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Alaska's Renewable Energy Future: New Jobs, Affordable Energy
By Kay Brown, Carly Wier, et. al. - Alaska Climate Alliance, March 21, 2022
Alaska has a vast endowment of renewable energy resources that can be tapped in its transition to a renewable energy future. Benefits of accelerating the energy transition in Alaska include more jobs, lower energy prices, higher energy security and the potential for renewable resources to support zero carbon hydrogen-based fuels for the aviation and maritime industries.
The state has already begun to develop its renewable energy resources and continues to support renewable technology development for Alaska’s challenging environment. The scale of Alaska’s vast undeveloped renewable energy resource endowment remains more than 14 times the total U.S. energy consumption.
Renewable energy technologies, including wind, solar, geothermal, and ocean and river hydrokinetic, along with complementary energy storage technologies, are continuing to exhibit declining costs which make them increasingly attractive as a primary energy source to substitute for fossil fuels in the electric sector and to support the electrification of buildings and the transformation of the transportation sector to electrification and renewable hydrogen-based fuels.
As local fossil fuel costs escalate across Alaska, from 2.5X higher in the Railbelt to as much as 4X higher in Rural Alaska (as compared to the U.S. average), renewable energy technologies are increasingly attractive investments and are poised to affordably replace legacy fossil fuel energy systems in the 2030-to-2050 time horizon while providing greater energy security, increased energy resiliency especially in rural Alaska, and broad environmental, economic and health benefits.
Independent studies have confirmed that the development of Alaska’s renewable energy potential will generate thousands of jobs – at least comparable in magnitude to the fossil fuel jobs that may be displaced by the transition to a clean renewable energy sector.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.
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