and Alex discuss how the Alaska legislation originally passed, and to Local Energy Rules episode 261 about plugin solar, which was actually with Kevin Cho from Bright Saver.
Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin, with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.