Clean Energy to Communities Program: Golden Valley Electric Association at Fairbanks, Alaska (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video C2C Testimonial: Fairbanks Alaska.

John Burns, the chief executive officer of the Golden Valley Electric Association, shares how the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Energy to Communities (C2C) program is helping Fairbanks make energy decisions.

[Text on screen: How Clean Energy to Communities helped Fairbanks, Alaska; C2C: Clean Energy to Communities, U.S. Department of Energy]

[Speaker: John Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Golden Valley Electric Association]

We have about 45,000 meters. Our maximum load in the wintertime is about 197 MW, which you know, significantly small, much smaller than a lot of the GTD—generation, transmission, distribution—utilities in the lower 48, and our service territory encompasses almost 6,000 mi². It's huge.

I've lived in Fairbanks since 1970, so I'm intimately familiar with how critically dependent this community is on safe, reliable, low-cost energy. Smaller communities like ours, for example, we really don't have the capacity to look at things from a much broader perspective. We're at a pivotal crossroads. It's: Where do we go from here?

NREL provides us the additional engineering and analytic tools that help us to evaluate: What is, you know, how do we integrate? How do we integrate large-scale wind? How do we integrate the batteries? They looked at our generation portfolio, and they came up with five strategic plans.

It'll allow the diversification of generation. It helps us with cost, and it helps us with emissions. We have to tie it to battery energy storage and to a robust transmission line in order to ensure that the reliability is not in any way negatively impacted. This is a really transformative opportunity, and I'm so excited that I see this confluence in the synergy that's being created.

[Text on screen: C2C: Clean Energy to Communities, U.S. Department of Energy]