Peter Tridish is a radio engineer based in Philadelphia who frequently works in Alaska helping to set-up solar and wind power for remote radio stations, both to source renewable energy and to offset the incredibly high energy costs rural northern communities face. These towns have included Port Alexander, Angoon, and Rocky Springs, with populations ranging from 50 to 500, and locations with various extremes of lack of easy access. Many of these communities are predominantly indigenous, being traditionally in the lands of the Tlingit and Dene peoples.
With many locations in Alaska, especially along the water, inaccessible without a boat, the cost for importing goods is already high, even prior to including the cost of electricity and utilities for daily life. Access to internet and energy is more metered than that of major cities, with hard caps on the amount of gigabytes available per month or couple watt, around ten times that of those living in the continental United States. Costs for running radio stations are frequently a logistical issue. This is doubly the case when dealing with repair and equipment costs on top of high baseline electrical charges. Peter Tridish works to set up more sustainable energy sources that also help offset these charges and has been instrumental in helping update and maintain radios in the small towns around southern Alaska and in Puerto Rico. There is a GoFundMe for one of his current projects in Puerto Rico, which helps bring awareness to mistreatment from the Navy on American soil and the impacts of American policies.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Grey Cooper:
Before we start talking about solar power in Alaska, can you give us a bit of your background?
Peter Tridish:
Yeah, sure. I’m a radio engineer. I studied solar in the early 90s, intending to make it a way of avoiding oil wars, but, but then, we won those oil wars and took all the oil. Nobody cared about solar for the next 15 to 20 years. I ended up instead becoming a radio engineer and working on low power [stations].. Most of those I work with generally have not had the capital to invest in going solar – these stations are so small that it’s like already a big stretch for them to put up a tower and put up an antenna and all that. I am hopeful though that more of them will start doing this. One of the big things that the Inflation Reduction Act has done is it has changed some of the incentives around getting solar. One of the big problems with our incentives up until today, or up until basically like last year or so, is that it came in the form of tax credits. If you owned a house, and installed solar panels on the roof, they might cost $20,000. Then you could deduct $12,000 or so and save on your tax bill. That was enough to make a lot of people do it. But the problem was there was no incentive for a nonprofit. All the radio stations I work for are non- commercial, non-profit organizations, and don’t pay taxes, so they would have to pay the whole cost. The Inflation Reduction Act has changed it so that, if you’re a non-profit and you spend money on solar, the IRS will send a check to help with the cost of installation. I hope that a lot of the stations that I work with start to take advantage of it.
Grey Cooper:
What got you into doing this in Alaska, specifically? There are small radio stations all across the continental USA.
Peter Tridish:
I started working in Alaska because I was called in to renovate repeaters (automatic radio-relay stations, usually located on a mountain top, tall building, or radio tower). Of the seven of them at this radio [station], maybe five were working. They hadn’t been worked on much since they were installed in the 80s; the radio was constantly getting calls from people saying “you’re off the air” or “you sound terrible.” So I’m the station manager, and Becky Meyers said we have to do a full renovation. The first one I worked on was Port Alexander; and, when I was there, I saw how precarious the power system was. I recommended doing solar and wind at the site before the Inflation Reduction Act because their radio is so important in emergency planning.
Energy is so precarious there, so it seemed like a confluence of need and resources. It’s common for their power to be out for days and for people to have their own generator. It makes sense economically to go solar a lot earlier there than it does in places where you have easy grid access. As an engineer, I am shocked by how little people know about what it takes to make electricity and how little they know the difference between how much electricity things use.
Grey Cooper:
I was wondering if you could share some updates about where you’re at in your radio projects, from last summer and going into this summer?
Peter Tridish:
Yeah, sure. [Our latest] project slowed down a little last summer because we ran out of money for it, but then a bunch of grants came through. We’re planning on really picking it up a lot this summer. We’re gonna work in two communities. One is in Angoon, which is a town of about 500 or so. The other one is Rocky Springs, which is a somewhat smaller town, around 100 people. They will get bigger during the summer and smaller in the middle of the winter. It’s mostly indigenous communities in the area near Sitka. And we’re going to work on solar systems in both of those, in addition to upgrading their transmitters and changing their towers and antennas.
Grey Cooper:
So you’re diversifying as many ways for them to get power as possible?
Peter Tridish:
Yes, Port Alexander was one of the most extreme cases because they have no municipal electricity at all. They just have a generator that works for City Hall and it’s only on sometimes. Angoon has a smaller power plant but the electricity they produce is really expensive, somewhere around like 85 cents to 95 cents per kilowatt hour, while in most of the country it’s around 12 cents per kilowatt hour. Energy is about seven to eight times as expensive, so people are a lot more conscious of how much energy they use, and what makes it. In those towns, it tends to be really pretty precarious because they’re dependent on diesel generators. Sometimes they only have one backup, and that might be small. It is tricky getting diesel to some of these places because they really don’t have roads. It’s a large archipelago, so everything’s on islands. So everything either comes in by plane or boat, and it doesn’t come in by boat during the winter. So generators have to have really big tanks and people have to be careful with them to make sure they don’t run out during the time when fuel can’t be transported.
Grey Cooper:
When you set things up during the summer, how immediately are you aware of how much energy you’re going to be able to store?
Peter Tridish:
One of the biggest problems we have in Port Alexander was the [energy] monitoring. The Internet is really difficult in that part of the world. It’s gotten a little bit better in the past year or two because of the advent of the Starlink dishes that are becoming available, but really up until recently most places all they had was a HughesNet dish.
In Port Alexander we had a very hard time monitoring how much energy we’re making. We’re going back there to improve that this year. We’re going to put it in a different inverter with a better connection and we’re going to add a Starlink to our installation, so we can make it easier to troubleshoot.
One nice thing is that it is fairly predictable how much power the transmitters and the ancillary equipment use. So we know better than most people what our demand will be, but you can’t predict the amount of sun or how parts will perform.
The solar contributes significantly during the summer, and some in the spring and fall, but during the winter it’s not very helpful. But, in a situation where you’re burning diesel, every gallon of diesel that you don’t burn is a big help. And summer is when the most people are there, so we’re trying to get our signal as available to the commercial fishing fleet as possible.
Grey Cooper:
How reliably is it able to reach the fleet? Or is that dependent on where the fleet is and weather?
Peter Tridish:
In the past these translators were 10 watts each, so, when they were originally built, they were just intended to be listened to in the little towns. 10 Watts was plenty because there’s very little interference from other stations, but people started spreading out a little bit further. What we realized was most translators are permitted to go up to 250 Watts, and we could cover a lot of the water. It was definitely the ambition of this project to double or triple the coverage area over the water. There are a lot of straits and channels between all the islands, so it’ll cover the water between different communities pretty well. We’re not very concerned about covering much of the land because that is usually just really little towns. So we’re more concerned about the water where people go back and forth a lot and there are hundreds of ships.
Grey Cooper:
Is it hard keeping up with the changes in the solar industry?
Peter Tridish:
When I started it back in like 1990 or so, there had been this burst of energy in the 70s, and people innovated a lot. But then there had been almost nothing for 10 years or so. When I was working in ‘95, solar panels cost about six to seven dollars a watt. So for a 300 watt solar panel, it could be quite expensive. Now, they’re often 30 cents or 40 cents a watt, even 25 cents a watt. Also batteries almost always leak acid, and a lot of people would install them and then just not take care of them and they would only last three years. Lithium ion batteries are now a lot more resilient, lasting closer to 10 years, and the cost has been falling – Germany and China have made their manufacturing much more feasible and cheaper.
So many people have panels that there’s a lot of innovation and there’s always a better model like six months later, like cell phones in the 2010s. That’s kind of where inverters and charge controllers are right now. So definitely a lot of work trying to test things out. I’m going to put a different system in my house, to practice installing it in Philadelphia where I’m close to a Home Depot instead of figuring it out remotelyremote.
Out there there are about 12,000 people in the listening area, and of those 12,000 people about 1200 people actually donate. So that’s like 10% of the population in the listening area that contributes which, even NPR they would kill for that. If you got 1% of people in the Washington area that would contribute, public radio would consider itself pretty lucky.
Grey Cooper:
When I was doing my readings on it, I was coming across how the higher cost of energy really hits communities in Alaska, especially indigenous and First Nations, I was wondering if that’s been true in your experience?
Peter Tridish:
Everybody in southern Alaska pays much more than what we’re accustomed to, even like eggs, anything that you buy costs at least like about twice as much as you’re used to paying here. When fuel prices go up, like those costs go up even more. In these places where it’s hard to get things in, it’s definitely more expensive and it’s very expensive relative to income. Pelican and Angoon are both largely indigenous. The way it works in Alaska is different because there aren’t reservations like there are in the lower 48 states. It’s more like each tribe has its own sort of corporation that operates lots of things for the village.
Angoon particularly was the site of a terrible massacre in the 1870s. There was a First Nations guy who was working on a whaling ship, he was killed, and his family were refused compensation. There are different versions of the story, but it sounds like three white hostages were taken. And the Navy came, they returned the hostages, but then the Navy demanded 400 blankets as compensation for having done this. And the tribe got together and came up with 160 or so. Navy’s like, “that’s not good enough”. So the Navy just bombed the entire settlement, destroyed all of their food stores and their shelter, and caused several years of famine. When news of it got back to the lower 48, the one good thing that came out of it was that the Navy lost its jurisdiction over Alaska. Really remarkable history in some of the places and impacts that are still felt today.
Grey Cooper:
Is there anything that you’re specifically looking forward to this summer?
Peter Tridish:
I’m going to be working with four friends, with Becky Meyers, who’s the operations director with my friend Lou Yoder, and Steph, and Isaac Nelson. So we have a great crew that’s working together. They’re all coming for different parts of the summer. Lou and Stephanie and I have worked together on doing solar energy in Puerto Rico. Got a bunch of solar panels donated several years ago and have been installing them every February for the past three years. So I’ve been doing that to get myself back in practice with solar. I did learn and I worked in the 90s, but many things have changed, so I’ve been trying to upgrade my skills by practicing and doing volunteer installations.
The two towns [Angoon & Rocky Springs] in Alaska are really beautiful. They’re really remote. One great thing about up there is that my cell phone doesn’t work. There’s no coverage. There’s only one store in town, in both those places. There’s no antenna, there are no roads. And every Sunday night, people play music together. So it’s a very fun place. We’ll be working near a school which will be closed for the summer. It’s out of a lot of the things that we get used to with civilization, and there’s challenges to that, too, because it’s not a vacation. Every screw, every bolt, we’ve got to bring with us. For instance, in Tenakee, the school there is up 200 stairs, up a hillside, so we’re gonna go up and down those stairs hundreds and hundreds of times, carrying all kinds of heavy stuff.