Increasing global climate change is placing an urgent demand on the transformation of human energy use, even at the end of the world like the Arctic. Recently, an article on the website of nature (www.nature.com) described the energy transition story of the town of Qaanaaq, a settlement in northern Greenland, where researchers are working with local residents to design wind and solar equipment that can adapt to extreme conditions.
For Toku Oshima, a hunter from Greenland, bringing renewable energy to her hometown of Qaanaaq is not only fighting climate change, but also fighting for the survival of civilization.
In 2015, Big Island de traveled 1,000 kilometers from Karnak, Greenland's northernmost town, to Ilulissat in the south for a climate conference. She had only wanted to discuss how Earth's rapidly changing climate threatened Greenland's traditional way of life, such as hunting and fishing by indigenous peoples, but as she left, she began to think about how to solve another existential crisis facing Karnak: energy security.
Qaanaaq, with about 600 inhabitants, is the northernmost town in Greenland.
The looming energy transition
Like many residents in the Arctic, it is increasingly difficult for residents of Karnak to pay for fossil fuels for home heating and electricity, which is exacerbating other pressures they face. Over the past few years, hunters have found themselves unable to pay for sled dogs, and some residents have relocated to escape the family's financial woes and mental depression. In the process, Oshima said, many Greenlanders are losing touch with traditional communities and cultures.
At that meeting, a friend told Big Island that Mary Albert, an ice and snow physicist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, discussed the evidence of climate change preserved in the polar ice core in a speech. Albert noted that the transition from traditional to renewable sources could help contain the climate crisis, and she also showed a public photo of her home decorated with solar panels. Oshima approached Albert during the coffee break and thought the scientist might be able to make some suggestions on how to help Karnak cut energy costs.
Although Albert was hesitant at first, the collaboration between the two women began. Their goal is to help Karnak wean off fossil fuel dependence. Over the past few years, Albert has recruited students at Dartmouth university to participate in a range of projects, including designing energy-efficient homes and assessing the potential of carnac town to harness solar energy. In May, Albert will travel to Karnak to test newly developed solar and wind energy devices that she hopes will one day heat homes there.
This project is not just about the town of Karnak. Oshima said producing cheap, easily accessible renewable energy in Karnak could "benefit the entire Arctic," no matter how remote.
Researchers and groups from Siberia to the Northwest Region of Canada are currently working to bring renewable energy to the Arctic. For scientists, this means developing renewable energy-related technologies that can be applied to places where there is no sunlight for months and temperatures are below freezing for most of the year.
While Greenland has made great strides in installing renewable energy equipment, so far these changes have occurred mainly in areas south of the island.
The logistical dilemma at the end of the world
Founded in 1953, Karnak is a town about 1400 kilometers south of the Arctic. At the time, the U.S. Air Force gave about 100 Inuit living near the newly built Thule Airbase days to pack their bags and travel to the far north of Greenland. Today, many of the town's about 600 residents run the town by teaching in schools or running water plants. Fewer and fewer people still make a living on the offshore sea, scouring for seals and halibut on the thick sea ice in dog-drawn sleds. Oshima Toku is one of them.
In 1975, Oshima was born into a family of hunters in Karnak. Although she went to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, as a young woman to study electrical engineering, she eventually returned to her hometown. Tokutoku Oshima now makes a living hunting and runs a workshop where she processes animal skins and slaughters meat.
Toku Oshima, a hunter, runs a workshop in Karnak, where she sews clothes and slaughters meat.
Like everyone else in town, Oshima-toku relies on the town's diesel generators for electricity generation. Sherry Stout, a project manager for Arctic strategy at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, said the situation is common in remote Arctic communities established after World War II. Stott said the towns that emerged during this period often installed diesel generators because diesel was more stable than other types of fuel and easier to transport over long distances.
But it's not easy to get diesel to such a remote place. Like many Arctic communities, Karnak has no road connection to the rest of the world. Almost all of the town's unsatisfactory supplies — including diesel — were transported by icebreakers. The supplies are transported twice a year, in the late summer of the Arctic, when sea ice is at its lowest.
"Most communities only have one chance to get all the diesel they need for a year," said Martha Lenio, a renewable energy expert at the World Wildlife Fund's office in Iqaluit, Canada. Increasingly volatile weather and sea ice conditions mean that the boats these communities rely on may never be accessible. In 2019, for example, unusual ice conditions prevented barges from delivering diesel to several villages in Canada's Northwest Territories, and the shipment had to be transported by plane.
The despair of diesel
Stott said these logistics conditions explain why fuel costs are so high for Arctic communities. In the United States, the average cost of generating electricity from fossil fuels is about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour. But in Northern Alaska, prices soared to between 50 cents and $1 per kilowatt-hour.
In Karnak, the inhabitants here spend a lot of money on fossil fuels. Sub-zero temperatures mean that homes must heat almost uninterruptedly. On the other hand, many of The Carnak houses are Danish style – some of them date back to 1953 – and the insulation efficiency of these houses is not high, which complicates the situation even more.
According to Niels Erik Hagelqvist, a renewable energy adviser at Nukissiorfitit, a state-owned energy company based in Nuk, the Greenland government has heavily subsidized fossil fuel use in order to cut the cost of energy use. But even subsidized diesel, which costs about 24 cents per kilowatt-hour, is a huge expense for Karnak residents, especially those who make a living by selling surplus catches and have a single source of income, Albert said.
"If you want to stay here, survival won't be easy." Oshima said, "The cost of surviving will be very expensive. ”
This is one of the reasons why Oshima toku wants to introduce renewable energy into Karnak. But finding the money to complete this transformation is a tricky challenge. In 2017, Greenland announced a plan to switch to renewable energy by 2030 whenever possible. But Hagelqvist said all the technical equipment had to be shipped in, which would make the projects extremely costly. He said that because Greenland was still dependent on Danish funding — a former Danish colony but gained local autonomy in the late 1970s — "our ambitions were limited by a lack of funds."
This partly explains why Greenland's 5 hydropower plants and 13 solar farms are concentrated in the more densely populated southwest, where they can benefit the most people. Small northern communities like Karnak often need to raise their own money – or apply for government grants – if they want to make renewable energy use a reality. Robert Cooke, a technical officer at the Canadian Arctic High Latitude Research Station in Whitehorse, Canada, said there could be risks in doing so.
In 2007, for example, Nikolski, a small community in Alaska, used government grants to build a wind turbine, but the turbine was left idle for years because technicians struggled to connect it to the control panel of the town's power plant. Cook said most renewable energy equipment is not built for the Arctic environment, and if one of the devices' systems is damaged, "it could take weeks for someone to fly over and fix it."
The prototype is on the way
Albert and her students hope to solve these problems by improving manufacturing techniques that can be easily mastered by Karnak's carpenters, such as Oshima's husband.
Two of the team's devices will be tested in Carnac in May. One of the prototypes, designed by Albert's student Simon Oster, uses wind energy to generate heat. Other renewable energy projects in the Arctic, such as the Alaska-based Chaninik Wind Group, are already using electricity generated by wind turbines. But Albert said Oster's device is different in that it directly uses the wind to generate heat. Oster said similar designs have been proposed before, but none of them have reached the prototype stage.
Albert hopes the wind energy unit could be used in the dark winter to reduce heating costs. The second solar prototype can be used in the summer. It was designed by Tucker Oddleifson, a Dartmouth student, and is a type of window capable of absorbing the sun's heat. The idea is also not new, but Audrey Lefson says these special windows are simpler than other designs, and they were built to take advantage of the 24-hour arctic summer sun. Albert said the team hopes that, in the end, "these small devices can be used anywhere."
Whether these projects will solve all the challenges of Karnak's energy transition once and for all, Oshima and Albert's team have no illusions. But the devices may help the residents of Karnak live easier lives and continue to "live in northwest Greenland, after all, people have lived there for thousands of years," Albert said. ”