With winter now in full swing, energy bills rapidly on the rise, and Cook Inlet energy production seemingly in troubled waters one local conservation group is trying to make a difference in the face of a plethora of energy concerns. Cook InletKeeper met on Tuesday night to discuss its newest conservation project, one that targets energy efficiency, or a lack thereof, on the peninsula.
“We’re brainstorming a sort of collaborative community project along the lines of other things Cook InletKeeper’s done focused on energy efficiency,” said Ben Boettger, the energy policy analyst for Cook InletKeeper who also led Tuesday’s community meeting. “It is the time of year when people notice their electricity bills and their heating bills, and there are kind of some low hanging projects that people can do to make their homes more efficient.”
The local group has pioneered conservation efforts and projects on the peninsula since 1994, adding a community initiative series, “Drawdown: Book to Action Climate Series,” to its portfolio since 2019. Over that span Cook InletKeeper has launched three projects, a waste reclamation composting initiative in 2019, a project to make solar energy powered homes on the peninsula more affordable in 2020, and a multi-year effort to plant trees on the Kenai.
This round, Boettger says there are several simple ways peninsula residents can increase their homes’ energy efficiency, some of which include: Window and door sealing, blowing insulation into walls and attics, insulating hot water pipes, and more.
“In a lot of cases, they can be do-it-yourself projects,” said Boettger. “These are very, very high return things for some minimal investment. But for a lot of people, it’s difficult to do just because you know, they have conflicting priorities in their life and things that need done. And so they sort of default to getting nickel and dimed on there and energy bill.”
One of the objectives of the project is to enable homeowners to accomplish these simple home improvements themselves, or with assistance through the collaboration of what Boettger calls a “Do-It-Ourselves Club.”
Boettger said Cook InletKeeper is working with locals with the proper expertise to help take up this mantle. “There are a group of people with a common project of constructing housing, in this case doing energy efficiency retrofits, and they can all kind of pull their labor, in some cases maybe pull their buying power on materials and sort of lower those barriers to these energy efficiency projects.”
To typify how these energy costs can add up, a memo was shared at the meeting which had been sent to Borough Mayor Peter Micciche by the borough’s Resilience and Security Advisory Commission. According to the memo, schools in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District are racking up roughly $5.5 million each year in heating and power costs.
More information on the projects and mission of Cook InletKeeper, as well as their efforts on the peninsula, can be found on their website, inletkeeper.org/localsolutions.