**Title**: Energy in the North - Michelle Wilber
**Date**: May 13, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Michelle Wilber

00;00;00;07 - 00;00;12;01 [Michelle Wilber] But it allowed us to put together a model that could, give you an indication of how much energy use your electric vehicle would use throughout a typical year of use somewhere, given your driving habits

00;00;12;01 - 00;00;31;08 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Michelle Wilber, a research engineer at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Michelle leads the Grid Edge program at ACEP, and she helped to create the electric vehicle calculator for Alaska. I began the conversation by asking Michelle, what spurred the development of the calculator specifically for Alaska?

00;00;31;08 - 00;04;43;16 [Michelle Wilber] We were getting a lot of questions as early as 2019 from people wondering if electric vehicles did well in the winter here. So we started to collect data. And even though there are other cold places in the world in the US where people are running electric vehicles down to -40 Fahrenheit Celsius. We were really interesting collecting experience and data from Alaskans, and those are people we had connection with. So we started collecting a lot of data on how people's vehicles were working down to as low as 40 below. And that was data that was not in the literature. And so we were able to extend the trend that people were seeing and how much energy use and thus how much electricity they need from electric vehicles. It really cold temperatures and throughout a long, cold winter in Alaska. 

So using that information that really allowed us to model what the energy use of an electric vehicle might be, there's a lot of things that go into it, not just temperature, speed. You know how much you turn the heat up inside the car, all that. But it allowed us to put together a model that could, give you an indication of how much energy use your electric vehicle would use throughout a typical year of use somewhere, given your driving habits and then that allows you to look at, the cost of fueling that vehicle. 

We're not looking into other costs like purchasing or maintenance, but fueling the vehicle with electricity and compare it to a gas vehicle. And then you can also look at carbon emissions if you're interested in that as well. And so with that, background data, we were able to put together a calculator that we are continually improving, improving because we're continually getting more data, on on different types of vehicles and how they're working. 

That, calculator is available at tinyurl.com/AKEVcalc. That's, that's an unwieldy URL, but you can get to it there. And we tried to make it as simple to use as possible. So you just choose a community in Alaska that fills it in with typical temperatures for the year. You choose how far you drive. You choose whether you want to look at a car or truck, those are the two main types being looked at right now. And broadly, everything's either a car or a truck in the calculator. So just put it in the best category. And then if we can't pre-populate from a database of gas prices, you also have to put in what you'd be paying for fuel on a gas vehicle. And but some, some locations, we have that data in a database. It takes a lot of information from online databases. It does the calculations and pops out an answer. That's a naive answer. If you're a data nerd or, energy nerd and you want to dig down, there's a button to press where you can choose all kinds of other things, like how long you plug it into your gas vehicle and do a block heater or other things like that. 

And one of the things we're doing not only is refining the model behind the scenes of energy use as we get more information, but we are also refining what those defaults look like. So originally we just put in some pretty conservative meaning favoring the gas vehicle assumptions about how long people idle their cars. You know, sit there while it's warm inside but aren't moving anywhere how long they plug in block heaters for. The more we interview people, the more we find that a lot of people are doing more idling or using the block heater in a cold climate, for longer than we are assuming. So the results may be better than what our model shows. And when we check against actual annual costs for running vehicles, we are finding that we are conservative.

The electric vehicle performs maybe 5% or more better than what we're assuming from that calculator. So, I'd never promise anything, your results may be different depending on your habits, but it should give you kind of a, decent case scenario. One caveat is, if you live in a place in Alaska with power cost equalization and not everybody knows they do, but most, small communities with diesel generation for the utility are, you may need to choose and do some thinking about if you'll be able to do any of your charging with your lower household rate, up to the 750 kilowatt hour cap.

00;04;43;16 - 00;05;05;27 [Amanda Byrd] Find the Alaska electric vehicle calculator a tinyurl.com/AKEVcalc. Michelle Wilber leads the Grid Edge program at 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.