Renewable energy lessons learned from niche markets in rural Alaska - Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Renewable energy lessons learned from niche markets in rural Alaska | Community Features | newsminer.com
Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series on Alaska energy topics contributed by Gwen Holdmann, Alaska Center for Energy and Power founder and UAF Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation & Industry Partnerships.
During visits to my aunt’s house in Germany when I was a young girl, I loved to snuggle up to the Kachelofen — a colorful tiled masonry stove with a built-in bench — on chilly mornings. I could always count on it to be toasty warm and it was my favorite place to curl up with a book. At the time I never thought to ask where that heat came from, despite never seeing any evidence of the wood or coal traditionally burned in them. It was just nice and warm, and slowly released heat into the house all day.
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: renewables
Renewable energy sources — once the fuel of the future, then practical in specific, narrow applications — are increasingly economic mainstream sources of power generation. Hydropower was long the mainstay of U.S. renewable electricity generation, although wind power surpassed hydro for the first time in 2019, and solar continues its rapid growth. The continued growth of wind and solar, with their fluctuations, is tied in part to improvements in storage technology: batteries.