“Our children were actually cold,” said Rhoda Jensen, Yakutat Tlingit Tribe executive director.

The school’s heating system in Yakutat wasn’t working right. It hadn’t been working well in years. 

Katya Karankevich was installing remote monitoring as a rural energy project manager with Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) when workers called her over to look at the school’s heating system. The 30-year-old pipes were leaking the system’s antifreeze onto the ground. 

The whole system was in danger of failure. If that happened, water pipes would freeze and burst, causing significant damage. “Their schools would have to close,” Karankevich said. “The situation was incredibly dire.”

Children in Yakutat can’t just ride a bus to a nearby school. Yakutat is only accessible by plane or boat. Everything needs to be shipped in, which drives up costs for everything, including gasoline and electricity. Limited transportation access also raises the stakes if heating fails.

To fix the failing heating system, Karankevich championed heat recovery from the community’s diesel generating station. Two years later, heat that is typically released into the air as a byproduct of power generation is piped underground to the school, public safety building and tribal center.

About a million dollars in Indian Health Service funding expanded the project to Yakutat’s public health clinic. Other funding for heat recovery came from the Alaska Energy Authority, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe.

The City Borough of Yakutat provided an in-kind match of heavy equipment usage. ANTHC and the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) also partnered in the effort.

The project saves carbon from being released into the atmosphere. It also saves significant money: $300,000 annually for the school and $100,000 for the health center.

Over the 25-year life of the system, heat recovery is expected to save about $9.25 million.

That’s about $13,000 per person in this community of 700 people. The borough of Yakutat is one of the largest organized county equivalents in the country, but its population is amongst the lowest. Almost everyone lives in town.

“Yakutat is probably the most beautiful place on Earth,” Karankevich said. “Southeast Alaska is a boreal rain forest. It rains here a lot, and snows a lot. It’s right on the ocean, so they have a lot of halibut, king salmon.”

She presses her hand into the sand next to the pawprint of a bear. “There’s a ton of moose, bears walking around everywhere, lots of deer,” she said. “It’s abundant in natural resources,”

The buildings warmed with recovered heat are absolutely essential in sustaining the human community amid this natural abundance. “Being able to heat them with basically little cost at all to the community is vital,” said Casey Mapes, Yakutat Power Plant manager and Chief of Yakutat Volunteer Fire Department.

The school is especially important for Yakutat and the Yakutat Tlinget Tribe, Jensen explained. “Children are the center of everything and everything we do in Yakutat,” she said.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by the 117th Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, is a piece of federal legislation that aims to reduce inflation by lowering the cost of prescription medications, investing in domestic energy production, and promoting clean energy, among other objectives.