**Title**: Energy in the North - Michelle Wilber
**Date**: April 1, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Michelle Wilber

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;06;14 [Michelle Wilber] it's also people trying to make decisions about, should I buy an electric vehicle, and how much is that going to cost me to charge?

00;00;06;14 - 00;00;21;02 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Michelle Wilber, a research engineer at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Michelle leads the Grid Edge program at ACEP and I began the conversation by asking her, what is the edge of the grid?

00;00;21;02 - 00;02;27;11 [Michelle Wilber] Yeah. So the edges of the electric grid are at the parts where the utility has less control. So they're behind the meters in buildings and houses, maybe extending to when, independent power producer owns a small solar, farm or wind farm. It doesn't include the transmission and big distribution infrastructure and central generation of a utility. And in Alaska, many of our utilities, of course, are very small and isolated. Even our central Railbelt, that extends from the Kenai Peninsula up through Fairbanks, is a pretty small grid and does not extend further into the continental U.S. or Canada or anything like that. Whereas most of the continental US is connected all with each other, all the utilities are part of one interconnected grid. We don't have that up here. And then each of our rural off grid or off the, road system, Railbelt, etc. communities, almost all of those are their own independent grids run by a small utility that maintains the infrastructure to generate power, often by diesel generators, and distributed to the buildings and water treatment plant and the loads in the community. So it includes all of Alaska. It's just not looking so much at the centralized generation and distribution of power on the utilities power grid. So we work very closely with utilities because they need to make sure that everything works out right. They have the data we need to do our research. They're very interested in the solutions, sometimes pioneering them themselves, like how can we control heating and buildings to use excess wind being generated, from the utility and the grid. But we're looking at that sort of behind the meter. What is the rooftop solar? How does that work with an electric heat pump or an electric EV charger? How does that work with a small wind farm nearby? How does that work with a home battery, and how does that work with the utility’s needs to always provide the power needed just when it's needed. But can we move around when that power is needed at the household or the business level? So absolutely every community in Alaska can be part of that research.

00;02;27;11 - 00;02;31;10 [Amanda Byrd] So that products from that research, who is the audience?

00;02;31;10 - 00;03;54;27 [Michelle Wilber] Well, the audience is anybody trying to make decisions. Utilities, certainly they're interested in knowing what solutions are out there. If we were to put in a bunch of wind, but half the time we didn't have a need for the wind production, is there something else we can do with that? But it's also people trying to make decisions about, should I buy an electric vehicle, and how much is that going to cost me to charge? And, can I move that around if for some reason, in some utilities, even in Alaska, it's starting to be the case, that there might be times where power is more or less expensive. So can I move charging to a different time? Can I move the time I heat my house with a heat pump or an electric heater to a time when power is very cheap? That might be true in a community, like, say, Kotzebue, where there is wind and solar production and also expensive diesel production. And because the wind and solar cost a bunch of money to put it in. But that's been done, paid for. so at this point, if there's wind or solar power being produced, but it's not needed, right, then some of it can be stored in batteries for later, but otherwise it's great to find a way to use it. And if you can heat a building now when you have that wind or heat a bunch of rocks and then use the heat from them later, then you can maybe use cheaper power when it's available and save, your power needs or save the expensive diesel you'd either burn inside the home for heating or at the power plant and not use that, then.

00;03;54;27 - 00;04;08;14 [Amanda Byrd] Michelle Wilbur is a research engineer at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller at ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.