A home heating study in Kotzebue will look at how to reduce diesel consumption in communities off the railbelt.
Dominique Pride works at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s the lead researcher on a National Science Foundation-funded study on heating oil consumption in the Arctic.
Pride said the mission of the study — which is part of the NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic program — is to find ways to reduce dependence on heating oil in Alaska, especially in colder, rural regions where winter heating bills can be astronomically high.
“Anybody that lives in Kotzebue or in Alaska in general doesn't have access to natural gas,” Pride said. “There's also the security issue as well — what happens if the barge doesn't come in?”
Pride and her team are looking for 16 households in Kotzebue to participate in the two-year energy study.
Households in the study will receive an energy audit to assess how to make their homes more energy efficient.
In the first year of the study, the researchers will collect baseline data on the households’ use of heating oil and electricity.
In the second year, participants will be divided into groups. Half of the households will get an energy retro-fit. That could include energy-efficient improvements like weather stripping and insulation as well as replacing windows, doors or heating appliances. The improvements would be tailored to the needs of the person’s home, Pride said.
A second group in the study will receive an electric thermal storage heater, which looks kind of like a large Toyo stove. The technology for these storage heaters isn’t new it’s been used since the 1940s and recently in Alaska in the Y-K Delta community of Kongiganak.
Basically, electricity heats an electric resistance coil, which Pride compares it to the heating element in a toaster. Once the coil gets hot, its heat gets stored in high-density bricks in an insulated cabinet.
“Then, when the homeowner decides that they want to use that heat, they just flip a switch and a fan blows air across the hot bricks, and that air is dissipated into the home and heats the home,” Pride said.
According to Pride, the thermal heaters can hold heat for 24 hours.
Some participants in the study will be part of the control group. They won’t get any energy upgrades or an electric thermal storage heater, but they will get $1,000 at the end of the study.
The two-year study is set to kick off this later this summer. Pride said she sees future potential for renewable energy in the region, where the cost of diesel is so high.
More information about the project can also be found at www.tinyurl.com/kotzheat
