The town where tourism is helping electrify home heating
Turning visitors to nature into heat pumps
Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.
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(Photo of people walking near Mendenhall Glacier by Rod Ramsell on Unsplash)
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About 25 years ago, I walked on the giant Mendenhall Glacier, an ice flow jutting out of the Alaska ice field near the state’s capital city, Juneau. I was there as tourist, on a cruise with my family through Alaska’s Inner Passage.
Where I stood as a teenager may be gone: Mendenhall is retreating — partially because it was heading in that direction in the first place — but massively sped up because of a warming world.
So even though I did interviews over a four-hour time zone difference, I was excited to report and write my most recent story for Grist. It’s about the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, which hopes to leverage the massive tourism interest (1.5 million people came to Juneau by cruise ship this summer alone) to help pay for a local climate action project: eliminating dirty and polluting fuel oil from home heating in the town.
In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems.
Heat pumps are “a no-brainer” in Juneau’s mild (for Alaska) winters, said Andy Romanoff, who administers the fund. Juneau’s grid relies on emissions-free hydropower, so electricity is cheaper and less polluting than oil heat. They also save residents money — Roberts said she was paying around $500 a month on heating oil, and has seen her electricity bill climb just $30.
So far, the fund has paid for 40-odd heat pump installations (specifically for lower-income residents, which as I get into in the story, is part of their argument that this project truly adds to emissions reductions, and doesn’t just subsidize something that was already going to happen). A new partnership with a local tourism company means they’ll probably be able to speed up that work a bit, but they are still limited by the gap between the supply and demand for contractors.
So how much would this fund need to switch the entirety of Juneau away from fossil fuel heat? There are an estimated 13,000 households within the city, and I’ve heard a differing estimates about the percentage of buildings in Juneau still on heating oil. But some rough estimation with conservative assumptions (and the cost quoted to me by the fund administrator) puts that cost in the tens of millions dollars.
The 180,000 tonne elephant in the room (or port, I suppose) is the cruise ships themselves — and as I write in the story, the three major cruise companies that run ships in Alaska do not seem to be jumping at the idea of paying for, or adding a fee, equivalent to the amount of carbon emissions created by running regular cruises to the area. (Some of the companies do purchase offsets, but these tend to fund renewable energy project nowhere near their operations).
Stories like these are not about sheer global emissions reductions, but the possibility to operate on different scales and replicate it elsewhere. The fund may be relatively small scale in the scope of world wide carbon emissions, or even the carbon impact of the cruise ships sailing in Alaska, but it speaks to the need of all kinds of climate finance: not just megaprojects and R&D but the nitty-gritty, home-by-home work of shifting away from fossil fuels.
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More local climate action stories
- The New Mexico co-op breaking up with fossil fuels (High Country News)
- How different regions might avoid short-term “energy droughts” (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
- Buses are driving Montana's EV future (Bozeman Daily Chronicle/Billings Gazette)
- Five ways to recycle your (real) Christmas tree (Outside)
- The regional fight over hydrogen tax credit rules(Canary Media)
- For those of you have been following this one for a long time: Vineyard Wind delivers its first electrons to Massachusetts
- “As Paris prepares to host the Olympics this summer, officials are turning the city’s iconic landmarks into sports venues. Their goal is to reduce carbon emissions to half the level of previous games, so only a few new facilities are being built.” (CityLab, gift link)
- A Plant Proposed in Youngstown, Ohio, Would Have Turned Tons of Tires Into Synthetic Gas. Local Officials Said Not So Fast (Inside Climate News)
- 200 orphan oil and gas wells plugged in 2023 by Michigan regulators