2022 Shultz Energy Fellowships: Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP): Hydrogen Use Cases and Optimization in Kotzebue

Regional-, state-, and city-level efforts are essential in our fight against climate change, especially in the field of energy. Stanford University is committed to helping by integrating its students into energy and climate ecosystems in the West through the Shultz Energy Fellowships program, an energy-related summer fellowship program for undergraduate and graduate students. You will be one of two Stanford students placed at ACEP based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Named in honor of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, one of the most widely admired American public servants of the past half-century, the program offers a suite of paid, energy-related public service fellowships for Stanford students in California, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii during the summer. 

The fellowships run from Monday, June 20, 2022 to Friday, August 26, 2022.

Organization/Agency mission or role in state government

The Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) is an applied energy research program based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. ACEP provides leadership in developing energy systems for islanded, non-integrated electric grids and their associated oil-based heating systems. 

ACEP is working with the community of Kotzebue and the Kotzebue utility operator Kotzebue Electric Association( KEA), to assist the community in their goal of transitioning from fossil fuel powered diesel generators to 100% renewable energy from variable renewable resources. Achieving 100% annual penetration will require long-duration storage.  

KEA has also been a leader in renewable energy adoption for remote microgrids with the installation of wind turbines and energy storage. Kotzebue was one of the first remote communities in the world to install grid-scale wind energy in a remote environment. Since then, they have made systematic improvements and additions to the system to achieve up to 75% instantaneous penetration of wind and solar energy. 

Kotzebue (population ~3,300) is located 30 miles above the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea. It is a predominantly Inupiaq community that serves as a regional hub, with several essential services (e.g., hospital, residential school) and a mixed cash-subsistence economy. In rural areas of Alaska, such as Kotzebue, energy prices are amongst the highest in the country, with most energy generation coming from imported diesel fuel. As a mid-sized remote Alaska community, Kotzebue offers an opportunity to develop smart, connected, and culturally appropriate energy solutions broadly applicable to the many islanded microgrid communities in the Arctic. 

KEA has installed almost 3 MW of wind, a 532 kW solar array, a 1.25 MW / 950 kWh Li-ion battery energy storage system, and an 450 kW electric boiler to deliver excess wind energy to heat the hospital. The microgrid operates at up to 75% instantaneous penetration of wind and solar energy.  Additional renewable generation sources and long-term storage are needed to go fully diesel off.

Assignment

KEA takes a holistic approach to energy for the community, seeing itself as an energy utility, not simply an electric power provider. A Shultz Energy Fellow will partner with ACEP researchers and KEA engineers to continue to explore new technological horizons in utilizing local, clean energy sources and the potential for using hydrogen as a long-duration storage solution. 

ACEP’s goal of helping KEA achieve supporting 90%+ penetration of variable renewable energy includes a research thrust to develop a variety of models of the energy system at different levels to help KEA to explore options.  

This fellowship opportunity would focus on techno-economic feasibility modeling, with a specific exploration around the use of hydrogen as a long-term storage, and comparing that to other long-term storage options. More broadly, the work would be part of within the context of an end-to-end modeling framework and suite of tools being developed to support design, planning, and operation of community power systems with high penetration of variable renewable generation. For these relatively small systems, the reduced topological and market complexity facilitates combination of capacity expansion and production cost modeling analyses under these so-called techno-economic modeling tools, such as HOMER or Xendee. In addition to techno-economic modeling, the end-to-end modeling framework being developed by ACEP will include transient stability and electromagnetic models. These models could be used to evaluate reliability of the proposed solutions under certain scenarios.

Potential mentor(s)

• Dr. Mariko Shirazi, President's Professor in Energy at Alaska Center for Energy and Power; and part of the ACEP Power Systems Integration Program and a wider multi-state research team focused on the Modeling of Converter Dominated Power Systems
• Dr. Erin Whitney, Research Faculty at ACEP, Leading ACEP Solar Program and part of the new ACEP Hydrogen Initiative
• Matt Bergan, Project Engineer at Kotzebue Electric Association