Flint Hills Resources unveiled in-home water treatment systems as a longer-term way to provide clean water to North Pole residents at a community meeting Tuesday night.

The filtration system is comprised of standard parts assembled specially to remove sulfolane. They are being tested during the next few months at five volunteer homes in North Pole with sulfolane readings between 50 parts per billion and 250 parts per billion, the full range found in private wells. After about two months, the system has proven to reduce sulfolane to non-detectable levels, said Flint Hills spokesman Jeff Cook.

“We’re hopeful that will be the final option we can offer people,” Cook said.

Flint Hills is continuing to clean up contamination that was discovered last year but happened years before the company bought the refinery in 2004. Sulfolane, a chemical used in refining oil, reportedly seeped into groundwater and private wells from gasoline spills last decade. Some water contains levels above those recommended by federal standards but much too low to make laboratory animals sick. Most of the tainted wells are outside North Pole city limits.

Jenny Vanderweele’s house looks out over Vanderweele Farm fields, so she has a front row seat to the bloom-and-bust summer season. As fall approaches, she spends hours in her kitchen putting up fall vegetables for the winter. Though she also pickles and cans produce from the farm, Vanderweele says freezing is a simple and effective way to preserve broccoli and cauliflower. “The longest parts of this process are getting the water to boil and waiting for the stuff to freeze,” she says. Properly prepared, cauliflower and broccoli should keep for up to a year — or even longer if vacuum packed. “Put it in your freezer and you have a beautiful way to open up some summer in the middle of the winter.”

Continue reading: Extend the Alaska summer: How to put up your veggies for winter

A Fairbanks developer said Tuesday he hopes he can build a 25-megawatt wind farm near Delta Junction despite limited avenues for public aid.

Mike Craft said his firm, Alaska Environmental Power, is working with Golden Valley Electric Association to study how to best feed wind power into Interior Alaska’s transmission grid.

The work parallels planning by Golden Valley for a separate wind farm near Healy.

Craft told a chamber of commerce audience Tuesday he hopes the integration studies will lead to power-sale agreements between his firm and the utility. He said Golden Valley previously agreed to a smaller, pilot sale agreement following construction of two smaller turbines at the Delta site.

“(It) made it possible for us to come on line with these two turbines. That helped us a lot,” Craft said. He said the turbines, the largest built with state aid, have produced 134,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Craft, a builder and residential developer, started looking to enter the wind power business roughly three years ago. He approached public officials last winter for help with his project and received lukewarm responses but said Tuesday he chose to continue and hopes to install 16 GE turbines near Delta.

In late July, a group of Inuit hunters set off by boat along the west coast of Banks Island to search for Peary caribou, which inhabit the Arctic archipelago of Canada. Roger Kuptana, a 62-year-old Inuit who had grown up on the island, didn’t give his fellow hunters much chance of success in their hunt for the animals, the smallest caribou sub-species in North America.

“I think it’s a waste of gas,” Kuptana told me when I visited his modest home in Sachs Harbour, a traditional community of roughly 100 people on the island, not far from the Yukon-Alaska border. “There used to be a lot of caribou around here when I grew up. But now you have to travel pretty far north to find them on the island. It’s not just here. It seems like this happening everywhere.”

As it turned out, Kuptana was right; the Inuit hunters found no Peary caribou, despite three days of searching. The hunters’ predicament is familiar to the Eskimos of Alaska, other Inuit of Canada and Greenland, and the Nenets, Komi, Evenks, Chukotkans, and indigenous groups of northern Russia and Scandinavia. Throughout the Arctic, many of the great caribou and reindeer herds that once roamed the treeless tundra, providing an indispensible source of meat and clothing for aboriginal groups, are in free-fall.

Continue reading: A Troubling Decline in the Caribou Herds of the Arctic

By CCHRC Staff

Q: Recently I read the News-Miner story about the heat pump being installed at Weller Elementary School. Are there different ways to install this type of system and is this something I can do myself?

Ground source heat pumps operate in a way similar to how a refrigerator transfers heat out of an insulated box to the surrounding air of your kitchen. In this case, the heat pump absorbs heat from the ground and transfers it to a home. The heat exchange mechanism between the ground and the heat pump is typically a series of liquid-filled tubes.

There are different methods to get the heat out of the ground each of which require different installation needs.

One system is the shallow horizontal trench, which is being used at Weller Elementary.

In this configuration, the tubes are made into overlapping loops and placed approximately 10 feet in the ground. For people who live in areas of shallow ground water, it is beneficial to get the loop below the ground water table. This requires a large area, so this type of system is probably not feasible in a downtown lot, but would work well on a southsloping hillside with a lot of land available.

Another option to consider is drilling multiple wells.

These would be similar to drilling a drinking water well for a home, except that only the heat in the water is being extracted, not the groundwater itself. It is likely that more than one well would be needed to heat a house.

The third option is to sink the ground loops deep into a body of water such as a pond or lake, provided that the water body is sufficiently large to accommodate the heat demand. Contact the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation before beginning this type of project.

All of these options are for a “closed-loop” system, where freeze-protected fluid is circulated in a closed system of piping. There are also “open-loop” systems that draw ground water directly and then inject the water back into the ground.

In most cases these are not appropriate for use in Interior Alaska.

In terms of a do-it-yourself project (and Alaskans are pretty handy) a heat pump involves digging a deep well or large trench, which will probably require hiring a driller or excavator. The equipment that makes up a heat pump is technical. Hiring someone who has been certified by the manufacturer or by the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association to install these systems is recommended.

Contact local heat pump distributors to get more information on installation.

Alaska HomeWise articles promote home awareness for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC). If you have a question, e-mail us at akhomewise@cchrc.org.You can also call the CCHRC at (907) 457-3454.

The state’s environmental agency has delayed a request to the federal government for permits for the Healy Clean Coal project.

The decision came Tuesday, the next-to-last day of federal regulators’ 45-day review of the plan. Golden Valley Electric Association needs the permit to restart and operate the dormant experimental coal plant.

The state will resubmit the proposal, which would cover operations of the 50-megawatt coal plant, within a couple of months, state Division of Air Quality manager Jim Baumgartner wrote to federal regulators.

The state Division of Air Quality withdrew the proposed permit Tuesday from the Environmental Protection Agency’s review list. EPA managers had suggested last winter they might call for a rigorous redo of permit reviews, given the plant’s lack of action during the past 10 years. That, given the tightening of emissions standards since the plant’s construction, could doom the project.

A University of Alaska group will receive $3 million to study options to optimize wind-diesel hybrid energy systems in rural Alaska.

The Alaska Center for Energy and Power, based at UA Fairbanks, was awarded the grant by the federal Department of Energy.

The university says Alaska already has systems pairing wind turbines with diesel power plants but many are not performing as designed due to extreme weather and remote, distributed grid systems.

Research paid for by the grant will investigate technical issues related to power stability, long-term energy storage and control systems to better use fluctuating wind power.

Research also will investigate turbine performance in cold climates and remote locations and challenges such as icing, foundations in poor soils and remote monitoring.

Large rolls of black tubing sat like super-sized balls of yarn next to the playground outside Weller Elementary School Wednesday. The sun shined brightly on the south-facing hillside, where a bulldozer carved out a 12-foot hole.

The balls, which are actually polyethylene ground loops, were then rolled out and buried in the ditch, where they will harvest heat from underground to use in the school during the winter. In the summer, six solar thermal panels soon to be mounted on the school will replenish heat to the earth through the same tubes. The system will not only reap savings on heat for the school district but also will test a technology that is young in Fairbanks.

“I would like to see a system that would work well in the Interior and that the public can utilize and save dollars,” said Larry Morris, projects manager for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District.

The project is an experiment to see how well the systems work in tandem and to collect data on ground source heat pumps, which are common in the Lower 48 but rare in Fairbanks.

“What we’re trying to do here is pair that system with a solar system that will recharge the heat you take out of the ground. In warmer climates, the sun can recharge how much you take out,” said Aaron Sirois, an engineer for PDC Engineering. “We were trying to come up with a solution that’s kind of adapted to Fairbanks.”

When Rich Boone looks at the future of Fairbanks, he can’t help but envision the canola fields outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

That’s because a projected warming trend in Alaska could eventually give the Interior the same climate characteristics that exist in that Canadian Midwestern agricultural city. Boone, a professor and ecosystem ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, used that example during a Wednesday presentation on climate change science.

Fairbanks faces a roughly 11-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase by 2100 if moderate climate-change models are used, Boone said. If that holds true, the Interior will no longer be characterized by permafrost and boreal forests.

“I think that’s very realistic,” Boone said. “We’d be in a zone that would potentially be prairie.”

Warming models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict worldwide temperatures will increase by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century. Since Arctic regions have been warming at roughly twice the rate of other parts of the globe, especially big changes could be ahead for residents of the north.

WindPower Innovations Inc., a wind power infrastructure and smart grid solutions company (PINK SHEETS:WPNV), announced talks with Alaska Villages Electric Co-op (AVEC), a non-profit electric utility, owned by the people served in 53 villages throughout interior and western Alaska, and is the largest service area of any retail electric cooperative in the world.

News of the talks arrived in a written statement from WindPower.

“We are in the second round of talks with AVEC to enhance the efficiency of their 250-500 kW wind turbines with our system optimization and grid-tie solutions,” says John Myers, president and CEO of WindPower Innovations. “Alaska represents a marketplace in the hundreds of millions and soon to be over a billion dollars for wind and other alternative energy sources, and the adaptability of WindPower Innovations’ technology allows us to capitalize on opportunities in extreme and remote environments where others can’t. We will be able to provide AVEC with solutions that help them break through barriers in efficiency and help solve the challenges faced by Alaska’s extremes in climate, geography and distance.”

AVEC is in the process of upgrading and increasing the operating efficiency of its power plant facilities and distribution lines, along with expanding its wind power segment, continuing to move away from costly diesel-generated power.

Continue reading: Wind power company in ‘talks’ with AVEC