There’s a little town all the way up, waaay north, called Galena, Alaska. If you look at a map of the state, it’s what we Marines would call ‘center mass,’ or darn near right smack dab in the middle of the state. There’s been a military airfield in town since World War II, and the Air Force still uses it as needed, even though they’ve turned it over to contractors to keep it open and pulled all the AF personnel out.
As of the 2020 census, they’d had a bit of a population boom, and bumped up to 472 from the 470 residents they’d reported in the 2010 census.
The little burg has had its fair share of ups and downs, most recently with a catastrophic flood in 2013 that damaged or soaked at least 90% of the homes in town thanks to an ice jam on the Yukon River.
Then there’s always the challenge of simply being a small, isolated Yukon community in itself. One of those is keeping the lights and heat on.
Galena’s been thinking out of the box ever since the price of diesel, which has kept the town’s generators going, skyrocketed over the years.
It has affected everyone.
Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost.
Every year, the Huntington family spent about $7,000 on diesel to heat the cabin during bone-chilling winters. And a few years back, a power outage at the town’s diesel plant left residents temporarily freezing in minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When power finally returned hours later, water pipes had frozen, leaving about two dozen homes without running water for days.
“We just didn’t open our door all morning until the lights came back on,” said Huntington, a member of the local Louden Tribe.
One thing the city wisely did was utilize local and abundant paper birches and build itself a biomass plant. That has alleviated some of the price pressure on the school system.
…Students here can take classes on sustainable energy, aviation, carpentry and much more. But to keep the school running — especially during long, cold winters — it needs heat.
That’s where the biomass project comes in. Every winter since 2016, trees (mostly paper birch) are locally harvested and shredded into wood chips that fuel a large boiler plant on campus, offsetting use of about 100,000 gallons of diesel annually for the school district and the city, said Brad Scotton, a Galena City Council member who also serves on SEGA’s board. It’s notable as one of the state’s first large-scale biomass plants and the most rural, he added.
Cost savings from use of biomass has allowed the Galena City School District to hire certified professionals in trade jobs and do upkeep on campus facilities, district superintendent Jason R. Johnson stated in an email.
Keep in mind, Galena is located in what’s known as a ‘subarctic’ climate zone, which means short summers and long, often very brutal winters. They did have a record high in January once of 43° in the early 90s, but the record January low of -70° has also been set in that same thirty-year 1990-2020 span, and most of the winter temperature means hover in the -20° or worse.
So this next move they’re making to help bolster their energy security in a place where they only have the palest sunlight for about three hours on a winter afternoon seems a little crazy on its face, until you understand the city isn’t paying for it. They have grants from the federal government, at least for the moment.
So, what the heck – throw up that solar array and see if you can cut your diesel bill in the summer at least, right?
Peak insanity. Not only lack of sunshine, but the irradiation loss with latitude translates to .5% degradation of output for every degree of latitude north of the equator. 🤣🤣
— GlobalTrvlr (@GlobalTrlr) June 29, 2025
And don’t forget, we’re not talking a New Jersey or even Maine ‘summer months‘ here – it’s only going to see the sun for a number of weeks.
The city fathers are hoping to glean some benefits from the array and battery set, including another source of maintenance jobs for local kids, from the 1.5GW system they’re currently installing.
…On an overcast May day, on a field flanked by boreal forests, workers in reflective safety vests slotted rectangular panels onto a metal grid. They were working on the nearly completed, 1.5-megawatt solar farm that will connect to a battery system.
The community will eventually be able to turn off its diesel engines and run on 100 percent clean, renewable energy on sunny summer days. Any excess power will be stored for nights, emergencies or heating the local indoor pool. The solar array will allow diesel operations to be shut off between 800 to 1,000 hours per year, saving about 100,000 gallons.
The solar farm won’t necessarily lower people’s electricity bills. But like the biomass plant, the hope is that it will stabilize energy costs, allowing those savings to go back into the community, all while providing work opportunities for residents like Aaren Sommer. Last year, the 19-year-old graduated from the academy, where he learned about solar energy. Now he’s helping to install the solar array.
“That’s going to reduce the diesel usage a whole bunch over at the power plant, which is going to help us out,” he said.
Are they being overly optimistic?
It could be, especially when you look at the downsides to this whole project. For one thing, scratch all of winter for the most part. There is a caveat to the ‘solar loves cold weather’ rule, for one thing.
It doesn’t love ‘frozen tundra‘ weather.
I thought this blurb on a solar company’s site was kind of hilarious in relation to Galena.
…For instance, solar panels sold by Mission Solar, Jinko Solar, and Tesla Solar are all rated with an operating range of -40°F to +185°F. When was the last time you experienced a day outside of this temperature range? We are guessing almost never.
In the event of a deep freeze in your area (less than -40°F), your solar panels may be too cold to produce new electricity. While this should only be a temporary issue, monitoring your panels’ performance after the extreme temperatures have passed is a good idea to determine whether or not any permanent damage may have occurred.
-40°F in Galena could be like…oh, just another Tuesday for them in the winter. Here’s hoping the panels are up to snuff to last through until next spring.
What light-gathering properties this new technology they’re putting in has better be the most super-duper ever created.
Maybe for a few weeks in summer? Look at the angle of the panel – maybe only 20 degrees above the horizon. How many gallons of diesel would that save. Not worth the cost methinks.
— UV Meter (@UvMeter) June 30, 2025
As for ‘not worth the cost’ of the diesel they save? There’s the only reason this is working. Again, because of grants. Galena isn’t paying for this – we are. Whatever ‘cost-savings’ they achieve – and I don’t blame them for taking advantage of whatever federal programs they had available to them to do so – are only achieved because there was no cost for the solar to be offset.
It’s all gravy until something goes wrong with it or they want it gone because it’s a failure.
…The projects come at a precarious time for renewable energy transition in the United States. The Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars of clean energy grants to bolster fossil fuel production, and billions of dollars more in investments have been scrapped or delayed this year. So far, the village’s federal grants for the solar array haven’t been impacted, but local leaders know the risk remains. Whatever the future of public funding, the village is an example of how renewable energies can save costs, boost reliability during extreme weather and create jobs.
Had Galena had to foot any of the bill for this pie-in-the-sky project, I can guarantee you there wouldn’t be solar cell one rising in the sky above town. It would never come close to paying for itself or relieving them of the burden imposed by their isolation.
It’s been over three decades of the most ruinous, expensive scam ever.
Competitive Solar? A Perennial Deceit (Enron/NYT in 1994)
Thirty-one years ago, the ‘newspaper of record’ excitedly reported atop the business section that a breakthrough with solar energy had occurred with the business genius of the upstart energy company Enron. Formed in the mid-1980s, Enron had just entered into the solar business and was destined to revitalize–if not save–the U.S. wind industry just a few years later.
Good press continues to create an Enron-like illusion of the coming competitiveness and profitability of solar and wind energies for on-grid electricity. Basic energy physics explains why the sun’s (dilute, intermittent) flow cannot compete against the sun’s stored (dense) energy embedded in natural gas, coal, and oil. And why outsized tax breaks for wind and solar remain essential after decades of priming. The article follows:
And solar panels sold to someone in Yukon would be the equivalent of selling ice to Eskimos.
Of course, they’d never BUY them.
