Lab Notes: NREL Researchers in Alaska Create Efficient Housing at the World’s Extremes

In the second episode in Transforming Energy’s Lab Notes series, guest host Molly Rettig takes listeners on a journey to Mountain Village, a Yup’ik community working with NREL researchers to design and build super energy-efficient homes amid the challenges of extreme weather and permafrost. Through local collaboration and innovative research and technology, these efforts not only address pressing housing needs but also empower communities to adapt to the changing climate while preserving their traditional way of life.   

Housed in the farthest-north LEED Platinum building in the world, the Applied Research for Communities in Extreme Environments (ARCEE) Center focuses on advancing energy efficiency and renewable energy in extreme climates, addressing Arctic and climate-threatened communities, and expanding NREL’s wealth of experience in building technologies. In each project, researchers are working hand in hand with communities to make sure these technologies work for their climate, their economy, and their culture.

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at podcast@nrel.gov. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.

Transcript

[Intro music, fades]  

 Kerrin: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I’m Kerrin Jeromin.  

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle. We’re here with our feature series, Lab Notes. These Lab Notes episodes provide a deeper dive into the research, the people of NREL, and the people impacted by NREL's work. Last time you heard from NREL’s lab director, Martin Keller, and in our second episode we’re taking you to one of NREL’s most remote campuses, in Alaska.  

Kerrin: That’s right, Taylor. I’m so excited for this episode—I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska and this is probably the next best thing. In 2020, NREL partnered with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks, Alaska, to expand the Department of Energy’s presence in the Arctic and support frontline communities with their energy transition.  

Taylor: Today, this laboratory, now known as NREL’s Alaska Campus, focuses on figuring out how to get clean energy and energy efficiency into one of the toughest environments in the world. And they do it by working with the people who know these environments best.   

Kerrin: Right, and to learn a bit more about what life looks like for NREL researchers in Fairbanks, we caught up with Bruno Grunau, who is the center director at NREL’s Alaska Campus. Hi, Bruno, welcome to the show!

Bruno: Thank you! Well, we have an awesome campus up here in Fairbanks. Uh, this is a group that loves Alaska and the Arctic at large, and whether we’re out skiing, or fishing, or dog mushing, or just even hanging out on the tundra picking our berries, our lifestyle really revolves around the land and the seasons. As scientists, we’re always learning and creating technologies that shape the future. But we’re also learning from the past, and from the First Alaskans who have lived here for thousands of years.   

Kerrin: That’s amazing. So, Bruno, your team in Alaska supports NREL’s broader goals of advancing the clean energy transition, but they also have a slightly different focus than those of us down here at NREL’s Colorado campuses. 

Bruno: Right. We’re working on the huge challenges of decarbonizing the energy and building systems, but we have a special focus on the world’s extreme environments. Our researchers up here do everything from evaluating how air source heat pumps work in the extreme cold, to using thermal storage to stretch our solar resources, to helping communities with microgrids get off of fossil fuels. And, on the buildings side, we’re developing energy efficient walls that can handle the Arctic conditions, and in fact, we’re creating a technology to actually grow building insulation from spruce trees and fungi, so we can use local materials instead of manufactured products. And with every project that we do, we’re working hand in hand with communities to make sure these technologies work for their climate, their economy, and their culture.  

Taylor: One of those communities is Mountain Village, a Yup’ik community in Southwest Alaska, where NREL researchers recently helped the tribal government design and build five super energy efficient homes. In this episode, you’re heading to Mountain Village to learn about what the community and researchers are working on. Because I’m staying here in Colorado, you’ll be traveling with Molly Rettig, a writer at NREL’s Alaska Campus.  

Molly: Thanks, Taylor. I’ll take it from here!  

[wind sounds]  

Molly: Standing beside the Yukon River in the middle of January almost feels like you're on another planet. The white horizon stretches forever, surrounded by a seemingly infinite patchwork of tundra and ponds. Wind whips off the river in gusts and swirls, people zip up and down on snowmachines and four-wheelers, or drill into the ice for lush and blackfish. Alex Beans grew up here, in Mountain Village, a small Yup'ik community only sixty miles from the Bering Sea.  

[wind sounds]

Alex: Mountain Village, Yup’ik name, is Asa'carsarsaq, which, as far as I know, means the beginning and the end of the hills…. It’s the end of the hills coming downriver, and it’s the beginning of the hills going up north.  

Molly: Here, life revolves around the river. The area is rich in fish, moose, bear, and millions of migratory birds. Alex, who is project director for the tribe, grew up here living a subsistence lifestyle and is now teaching his five young children to do the same.  

Alex: I made a choice to do the best I can to live off of the land, so it’s almost every day I eat moose, I eat fish, and I eat birds. All kinds of fish, different kinds of birds, and one kind of moose. That’s the first thing I want my kids to learn is the health benefits we have living off of the land. 

[dog barks in the background] 

Molly: While the Yup'ik people have been living here for thousands of years, they only settled into permanent villages within the past seventy years. Today, Mountain Village has grown to around 700 people, who live in wood-frame homes dotting the hillside. But these homes were never designed for the climate, and the effects are obvious. Houses shake in the wind, windows are covered in ice or boarded up to save energy, oil stoves run nonstop to keep people warm. As the climate changes and the permafrost thaws, homes lean off-kilter into frozen mud.  

Alex: The homes were all built mostly in the 70s, we’ve had some new houses built that were designed in uh, a tropical area and were built up here in the north, where it gets down to negative 60 with wind chill. We have molding issues; we have bad air quality issues. It’s super expensive to keep the houses heated, and there is definitely overcrowding in at least half of the homes.   

Molly: Actually, Alex was one of those people.  

Alex: I grew up with my grandparents and we had 10-plus people in the house most of the time. Uh, my own experience, I slept on the couch maybe half my life with my mom. 

Molly: And yet, updating homes and energy systems isn’t easy in a place like Mountain Village. There are no roads to the outside world, so everything comes in by barge or plane - food, building materials, fuel. Which means it’s expensive. People here spend three times more than the average American just to heat and power their homes. That’s why the tribe partnered with NREL in 2020 to design new homes for the village. Here’s NREL Architect Aaron Cooke talking about the project.  

Aaron: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Alaska Campus partnered with the tribe in Mountain Village to design affordable, healthy, energy efficient housing, specifically tailored to helping people transition out of homelessness. In a community where most people are in some way related, either by family or by other ties – in a small, rural community, no one is going to be left on the corner, or on the street, where there is of course no shelter. What that generally means is there’s an invisible segment of a rural, remote community that is homeless and yet is staying with relatives or sleeping on living room floors.  

Molly: Because of the housing shortage, many live in substandard homes. Richard John Queenie, for example, lives in a house about the size of a single car garage with his three daughters. The house has no plumbing and very little insulation. Mold lines the plywood floor, which is buckling because it sits on a rotten foundation. Along some of the floor seams, you can actually see daylight coming through.    

Richard: This house is – I don’t know, it’s older than I am. It was downtown, and then, I guess they’re building themselves another house down there, and they ended up bringing this one up here. Saved this house and built another one down there. They brought it up on logs, so long ago the logs are disintegrating, rotting away under there, like, not even there anymore.

Molly: Richard has a good job working as a carpenter for the tribe, but most of his paycheck goes straight toward his heating bill every month. As much as he’d love to build a new home, he can’t afford it.  

Richard: Me, myself I was thinking of just build myself just a 24x26 house or something like that. Something easy for me and my kids. I was thinking about, I was thinking about it myself, try to save up money for that, but it’s hard to – hard to save. You know, buying the stove oil, paying my lights, I got to pay my cell phone, buy my baby’s cell phone, buy food.  

Molly: When NREL started working with the tribe, the first step was to conduct a community survey to learn about people’s housing conditions and needs. Next, NREL worked hand in hand with the tribe to make sure the homes would work for them. The new homes have super insulated walls surrounded in a thick layer of rigid foam board, triple-pane windows, and very efficient appliances. According to Alex, they’re a huge improvement over the older homes, which were built with no local input.    

Alex: The homes are very well insulated. There’s just a small heater to heat the home, and on the extended versions we have a woodstove. So, if we have that woodstove going, there should be almost no cost going towards heating fuel.  

Molly: Another critical part of the project is that they were built with local labor. 

Alex: Everything that was put into the homes created jobs out here and created, or allowed our people to have actual job experience and learn more about different, uh, the new science we can put into homes that will benefit the people in a cold climate.   

Molly: In January 2024, an NREL team went back to Mountain Village to inspect the new homes and talk to residents. From the banks of the Yukon, the new homes were easy to spot among older, weathered plywood homes. Small and boxy, they have a slanted shed-style roof and steel siding that makes them look kind of like shiny toys. There are two different versions: a small, 380 square foot home with a bedroom loft, and a larger 600-square-foot home with an extra living room and bedroom downstairs. The cool thing is—the house was designed with a giant deck so the smaller version could easily be expanded to the larger size.  

Aaron: We want the house to be expandable. One of the, one of the key things that we’ve learned from people who live in tiny houses is they’re great for a certain stage in your life and there may be a time you wish it were bigger. And that was one of the things that was new and exciting about this approach, is, we designed not a house but a house that could be expanded in three different ways, and we designed an adjustable robust foundation. The oversized foundation of the small house gives the occupant, or the tribe, in the future, to expand the initial size of the building to almost double. 

And that was an economic consideration and a structural consideration, but I think there’s also a cultural component that came out almost as a biproduct. Because really, if you’re only designing the core, the seed, of the house, then the occupant can design the expansion to best suit their lifestyle, and their average daily life. Whether, they are engaged in wage employment and go work in an office every day, or they’re fully immersed in subsistence lifestyle and working within that - those parameters of gathering and hunting for their family. As an architect, that’s exciting to me because it leaves me out of the equation, and I’m an outsider to the community. And, so, we do our very best to listen to our clients and our occupants to design to their lifestyle, but no one can design to someone’s lifestyle as well as they themself can.   

Molly: The NREL team visited the five homes to test the air quality and get feedback from occupants. Agnes Brown is an Indigenous Elder who lives in one of the new homes at the foot of the hill. Though it was minus-20 outside, with an icy wind blowing off the river, it was warm and cozy inside her house.    

Agnes: I'm Agnes Brown. I was born in 1946 at Hooper Bay, and my family moved here to Mountain Village in 1949. And I've been here since. The reason why we moved up is, there was tuberculosis at that time and it was killing a lot of family members at Hooper Bay. My brothers passed away from that. My folks were subsistence and they cut fish, they picked berries, my dad was a hunter, my brothers, and um, we did a lot of subsistence growing up, while I was growing up. 

Molly: In Agnes’ old house, the foundation was so crooked that the walls were pulling apart from the roof, causing the roof to leak.  

Agnes: It just, just dripped, even during the wintertime when it poured out. We would have to use all kinds of containers. And it wasn't good for our health. Too much dripping … Our coughing, catching cold and all that more easily compared to here. This is healthier for me here.  

 Molly: Her new house is warm, dry, and easy to heat.  

Agnes: But the fuel is not so much as in the old house. It's so much lower. And I’m so grateful. Very grateful.  

Molly: Because the new homes are so airtight, ventilation systems are extremely important to get rid of indoor pollutants – like chemicals that off gas from your furniture and cleaning products, excess moisture, and even us, as we’re constantly generating carbon dioxide. Heat recovery ventilators replace stale indoor air with fresh outside air. In the process, they capture heat from exhaust air and transfer it to fresh air so you’re not losing that precious energy. In Agnes’ loft, two NREL researchers showed a Mountain Village local how to maintain the ventilation system. NREL Architect Aaron Cooke said this kind of training is critical to empower local communities.  

Aaron: So, we go in together, we rebalance, we recheck, together, we’re able talk to the occupants, together, both our team from the lab, and the construction crew of the people that built their homes for them, their friends and neighbors that built their home. In that way, we’re able to track over time, any changes to the house.  

Molly: Another challenge we had to figure out was how to build on unstable permafrost.  

Aaron: There are two things that make foundation design very difficult in Mountain Village. One is that the ground is frozen, and two, that it's thawing and no one knows how fast it will thaw. We have to got to design a foundation that can handle frozen soils, which is already difficult, and then we’ve got to be able to design it in such a way that it can adjust as those soils change, which we know will happen, is already happening, but we cannot predict linearly or mathematically how it’s going to happen.  

Molly: The new homes have foundations that can be adjusted with simple hand tools. Outside Agnes’ house, Alex measured the foundation with a long level, then twisted a few of the adjustable brackets to make it level again. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes.  

These healthy, energy efficient homes have already eased overcrowding in Mountain Village and provided a technology that can help the community grow. Of course, many more are needed, not just in rural Alaska, but in hard-to-reach places everywhere. NREL’s Alaska researchers continue to work with frontline communities to help them adapt to our changing world, while preserving their way of life.  

[interstitial music, fades]  

Kerrin: That was incredible! What an amazing look at the work that is happening in one of the most extreme climates in the world. Taylor, I thought that was incredible, what’d you think?

Taylor: Oh, incredible, incredible work. We love to hear more about what’s happening up in the Arctic, and we’re really excited that you all joined us for this journey. Thanks, everyone, and make sure to let us know what you’d like to hear more of, as you’re listening, at podcast@nrel.gov.

[Music fades in]  

Kerrin: This episode was written by Molly Rettig. Our theme music is written and performed by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino, of Drift B-C and episode music by Ted Vaca. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. NREL’s Alaska Campus is on the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River.  We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land.     

[Music fades out]