Once installed, the operating costs for solar farms are minimal, another aspect that is attractive to investors and builders. There is, however, one thing that northerly solar farms have to contend with that their southern counterparts don’t. Willow averages 2.2 metres (87 inches) of snow per year, which means solar panels can end up blanketed in snow and ice during the winter months.
“We have had to hire people for snow removal,” says Renewable’s Miller. “But in months like December, when it’s really dark, we just let the snow build up, as there isn’t enough daylight to warrant snow clearing. As we move into spring, when we are starting to get more hours of sun, we will come out and clear snow frequently.” At GVEA, they have the same philosophy on snow removal, leaving the panels buried during the least productive winter months and beginning scraping around February.
Another solution has been finding the optimal panel angle to help with snow removal. The snow will simply slide off the more sharply angled panels. According to Miller, 45 degrees is the preferred angle for optimum energy production at the Willow farm, which is also a steep enough slope to help snow slide off the panels.
Renewable is also working with the University of Alaska, as part of the Alaska Center for Energy and Power solar technology program, on testing clear coatings that can be applied to panels to make them slippery and so shed snow more easily. Miller says that this year there hasn’t been enough snow cover to properly test the coatings, but they are hopeful that they will mean less maintenance for the facility.
Besides the snow, a limitation of northerly solar is not necessarily the amount of energy produced but the time of year that it’s available: peak production does not match peak energy use. “In Alaska, we don’t generally use air conditioning in homes,” says Tom DeLong, board chairman of GVEA. “So in the summer months, when production is at its highest, actual kilowatt hours sales are at their lowest. And in December, when people are using more energy for heat, more electricity, we get next to nothing from our panels.”
Lower output in winter is true across the board for the farms, with Renewable showing winter output as low as 30 kWh, dipping to zero when the panels are fully covered in snow. On the flipside of that, during the summer months, when it’s light for upwards of 18 hours a day, output can exceed 8,000 kWh per day. Sam Dennis, chief operating officer at Renewable, says: “We make more in one day in June than we make for the entire month of December.”
The reflection of the sun off the snow on the ground in spring also helps with output. “We get a lot of reflective light from the snow in the early spring months,” he says. “This helps increase output. Last year in March our best day generated an output of 800 kilowatts.”
Despite the limitation of lower output during the winter months, solar energy is being welcomed as a partial solution to reduce carbon emissions in the north. Finding local solutions is especially pressing given the rate at which the Arctic is experiencing climate change.
“Arctic regions often experience warming above the global mean,” says Shyla Raghav, a climate change adaptation and mitigation expert at Conservation International. “Solar power can help reduce dependence on fossil fuels and can be installed off-grid, on-grid, or via a hybrid system.”
While the energy produced by solar farms is fully renewable, there is a carbon cost to installing the farms – there has been some concern over the carbon footprint of solar farms, but both Miller and Raghav say the benefit outweighs carbon cost. “Our solar farm pays back the carbon footprint associated with manufacturing and construction, to include tree clearing, in three to five years. And a solar farm has an expected life span of 30 years,” says Miller.
“It’s important to consider the entire life-cycle of energy use and emissions, to include manufacturing,” adds Raghav. “Most studies that evaluate solar and wind alongside coal and other fossil fuels have found that renewable energy has a considerably more favourable carbon footprint.”
Declining costs associated with solar energy is also an incentive. Whereas solar was initially expensive to generate, costs have dropped precipitously and continue to do so. Overall, the cost of solar panels has consistently fallen in the past 40 years. Even since the first Willow farm panels went in, prices have dropped. “Our panels for our pilot project are 340 watts,” says Miller. “The new panels are 370 watt and were 10% cheaper than the pilot panels. That’s in one year.” Miller anticipates costs for future projects to continue to go down as solar power becomes more affordable.
Miller says solar use in Alaska is on the rise. According to data from Alaska’s Solarize Anchorage campaign, in 2018 just 33 homes had solar installed. As of 2019, that number had jumped to 163.
As the cost of solar has fallen, it has become cheaper than fossil fuels such as coal. “This means we not only have a positive environmental impact, but a competitive, positive economic impact,” says Chris Colbert. The Renewable team plan to expand in the coming years, and is currently looking for sites for their next solar project, which they anticipate will occupy 50 to 100 acres. They hope a farm this size could provide power for 1,000 homes.
The prospect of affordable renewable energy even in these icy northern regions is a mark of just how far solar power has come. From tentative, expensive origins, it has reached as far as Alaska in the US – and elsewhere, even further north. If solar is proving viable even here, then it is perhaps not just a glimmer of sunlight across a frozen landscape, but also a glimmer of hope.
