Originally a mechanical engineer, Bruno Grunau now spends his days testifying before Congress, meeting regularly with the Alaska governor’s office, and learning from Alaska’s utilities, communities, and Indigenous people whose ancestors have lived here for thousands of years.
Grunau is the regional director of Applied Research for Communities in Extreme Environments at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Alaska Campus. We caught up with him to debrief the recent Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference and find out what is in store for the nation’s only Arctic state.Alaska is harnessing renewable resources and energy efficiency as an answer to economic empowerment and energy independence.
NREL Director Martin Keller moderated a panel at the May 2024 conference, and NREL was well represented among the attendees and presentations. Did you know that when COVID-19 protocols softened, Alaska Governor Dunleavy was the first visitor knocking on NREL’s door for a meeting? We now meet with the governor’s office twice a month.Alaska has strong untapped potential. For example, the offshore marine energy potential in the Lower 48 states totals about 1,700 gigawatts of electricity. Not bad.
The vision of NREL’s Alaska Campus is to integrate scientific research and cultural knowledge to unleash a sustainable and equitable energy transition, with an emphasis on rural, remote, and islanded communities in the most extreme environments in the world. This can mean Arctic communities although the solutions are replicable in islanded communities and extreme environments all over the world.In Alaska, 80% of our energy use goes toward space heating.
A modern home with dark wood siding and large windows with a snow-covered lawn Grunau and his wife designed one of the first essentially net-zero-rated houses in Alaska. Photo from Bruno Grunau, NRELI have two kids who grew up steeped in the values of sustainability, and they now champion it themselves.