**Title**: Energy in the North - Jeremy Kasper
**Date**: July 8, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Jeremy Kasper


00;00;00;12 - 00;00;09;16 [Jeremy Kasper] Where the real magic happens is putting together a community leader in Old Crow with a community energy leader in Kotzebue.

00;00;09;16 - 00;00;29;27 [Amanda Byrd] This week, on Energy on the North, I speak with the Alaska Center for Energy and Power director, Jeremy Kasper. On this show, we've covered stories from energy producers, end users, researchers, and everything in between. One question we often get is what does ACEP do? I began the conversation with Jeremy by asking why was ACEP started?

00;00;29;27 - 00;01;42;12[Jeremy Kasper] No matter what you do, you can't escape the need for energy in Alaska, and back about 18 years ago now, the university realized there was a gap. We didn't really have an energy program at that point. And so a couple of forward looking folks took the initiative to stand up an energy program that would respond to the needs of the state and be able to start answering some questions about, well, how do you integrate solar into energy systems in rural Alaska, for example? I guess at that time people weren’t probably thinking about solar. But how do you integrate wind? What's this thing called hydrokinetic energy? Should we be paying attention to it. And really starting to ask some questions about what technologies are available? What do we know already? Do we have the right energy technologies? What energy technologies should we be thinking about? Is there a way to do it cheaper, is there a a way to it better, more reliable? So really starting to answer questions that are very specific to Alaska. Now, it doesn't mean the answers we get only apply to Alaska. These really apply to anywhere where you have an isolated community. Look around the Arctic. These questions apply in a lot of the Arctic, northern Canada, Iceland, Iceland and Iceland at grid system just like ours.

00;01;42;12 - 00;02;04;17 [Amanda Byrd] So back in 2015, an independent research group, Navigent Research, now Guidehouse Insights, reported that Alaska was highly significant, with 50% of the microgrids in the U.S. 12% of the world's installed microgrids. With more than 200 microgrid communities and over 100 utilities in Alaska, how does ACEP fit into this?

00;02;04;17 - 00;03;54;06 [Jeremy Kasper] ACEP’s got some experts, right. We've got some real worldwide, nationally, internationally known experts. But a lot of the people who are running these systems are those experts. And so a lot of our programing and research has focused on, okay, we've got these incredibly skilled and knowledgeable people - how do we get that knowledge to the people who need it elsewhere? And so the ARENA program, the Arctic Remote Energy Network Academy, is a peer to peer mentoring program that ACEP here in Alaska, established with our Canadian partners and our Icelandic partners about, going back about ten years ago now. And so we've got onsites as part of that program in Alaska, Iceland and the northern Canada. And the whole idea of the program is to pair up leaders in community energy systems who have the potential or trying to get projects done with people who have done projects. And so that's where the peer to peer mentoring comes in. And so, we can provide and we do provide some of the subject matter experts for the for the intro talks. But where the real magic happens is putting together a community leader in Old Crow with a community energy leader in Kotzebue or Cordova, or Galena. And these are the, you know, the communities that are really well along and kind of shaping their community energy goals and getting their communities where they want them to be. So that's that's really one of the things that we emphasize a lot at ACEP is those partnerships. We're not the holder of all the knowledge. And if there's people that we know a lot about these systems, we try and help that, you know, that transfer of knowledge to others who might be interested in that knowledge.

00;03;54;10 - 00;04;32;21 [Amanda Byrd] So you mentioned Old Crow and Kotzebue. Actually in the first ARENA cohort, we had both people from Kotzebue and Old Crow. In the second ARENA cohort, we went to Old Crow and we saw a solar development project that was created after the initial ARENA program. It's incredible to see how a program like ARENA can pair people together and share that knowledge and actually make projects happen,
 because we don't actually build energy projects at ACEP we give the ability to share that knowledge so that people can make projects happen around the world.

00;04;32;21 - 00;04;58;26 [Jeremy Kasper] Absolutely. And that's, you know, it's an important thing to emphasize. We do research on the economics or on how do you use excess renewables for heating? But you're very right. We don't, you know, we're not going to install a solar power plant in a remote community. Yeah, that's not a headache I want, but, obviously, that is what people in those communities want. And so how do we help them get there?

00;04;58;26 - 00;05;12;06 [Amanda Byrd] Jeremy Kasper is the director for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep, and follow us on social media.