**Title**: Energy in the North - Ben Loeffler
**Date**: October 16, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Ben Loeffler

00;00;01;01 - 00;00;10;16 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, we speak with Ben Loeffler. He's the Pacific Marine Energy co-director at UAF and leads ACEP's hydrokinetic energy program. I recently visited the Tanana River Hydrokinetic Test Site near Nenana, where Ben and his team were working with the developers of an innovative in river turbine called BladeRunner funded by the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy or ARPA-E. And, I began by asking Ben about the research that he's conducting.

00;00;30;06 - 00;00;40;17 [Ben Loeffler] e've got sort of three parallel lines of inquiry. So one with anything we test here, the College of Fisheries and Oceans Sciences is doing environmental monitoring, so we're always trying to learn more about fish impacts. The second line of inquiry is the performance of the device. So we're collecting resource data, velocity, water velocity and then electrical output power from the device. And so by looking at those two, we can gauge the efficiency of the device under different conditions and then the final line of inquiry is just all the sort of ancillary data to help the technology developer improve their design. So a lot of detailed analysis of angles and rotation rates and things like that to really refine the technology itself.

00;01;12;15 - 00;01;19;03 [Amanda Byrd] And so a lot of Alaska's communities are located along the rivers. And so it's it actually sounds really cool to be able to harness that energy for powering the community.

00;01;24;06 - 00;01;45;28 [Ben Loeffler] Yeah. So looking at PC data, there's roughly 90 communities in Alaska on major rivers with about 20 megawatts of average annual electrical load. And there's just megawatts and megawatts of power going by the river. And you know, compared to solar and wind, it's a better resource. It runs day and night. It's predictable, at least in the summertime, but it is a more challenging resource to harness, primarily with debris in the river sediment suspended, stuff like that.

00;01;54;01 - 00;02;04;19 [Amanda Byrd] Right now, before you did this deployment, I saw this giant tree come down and it was like the biggest hairiest black spruce with all of the limbs everywhere.

00;02;04;23 - 00;02;05;06 [Ben Loeffler] Yes. Yeah. So that's something we're really excited about with Blade Runner in particular is on the debris interaction front. So their technology incorporates a few unique design aspects that are resilient to debris. This is our fourth summer now testing their device. And we've never had a single debris entanglement, both small things and large things, almost as big as that tree. So, it's really exciting to have a device that's resilient to real debris that we're able to test here.

00;02;34;23 - 00;02;36;07 [Amanda Byrd] Like, it's a pretty simple device to be able to deploy it in a remote community seems pretty feasible. And by a very small crew.

00;02;42;08 - 00;02;52;00 [Ben Loeffler] Yes. And, that's been another key driver is reducing that operate OpEx. So the cost of operating and maintaining, deploying and retrieving the device. And so it's it's relatively small scale, but it's it's of a size that you could deploy either directly from shore or with a small boat.

00;02;59;07 - 00;03;01;12 [Amanda Byrd] So I hear that you're going to do a pilot project at a fish camp.

00;03;02;10 - 00;03;12;23 [Ben Loeffler] Yes. So ARPA-E has selected our project for a plus-up for follow on funding and specifically for us, it's going to support a pilot deployment in Napiamute, Alaska on the Kuskikwim River. Napiapmute used to be a year round community, and now it's predominately a summer only fish camp and you know, subsistence activities. They also use it for moose hunting in the fall. And so it's a really unique opportunity because there's no regulated power system. So the permitting requirements are much lower. And so we're going to look to deploy roughly a five kilowatt device in the river just upstream of the community and bring the power into their existing power system and hopefully offset most of their diesel generator usage in the summer months.

00;03;42;18 - 00;03;53;12 [Amanda Byrd] Ben Loeffler is a hydrokinetic energy lead at UAF. And I'm Amanda Byrd, Chief Storyteller at ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.