**Title**: Energy in the North - Andy Seitz
**Date**: September 11, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Andy Seitz


00;00;00;05 - 00;00;04;22
[Andy Seitz] There's a tremendous amount of energy in water that's flowing out to the ocean. And this would be a way of taking advantage of the energy in that moving water and reducing reliance on diesel fuel.

00;00;11;11 - 00;00;17;27
[Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, we speak with Andy Seitz, a fisheries professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Andy is exploring the interactions between fish and hydro kinetic energy devices that use the power of the water to spin a turbine. We were standing on the banks of the Yukon River in Galena and I asked him about salmon and their journey up the river.

00;00;32;11 - 00;00;36;20 [Andy Seitz] Well, the Yukon salmon, both chums and Chinook salmon, swim up this river, and both species undertake their the longest migrations up this river of anywhere in their range. Some salmon will swim over a thousand miles up into Canada. And so this is just sort of the, I wouldn't say the beginning of their trip, but sort of the middle part of their trip. And they have to swim up a river that's flowing 6 to 8 miles an hour. And so they're swimming uphill four, sometimes 3 to 4 weeks to get to their spawning grounds.

00;00;59;24 - 00;01;08;22 [Amanda Byrd] The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded UAF and the community of Galena a $9.5 million to explore in river Hydrokinetic turbines.

00;01;08;25 - 00;01;15;02 [Andy Seitz] The turbine project is putting a spinning device in the river that would eventually produce power. There's a tremendous amount of energy in water that's flowing out to the ocean. And this would be a way of taking advantage of the energy in that moving water and reducing reliance on diesel fuel. And we are investigating whether fish would have interactions with that spinning device, And we're mainly focused on the juvenile down migrating stage. And these are fish that are anywhere between an inch and three inches long, so we're interested in if the fish interact with the device if they do interact with the device, what the outcomes are.

00;01;46;04 - 00;01;49;10[Amanda Byrd] Yeah, Fish are such an important part of life in Alaska.

00;01;49;11 - 00;01;51;23 [Andy Seitz] It goes without saying, they're a really important resource, and so part of responsible energy development is understanding potential impacts to natural resources such as fish. we've done research on a variety of systems, including the Yukon River, further upstream in the Tanana River and fish densities, as particularly the juvenile fish are really, really low. And so some fish probably do interact with a turbine, but we haven't seen any real obvious damage from these interactions. And in general, the interactions are probably pretty few and far between. And then upstream migrating adult stage swim past a turbine if it were placed in the river. But the turbines placed in the fastest part of the current. And the adults typically swim in slower parts such as the bottom of the river or the sides of the river. And so they have very infrequent interactions.

00;02;38;03 - 00;02;41;18 [Amanda Byrd] It sounds like this research could benefit more communities around Alaska.

00;02;41;19 - 00;02;43;00 [Andy Seitz] A lot of people benefit by making informed decisions about whether to move forward with a hydrokinetic electricity generating project. And then if the local community is supportive of that and they could get some electricity and power from a non-carbon based source there's a lot of communities along many rivers in Alaska, and we can use this knowledge to understand how hydrokinetic electricity generation might fit into their communities as well.

00;03;07;01 - 00;03;09;25 [Amanda Byrd] And this isn't a brand new technology to Alaska.

00;03;09;26 - 00;03;13;09 [Andy Seitz] It's been examined to various degrees in many places, the upper Yukon and Eagle. we have a Tanana River Test Site where we're constantly investigating and refining methodologies in Nenana, Alaska. There's been deployment of a turbine that's actually been connected to a grid in Igiugig and Kvichak River.

00;03;27;27 - 00;03;32;03 [Amanda Byrd] I see this technology fitting into Alaska's overall energy generation.

00;03;32;03 - 00;03;33;09 [Andy Seitz] So solar and wind are great resources as well. But sometimes the sun isn't very strong in ºÚÁÏÉçappand sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And so rivers move year round, even when they're covered in ice, water flows downhill. And so this is just part of a of a diversified energy portfolio.

00;03;49;01 - 00;04;02;09 [Amanda Byrd] Andy Seitz is a fisheries professor at UAF. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the ºÚÁÏÉçappCenter for Energy and Power at UAF. Find more stories, including this one at uaf.edu/acep.