**Title**: Energy in the North - Bri Gabel
**Date**: May 20, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Bri Gabel

00;00;00;13 - 00;00;12;10 [Bri Gabel] Our loads are much, much lower in the summer. And so from a consumption standpoint, you're using a lot more power in the winter. But you're the idea is that your bill is roughly the same in
the summertime

00;00;12;10 - 00;00;47;19 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Bri Gabel, the sustainability coordinator for the City and Borough of Sitka. Sitka generates 100% of the electricity by hydro, with Green Lake and Blue Lake hydropower stations. In 2024, Sitka used 120GW of energy. That's about two thirds to three quarters of the power generated That demand is growing as heat pumps and electric vehicles come online. Power demand changes from winter to summer, and so do the rates. And I began the conversation with Bri by asking what the electric rates are between those two seasons.

00;00;47;19 - 00;01;21;29 [Bri Gabel] So in the winter time we average about it's about 13.5 cents a kilowatt. In the summertime it's about $0.21 a kilowatt. We don't have meters that can currently change rates depending on peak demand. That is an ongoing project to start working at some of that into our system. So we can utilize things like off peak demand for not only electric vehicles, but really anything. So, another interesting project that we're trying to work on is getting those meters figured out and upgraded.

00;01;16;23 - 00;01;18;07 [Amanda Byrd] I know that some utilities on the Railbelt are starting to do, off peak rates.

00;01;21;29 - 00;02;33;11 [Bri Gabel] Yeah, it's a very common tactic. And many utilities just not here yet. So when we get there, it'll be interesting to see what our capabilities are and how that might change things. The seasonality is because our consumption is much higher in the winter because we do have such a high electrification load of our primarily housing. Our loads are much, much lower in the summer. And so from a consumption standpoint, you're using a lot more power in the winter. But you're the idea is that your bill is roughly the same in the summertime because you are changing your rates based on how much less power you're using. This last year has been a little bit interesting in that we did have an unusually warm December, and so our consumption was much lower, and we had an unusually cold May where our consumption was much higher, which was right when those rates changed. And so, it is, interesting to see a community that is so dependent on electricity but still so closely linked to how how the temperatures change and how those rate structures can benefit. Or in some cases not be so beneficial for electric communities.

00;02;33;11 - 00;02;47;12 [Amanda Byrd] And in southeast heat pumps actually in all over Alaska, even above the Arctic Circle, heat pumps, air source heat pumps have made a really big impact on, residential heating.

00;02;47;12 - 00;02;48;04 [Bri Gabel] Yes.

00;02;48;04 - 00;02;51;22 [Amanda Byrd] How is that, being implemented in Sitka.

00;02;51;22 - 00;04;26;04 [Bri Gabel] As part of the Sitka Community Renewable Energy strategy, we did a pretty robust greenhouse gas emissions inventory as an energy baseline to really understand what our makeup of different heating elements are when it comes to residential households and in commercial buildings spaces a little bit as well. And we don't have a great idea of how many heat pumps are in Sitka, because they kind of fall into that area. That's really hard to measure. So what we did was, is we looked at all of the utility bills and compared the average winter months and the average summer months and said, if you if this threshold change by a certain percentage, in this case 50%, we could probably assume that they're using some sort of electric heat. And that number was, if I remember right, close to 60% heat pumps because there's so much more efficient. Don't change your load as much, which could mean you have a heat pump. Or it could be that you have oil based heat and maybe you're using like a baseboard heater or some sort of combination. So because heat pumps are so much more energy efficient, they're not increasing the load as much as like a resistant boiler type heating system. But they are kind of hard to quantify given that they do fall on that little area. So right now we're thinking about ways, to kind of better understand how many heat pumps we do have so we can better plan of of what additional load might be or how we can actually, in some cases, reduce our load depending on how many heat pumps we do.

00;04;26;04 - 00;04;30;10 [Amanda Byrd] Bri Gabel is the Sustainability Coordinator for the City and Borough of Sitka. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/ACEP.