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Looking to plug energy information gaps When it comes to determining how much fuel oil rural communities use in Alaska, information can be easy to find but hard to get Eric Lidji Petroleum News
On the path to lowering energy costs, the state is falling into a familiar information gap.
Between the proprietary databases of fuel distributors and the lack of detail on reporting forms for state fuel taxes, it can be difficult to accurately gauge how much fuel a given community uses for heating, transportation and electricity.
Without knowing how much oil a community uses, the state is forced to rely on estimates and guesswork to find solutions for replacing fuel oil with a cheaper source of energy.
“Very little data currently exists, almost none beyond just individual recordkeeping for each community,” Nick Szymoniak, a research associate with the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Institute of Social and Economic Research, told the Alaska Renewable Energy Task Force, a joint-committee of the state Legislature, in Anchorage on Nov. 10.
Gauging fuel use is part of an energy plan the Alaska Energy Authority plans to unveil in December. The plan aims to pinpoint how rural communities use energy, and how the state or private industry might be able to employ alternative technologies to lower costs.
ISER estimated each household in rural Alaska uses 737 gallons of heating oil on average each year, and each job requires an additional 538 gallons of heating oil annually.
But those figures rely in part on the 2000 census, the most recent information available.
The best available information on fuel use in Alaska comes from the Power Cost Equalization program, or PCE, a state subsidy designed to bring high rural electricity costs more in line with those of relatively cheaper urban areas. While highly accurate, the PCE database only covers fuel used for electricity, not transportation and space heating.
The Alaska Energy Authority spent the summer traveling around the state learning about community fuel needs and usage and potential energy resources. Through those trips, the public corporation estimated fuel habits, but hired ISER to get more precise numbers.
“It becomes apparent to anyone who tries to delve into energy planning or modeling or forecasting that once you get beyond the PCE database, there is precious little, if any, data on fuel used for heating, transportation and other uses, subsistence being one that we know particularly little about,” Steve Colt, interim director of ISER, told the task force.
Information hard to get In addition to information from the 2000 census, ISER asked fuel distributors for actual delivery figures, and tried to glean information from the tax returns fuel companies filed with the state Department of Revenue. ISER researchers also contacted 19 individual communities to get a sense of fuel habits from the people actually using it.
But each source of information comes with unique drawbacks.
Some distributors gave ISER detailed information about deliveries, but others weren’t willing to give out the information for competitive reasons. To protect proprietary details, ISER agreed not to use data from one company unless it got data from all companies.
Turning to the state, ISER found that tax returns filed with the Department of Revenue offer a picture of total fuel usage in the state, but becomes less accurate on a regional or community level because the tax returns don’t include “geographic ties.” Individual fuel distributors either pay the state tax or file for a deduction on a companywide basis.
ISER plans to continue working with the Department of Revenue to see if more information can be gleamed from the existing filings, Szymoniak said.
Even talking to communities can be problematic. ISER found it difficult to find the best, or any, point of contact in a dozen communities. Plus, the average fuel use changes from year-to-year based on prices, and between communities based on temperature.
Nevertheless, by running all available information through three different statistical models and averaging the results, ISER determined that PCE communities, except those on the North Slope, use around 58 million gallons of fuel oil each year.
Of that, 26 million goes toward space heating, 24 million goes toward generating electricity and 8.5 million is used for transportation. Bethel, Nome, the Northwest Arctic Borough and the Aleutians West Census Area account for half of rural fuel use.
“There’s no such thing as a real typical rural community, and that showed up in the modeling,” Szymoniak said.
Model just a starting point By teasing as much information as it could from a limited amount of data, ISER believes its model is good enough to use as a starting point for discussions next year about projects, but it wants to improve data collection on fuel use to ease future discussions.
ISER believes complete information about fuel use in Alaska is already being collected, “but it’s very murky even to figure out who’s got what,” Colt said. A full picture could be pieced together using proprietary data from distributors, the Alaska Permanent Fund database protected by statute and other sources like the weatherization program at the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. ISER and others at the University of Alaska want to create an Alaska Energy Data Network as a “one-stop shop” for known information.
“You may see a budget request appearing on the University budget next spring,” Colt said.
Steve Haagenson, executive director of the Alaska Energy Authority, said the database underpinning the new state energy plan is designed to incorporate new information “in a heartbeat.” He said anyone who disagreed with the findings on fuel use would be welcome to present information to the contrary for public use.
Urban energy plan ahead, too The energy plan to be unveiled in December will look at near-term solutions for the roughly 350 rural communities in the state, but doesn’t address the major urban areas.
“There’s no one-year solution to the Railbelt,” Haagenson said.
The AEA is currently accepting proposals for a “Railbelt Integrated Resource Plan” to address concerns of communities on the road system. The AEA is accepting another round of proposals for grants from the Renewable Energy Fund passed by the Legislature earlier in the year. The AEA and the Denali Commission awarded around $5 million in grants this summer to the first round of projects.
The Alaska Renewable Energy Task Force is planning to tour resource opportunities in Fairbanks before the end of the year. The new legislative session starts in January.
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