The Kenai Peninsula Clarion has an article on interest in developing tidal power in Alaska - A new wave of energy: Company studying tidal power in Cook Inlet.

As the liquified natural gas plant in Nikiski prepares for its final shipments, a tidal power company is preparing to begin collecting environmental data in the same area.

Ocean Renewable Power Company received a permit to begin studying the area last week. Tuesday, it held a meeting at the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association building to discuss its Cook Inlet projects with Kenai Peninsula residents. Eventually, the company wants to capture hydrokinetic energy for Alaskans to use.

Company President and CEO Christopher Sauer said hydrokinetic means using the motion of the water to create energy.

Just who would buy the power is still an unknown, although Sauer said it is likely that the company would sell some of their turbines and also deploy some to sell the resulting electricity. ORPC sees its potential buyers as railbelt utility companies or even oil platforms that are currently using diesel to generate electricity, Sauer said.

But that is a few years out. Right now, the company has a permit to establish baseline environmental data. Essentially, it wants to see how fish and whales use the area, said Monty Worthington, the company's project development director.

Ocean Renewable Power has three years to do that work -- and then they'll receive priority in applying for a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission permit for a pilot project, Worthington said.

Bob Shavelson, from the Homer-based environmental organization Cook Inletkeeper, said the permitting process would likely be tough for the company.

Worthington said the company was trying to find the best location to get a project permitted. That project would be on a small-scale, to see if it's feasible to do a larger project in the area, Worthington said. If the company sees that beluga are incompatible with the technology, there's no project he said.

Last spring, the Maine-based company began similar work at a Fire Island site in the north Cook Inlet. Worthington said that bulk of that work is done. Now they're largely focused on the Nikiski site, called East Forelands.

The Cook Inlet is ideal for tidal power for a number of reasons, Worthington said. Most simply, there's a lot of power. More importantly, that power is close to the railbelt utility grid, where electricity is needed.

The Nikiski location has its own perks. In that area, the ocean has about the right amount of energy for the technology Ocean Renewable Power has developed.

The SMH has an article on the maintenance nightmare that is BP's ALaskan oil pipeline system - BP's Alaska pipelines in danger of rupturing.

The huge pipeline system that moves oil, gas and waste between BP's operations in Alaska is plagued by severe corrosion, an internal maintenance report says.

The document, obtained by the independent investigative journalism group ProPublica, shows that as of October 1, at least 148 BP pipelines on Alaska's North Slope received an ''F-rank'' from the company.

BP workers say this means inspections have found that more than 80 per cent of the pipe wall is corroded and could rupture.

Most of the pipelines carry toxic or flammable substances. The document says many metal walls of the F-ranked pipes are worn within millimetres of bursting, risking an explosion or spills.

BP oil workers say the company's fire and gas warning systems are unreliable, that the giant turbines that pump oil and gas through the system are ageing and that some oil and waste holding tanks are verging on collapse.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that oil reserve numbers in Alaska have been reduced by the USGS - USGS report reduces estimate of oil in petroleum reserve.

Recent drilling results indicate that the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska contains roughly a tenth of the oil that federal scientists had previously estimated, the U.S. Geological Survey announced Tuesday.

Instead, the federal agency said, natural gas is the dominant energy resource in the 23 million-acre reserve across northern Alaska, and in nearby state waters. The findings are based on more than 30 wells drilled and other exploration in the NPRA over the past decade.

The agency's findings are in sync with declining investment by some oil companies, which have shed more than a million acres of leases in the reserve and are spending much less money on purchasing new ones.

And yet, the agency scientist who published the new estimates cautioned against overreacting. He stressed on Tuesday that the reserve does hold some decent-sized accumulations of oil -- particularly in the northeast, near Teshekpuk Lake -- and its potential for gas is "just phenomenal."

But until a North Slope gas pipeline is built, "a gas discovery is not a lot better than a dry hole," said the scientist, David Houseknecht.

Reuters reports that BP has another problem on its hands, this time in Alaska - BP-owned Alaska oil pipeline shut after spill.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, partly owned by BP, shut down on Tuesday after spilling several thousand barrels of crude oil into backup containers, drastically cutting supply down the main artery between refineries and Alaska's oilfields.

The accident comes at a difficult time for BP -- the largest single owner of the pipeline operator, holding 47 percent -- as it struggles to plug a gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well.

The shutdown followed a series of mishaps that resulted from a scheduled fire-command system test at Pump Station 9, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks, said Alyeska Pipeline Service Co, the operator of the 800-mile oil line.

The power outage triggered opening of relief valves, causing an unspecified volume of crude oil to overflow a storage tank into a secondary containment. There were no injuries, but the approximately 40 people at the work site were evacuated, Alyeska spokeswoman Michele Egan said.

North Slope oil producers have cut their flow into the pipeline's Prudhoe Bay intake station to 16 percent of their normal rates, Egan said. There is enough storage capacity to allow the line to be shut down for 48 hours as long as producers maintain the 16 percent flow rate, she said.

It is unclear how long the shutdown will last.

Greg Palast has a look at a man who was instrumental in creating the Alaskan oil industry - Emperor Hickel: The Man Who Invented Alaska ... and Sarah Palin.

Wally Hickel invented Alaska and told me he regretted it. He also invented Sarah Palin, and I was hoping, when I travel to Alaska next month, to ask him whether he also regretted that second creation.

Hickel wanted to be President; of what nation, well, that changed. First, he wanted to be President of the United States. That required that his home, Alaska, become united with the States, a task he accomplished in 1959 with the help of his buddy, and later enemy, Richard Nixon.

"That was a mistake," he said, referring to US Statehood. "We should have been our own nation," which, I pointed out, would have made him President instead of Governor.

Hickel grinned and took me over to a globe. As he massaged and caressed the planet's crown, he talked about his long-held dream to create a circumpolar resource cartel linking Siberia, Alaska, sub-polar Scandinavia and northern Japan, tied together by a rail tunnel under the Bering Sea. Alaska was too small; his plan was for a Confederation of the North, an Arctic Empire that circled the top of the planet. Benevolently ruled, he made clear, by Emperor Wally.

Mad, yes, but all of Hickel's plans were nuts, and usually successful. When I met with him in 1997, he had already prodded the Governor of Sakhalin Island, Alaska's twin in population and minerals, to declare its independence from Russia. (That didn't last.)

Walter Hickel, elected Governor of Alaska twice over twenty-five years, was one strange Republican. Nixon expelled him from the Cabinet in 1970 for publicly opposing the invasion of Cambodia. Hickel was a Huey Long-style populist socialist. "Private property," he told me, "is an artifact of the temperate zone; it just won't work for most of the planet." ...

Thirty years ago, Hickel realized that his arctic dreams lay in Alaska's vast reserves of gas, oil, coal and lumber. But extracting and shipping those resources required removing a large obstacle: the land's ownership by Indians and Natives.

The US Congress recognized Native land rights in the original agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia and, in 1959, again acknowledged those rights, albeit reluctantly, when Alaska became America's 49th state.

Hickel, elected Alaska's second Governor in 1966, was driven crazy by the Natives' ownership of the land. He told me, "You can only claim title to land by conquest or purchase. Just because your granddaddy chased a moose across some property doesn't mean you own it."

However, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall (who served both Kennedy and Johnson) protected Native land from Hickel and the oil companies. But then, in 1969, newly-elected President Richard Nixon gave Hickel Udall's job.

Unless the Natives ceded or sold their territory, billions of barrels of crude oil on Alaska's North Slope could not get to port through a pipeline proposed by a consortium led by British Petroleum and its junior partner, Exxon.

From inside the Nixon Cabinet and outside, Hickel successfully lobbied Congress for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the BP/Exxon pipe required getting those Natives out of the way. And that required passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

ANCSA contained a clause unique in US history: Rather than create reservations in which there would be a sovereign territory held for Natives in perpetuity, Alaskan Natives would be given shares of stock in a dozen or so corporations. The corporations, not the Natives, would own the land.

Most important, Because the land was corporate real estate, not reservation property it could be sold. And guess who was ready to buy it? ...

In 1973, the United State Senate authorized the Trans-Alaska Pipeline by a single vote.

To get that controversial law passed, R.O. Andersen, Chairman of ARCO Petroleum, now a part of British Petroleum, testified under oath that North Slope Alaska resources would be shipped exclusively to the US market, not Japan.

He and Governor Hickel also swore the oil pipe would not be followed by a gas pipeline on the same route.

Yet today, Yukon Pacific Corporation has begun work on that gas pipeline designed to ship liquefied fuel to Japan. For Sarah Palin, whose rise to Governor was engineered by Hickel, this was her greatest accomplishment in office: requiring the major oil companies to participate in Yukon Pacific's gas pipe project.

Yukon Pacific's founding investors were R.O. Andersen ...and Walter Hickel.

Rigzone has an article on efforts to investigate the possibility of extracting methane from methane hydrate deposits on Alaska's north slope - Producers Test Ways to Draw Hydrates from Alaska's North Slope.

For several years scientists have pondered whether vast stores of methane -- the main component of natural gas -- locked in hydrates on the North Slope and elsewhere in the Arctic could ever be produced. Now the U.S. Department of Energy is working with two Alaska oil and gas producers and a regional municipal government in an effort to find out.

Test wells planned in 2010 and 2011 could point the way toward a way of economically extracting methane from hydrates.

A gas hydrate is a crystalline solid where a methane molecule is trapped in a cage of water molecules, essentially ice that contains gas. The potential resources are immense. Methane hydrates may contain more organic carbon than all the world's coal, oil and non-hydrate natural gas combined, the U.S. Geological Survey says. Much of this is in difficult-to-reach offshore hydrates, but a lot of it is onshore in Arctic regions.

Studies by USGS geologists indicate a potential resource of 500 trillion cubic feet of in-place methane in hydrates believed to exist across Alaska's North Slope. From 44 trillion to 100 trillion cubic feet of this could exist right at industry's doorstep, below or near the existing oil field infrastructure on the slope, the agency says.

The question is whether methane can actually be produced from a hydrate, and the North Slope will provide a good test bed to find out, the DOE believes.

The agency has enlisted two producing companies, BP and ConocoPhillips, to try out two separate production ideas. The North Slope Borough is engaged in a separate project with DOE to assess whether hydrates are replenishing gas reserves in two small gas fields the borough operates near Barrow, 180 miles west of the North Slope fields. The borough will also drill a production test well in the East Barrow gas field.

Methane hydrates exist under certain pressure and temperature conditions, and they are known to exist offshore in buried sediments along continental shelves in several regions of the world.

Conditions are also ripe for onshore methane hydrates in Arctic regions, where there are underground geologic formations that contain hydrocarbons. This includes much of the North Slope and many parts of northern Canada and Russia.

Onshore hydrates appear to be formed by the migration of methane upward from the deeply buried source rocks into hydrates that form to trap the methane just below the permafrost, at depths of 2,000 feet to 4,000 feet.

The onshore hydrates, at least on the North Slope, also appear to be in thicker layers and more concentrated than offshore hydrates, and could therefore be easier to find and possibly produce, says Gordon Pospisil, technology and project manager of BP's Alaska hydrate program.

David Schoderbek, Conoco's Alaska hydrates project director, said offshore hydrates appear to occur in lower concentrations and in non-reservoir rocks, with densities that could be in the range of 20 percent. In contrast, the onshore hydrates on the North Slope appear to occupy as much as 60 percent to 80 percent of the pore space in sandstone.

North Slope producers have long known that hydrates exist around the large producing North Slope fields, where they were considered hazards when drill crews would unexpectedly encounter them while drilling conventional wells. Hydrates are believed to have caused gas "blowouts," or dangerous uncontrolled flows of gas, on wells on the North Slope.

Recent advances in seismic techniques and interpretation of well logs, or data gathered during drilling has allowed hydrates to be identified and mapped with greater accuracy.

Pospisil said what makes the North Slope ideal as a test-bed is the presence of industry infrastructure -- availability of rigs and services, roads, utilities -- that will allow production tests to be done more economically than in offshore regions.

BP's hydrate test project has been underway since 2002 in collaboration with the DOE. The goal is a long-term hydrate production test. The company drilled a well in the Milne Point field in 2007 to confirm results of its seismic profiling and to extract cores, or samples of rock containing methane hydrates. The project was successful on both counts: Drilling showed the hydrate was right where it was supposed to be, Pospisil said, and 100 feet of hydrate core was extracted. The test also showed the reservoir rock to contain higher saturation of hydrate than expected.

In a second phase of the project, BP will drill a second well and conduct a long-term production test that could last between three and 18 months, Pospifil said. Locations for the well are still being considered. It could be in the Milne Point, Kuparuk River fields or the western part of the Prudhoe Bay field, he said.

The test will involve gradually depressuring the hydrate to encourage the methane to flow, Pospifil said. Potential problems include possible re-freezing of the hydrate around the well-bore, which would impede the methane entering the well. This might be controlled by installing a heat tape to keep the temperature above freezing at the well perforations, or the points where gas would enter the well.

Problems could include sand and water that could flow into the well and impede the flow of methane to the surface.

Pospisil believes the sand problem can be solved just as solutions are being found for sand production that occurs with heavy oil. Handling the water that is produced imposes a cost, but it might also be an advantage because the water will be fresh, not briny like most water produced with oil and gas. Pure water is ideal for use in enhanced oil recovery projects in nearby conventional producing fields.

ConocoPhillips' carbon dioxide injection test, also planned for 2010, attempts to demonstrate in the field a process the company has successfully shown to work in the laboratory, that a CO2 molecule will displace the methane molecule in a hydrate while also preserving its structure, according to Schoderbek.

The downside of other hydrate production concepts, such as pressure drawdown, is that they could destabilize the hydrate, creating the problem of sand and water coming up the well. If the hydrate is preserved, however, only methane comes up the well, Schoderbek said.

ConocoPhillips' lab work has also shown that replacing methane with carbon dioxide in the hydrate appears to strengthen it.

TreeHugger has a post on some geodesic dome aficionados in Alaska - Bucky's Back: Domes Come in From the Cold (hat tip Chris). A video and more images at the link.

An Alaskan company has crossed Bucky Fuller's geodesic dome with walk-in cooler and come up with the Artic Dome [their spelling]. Intershelter's twenty foot diameter dome is built like a boat, with a gelcoat exterior and a core of P2000 insulation, a material that "combines thermal reflective technology with the high insulating properties of a specially formulated EPS foam core."

Each piece is 70 pounds so that it can be shipped easily and assembled quickly. While the materials are not particularly green, they pair it with a Sol-Cool heat pump unit that runs off solar panels and a wind turbine.

It is also not really a Geodesic dome as designed by Buckminster Fuller, which was made of triangular elements. These appear to be built from very clever overlapping pieces that remind me of fish scales more than anything else. But it has many of the attributes of a Geodesic dome, both good and bad.

According to Libby Tucker in the New York Times, The domes can be reused for up to 50 years and can withstand up to 40 feet of snow and 160-mile-an-hour winds.

There are a couple of layouts that look quite comfortable, although having had a twenty foot diameter dome, I can attest that they are tough to furnish. These were designed for emergency and commercial uses in extreme temperatures; I hope they introduce a model with a bit more glazing. But at about fifteen thousand bucks for 315 square feet for the insulated version, it is a great start.

Greg Palast reports that Exxon has escaped almost scot-free for the Valdez oil spill, successfully delaying paying up for 20 years until it found a court willing to help them avoid paying compensation to the victims.

Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die. And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and its oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching.

Here's the unreported story, the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar.

The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitments to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez. The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill. ...

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can't happen again.

They promise.

Peter Matthiessen (author of "The Snow Leopard") has an article in The New York Review Of Books on the slow creep forward of big oil on he north slope of Alaska - "Alaska: Big Oil and the Inupiat-Americans".

On August 2 of this year, asserting a symbolic claim to almost half of the Arctic Basin, a Russian submarine with two parliamentarians on board planted a corrosion-resistant titanium flag more than two miles down directly under the North Pole. In its international implications, the flag-planting anticipated a second epochal event when, on August 21, it was officially announced that the Northwest Passage, emerging at last from millennia of ice, was navigable and open to commercial shipping, removing as many as five thousand miles from long world voyages by way of the Panama Canal. A week later, on August 28, came the latest reports of a scarily accelerating loss of Arctic sea ice attributed by most scientists to global warming, a loss that on September 5 would be confirmed as the greatest on record.

All of these circumstances, of course, bore directly on the imminent development of the Arctic sea floor as a lucrative new field for the industrial extraction of the fossil fuels whose carbon emissions were the principal component of the greenhouses gases that are the primary cause of Arctic warming in the first place. As in Iraq, what was driving all this activity, for better or worse, was the region's mineral resources, and as in Iraq, the one clear beneficiary of this earth disaster was the international energy industry, a.k.a. Big Oil. Though present estimates may be inflated and not all of the deposits economically accessible, it is thought that these undersea deposits might suffice to fuel the world for a few years, after which this last clean wilderness will be fatally filthied and contaminated and lost forever to mankind. ...

When the energy industry's twenty-seven-year campaign to drill the refuge coastal plain was forestalled by the Republican loss of Congress in 2006, the Inupiat and the Gwich'in who had most to lose were among those Americans most relieved that Big Oil's unrelenting pursuit of fossil fuels into the heart of America's most pristine and magnificent wildlife sanctuary had at least been slowed. But as it turns out, the industry was less interested in the refuge as a marginal oil and gas field than as a shore base for a vast drilling operation in the oil-bearing strata not far off the coast, with even more ominous implications for the native people.

Faithfully supported by the Bush administration, corporations like Shell Oil were expediting plans to prospect and develop Alaska's continental shelf, littering the Beaufort Sea with drilling ships and wells, supply ships and barges, airplane and helicopter racket, blasted-out harbors, ice-fortified steel piers, and hundreds of miles of pipe—not only an immense increase in contamination and disturbance but an incalculably risky project that threatened to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the indigenous sea hunters and an entire precious ecosystem already seriously under stress from Arctic warming.

Environmentalists are quite aware that despite society's desperate need for clean energies, carbon fuels will drive the world economy for years to come, and political pressures for ocean drilling may be insurmountable. But the risks of ecological disaster from irreparable accidents such as oil spills in Arctic seas are truly enormous, which is why critics feel so strongly that the oil industry's ambitions are premature at best and at worst reckless. In addition to severe operating and maintenance difficulties in fierce Arctic conditions—never satisfactorily tamed even on land—any offshore drilling operation would have to deal with freezing ocean storms and shifting ice and four bitter months of winter darkness.

When one considers the more than four thousand spills--over one a day--recorded by the oil industry in its land operations in the last decade, and keeping in mind that offshore hazards are far greater, the inevitable accidents seem certain to accumulate into an ongoing and permanent calamity. A black effluvia of crude petroleum and drilling mud and chemical pollutants would spread inshore, suffocating plankton and invertebrates and bottom-dwelling fish and poisoning great stretches of Arctic coast with a viscous excrescence. The same toxic mixture will blacken the drifting ice, fouling the pristine habitat of Arctic birds, the Pacific walrus, four species of seals, and the beleaguered polar bear, while contaminating the migratory corridors of the white beluga and endangered bowhead whales—all this defilement made much worse by the grim fact that no technology has ever been developed for cleaning up spilled oil in icy waters. Even in spills in temperate waters, such as the Exxon Valdez disaster, only an average of less than 15 percent is ever removed.

While the engines of the legacy fossil fuel industry grind grimly onwards in the far north, there are some brighter signs elsewhere in Alaska - Popular Mechanics has a report on a low temperature geothermal power development near Fairbanks - "Geothermal Power in Alaska Holds Hidden Model for Clean Energy".

The whine of the power plant sounds like a jet engine as refrigerant blasts through the turbine at 1000 mph. Though the equipment is compact, the din fills the vast hangar, and mechanical engineer Gwen Holdmann has to shout to be heard: “What you see here is very Alaskan. It’s not painted. It’s not pretty. But it’s real.” I place my hand on the steel door capping the plant’s evaporator; it’s warm to the touch, filled with Alaska’s most promising new energy source—plain water.

It’s midnight at Chena Hot Springs Resort, 56 miles northeast of Fairbanks, and outside, the July sun has only just slipped below the horizon. Holdmann’s blond hair escapes a loose ponytail as she climbs onto a metal walkway to point out the heat exchanger. A black-eared husky named Amberlynn watches her every move from below. “The cool thing about this ... ,” she begins, as she does most sentences, and it occurs to me that it’s appropriate every time: This is cool. It is Alaska’s first geothermal plant, and it’s producing electricity from lower temperature water than any plant in the world.

Heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface holds 50,000 times the energy of all the oil and gas in the world combined. If it could be harnessed, it would be an ideal source of base-load power: Geothermal is cleaner than fossil fuels, and more reliable than alternative sources like tidal, wind, wave and solar. Today, geothermal plants in the United States generate nearly 3000 megawatts of electricity—enough to power South Dakota. Almost all of it comes from reservoirs that are at least 300 F.

The water rising through a fracture in the granite pluton under Chena is only 165 F. Experts didn’t think it was hot enough to produce serious power. But with the nearest electrical grid 32 miles away and generators burning through $1000 worth of diesel fuel daily, Chena had the incentive to prove the experts wrong. Now, its tepid water not only generates electricity, it heats the resort’s buildings, maintains a greenhouse and keeps an ice museum frozen year-round. There are thousands of such low- to moderate-temperature geothermal systems scattered throughout Alaska and the rest of the country. Power plants like the one at Chena could tap them to produce tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity.

“I think we have an opportunity here in Alaska to be leaders in moving toward a more renewable energy economy,” Holdmann says, her voice an equal mix of practical and impassioned. “The cost of power can be exorbitant in our villages—as high as a dollar a kilowatt-hour. It’s a real bummer for a lot of these communities, but it can also be a real motivating factor.” She pauses at the door of the hangar. “We’re an oil-producing state and we’re worried about our energy costs. It’s just a matter of time before the rest of the country catches up to where we are.” ...