Project to assess viability of marine hydrokinetic technologies to power Alaskan Communities
15 April 2021
XENDEE Corporation, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), and the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) have been granted funding to assess the viability of tidal, wave, and river/ocean current technologies for powering remote Alaskan Communities as well as generate a framework for their integration in modeling platforms.
This project, launched in part with seed money from the US Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, is intended to tap into regional sources of energy to reduce costs and dependency on imported fossil fuels as well as to enhance local resilience and sustainability.
“Several grid-islanded Alaskan communities have the potential to harness significant hydrokinetic power,” said Thomas Mosier, Energy Systems Group Lead at Idaho National Laboratory. “The implementation of Microgrids in these areas would diversify local energy profiles with the potential in many communities to keep costs flat while reducing environmental impact and the dependence on diesel.”
The project team will first generate a database of grid-islanded communities that are strong candidates for this type of technology and currently have a heavy reliance on diesel burning generators for power generation. The project team will then assess the strategy and integration methods related to implementing marine hydrokinetic technologies in an islanded grid facing arctic weather conditions.
“The decision framework that will be developed for this effort will provide a systematic basis for recommending potential microgrid configurations,” said Shiloh Elliott, Modeling and Simulation Scientist at Idaho National Laboratory. “Those configurations will utilize local reliable energy sources to increase community power resilience and diversify power profiles to isolated and vulnerable Alaskan communities.”
Finally, the project team will be enhancing Microgrid decision support platform XENDEE to include capabilities for marine hydrokinetic technologies.
“The introduction of marine hydrokinetic technologies to the XENDEE software platform offers a quick and reliable way for Microgrid designers to experiment with new DER technologies and test the viability and bankability of Microgrid projects before breaking ground,” said Michael Stadler CTO of XENDEE. “In fact, with the new technologies integrated, our team will be able to easily examine the use of other technologies as well, such as hydropower or wind energy to supplement the islanded communities.”
