There's a little town all the way up, waaay north, called Galena, Alaska. If you look at a map of the state, it's what we Marines would call 'center mass,' or darn near right smack dab in the middle of the state. There's been a military airfield in town since World War II, and the Air Force still uses it as needed, even though they've turned it over to contractors to keep it open and pulled all the AF personnel out.  

As of the 2020 census, they'd had a bit of a population boom, and bumped up to 472 from the 470 residents they'd reported in the 2010 census.

The little burg has had its fair share of ups and downs, most recently with a catastrophic flood in 2013 that damaged or soaked at least 90% of the homes in town thanks to an ice jam on the Yukon River.

Then there's always the challenge of simply being a small, isolated Yukon community in itself. One of those is keeping the lights and heat on.

Galena's been thinking out of the box ever since the price of diesel, which has kept the town's generators going, skyrocketed over the years.

It has affected everyone.

Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost.

Every year, the Huntington family spent about $7,000 on diesel to heat the cabin during bone-chilling winters. And a few years back, a power outage at the town’s diesel plant left residents temporarily freezing in minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When power finally returned hours later, water pipes had frozen, leaving about two dozen homes without running water for days.

“We just didn’t open our door all morning until the lights came back on,” said Huntington, a member of the local Louden Tribe.

One thing the city wisely did was utilize local and abundant paper birches and build itself a biomass plant. That has alleviated some of the price pressure on the school system.

...Students here can take classes on sustainable energy, aviation, carpentry and much more. But to keep the school running — especially during long, cold winters — it needs heat.

That’s where the biomass project comes in. Every winter since 2016, trees (mostly paper birch) are locally harvested and shredded into wood chips that fuel a large boiler plant on campus, offsetting use of about 100,000 gallons of diesel annually for the school district and the city, said Brad Scotton, a Galena City Council member who also serves on SEGA’s board. It’s notable as one of the state’s first large-scale biomass plants and the most rural, he added.

Cost savings from use of biomass has allowed the Galena City School District to hire certified professionals in trade jobs and do upkeep on campus facilities, district superintendent Jason R. Johnson stated in an email.

Keep in mind, Galena is located in what's known as a 'subarctic' climate zone, which means short summers and long, often very brutal winters. They did have a record high in January once of 43° in the early 90s, but the record January low of -70° has also been set in that same thirty-year 1990-2020 span, and most of the winter temperature means hover in the -20° or worse.

So this next move they're making to help bolster their energy security in a place where they only have the palest sunlight for about three hours on a winter afternoon seems a little crazy on its face, until you understand the city isn't paying for it. They have grants from the federal government, at least for the moment.

So, what the heck - throw up that solar array and see if you can cut your diesel bill in the summer at least, right?

Peak insanity. Not only lack of sunshine, but the irradiation loss with latitude translates to .5% degradation of output for every degree of latitude north of the equator.