Government

The federal government research organization that has been devoted for half a century to renewable energy development has had the word “renewable” stripped from its name.

The Trump administration, which broadly opposes renewable energy projects, changed the name of the Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory to “National Laboratory of the Rockies.”

The U.S. Department of Energy announced the name change on Monday, effective immediately.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said in a statement. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Laboratory of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”

NREL has a prominent presence in Alaska. The agency in 2020 joined into a partnership with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The UAF facility is one of four NREL centers; two campuses are in Colorado and there is an office in Washington, D.C.

Jud Virden, the laboratory’s director, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all,” according to the statement.

However, the name change is a troubling sign to one Alaska organization involved in projects promoting renewable energy and energy affordability.

“Removing ‘Renewable’ and ‘Energy’ from NREL’s name raises concerns. Renewables are key to affordable, secure energy and deliver long-term economic benefits, especially for rural communities,” Bridget Shaughnessy Smith, communications director for the Alaska Public Interest Research Group, a non-profit consumer advocacy group, said by email.

“While it’s not yet clear if this name change signals a broad mission shift, any refocus cannot come at the expense of renewable energy or by prioritizing already well-funded fossil fuel industries. Remote microgrid communities in Alaska are working with NREL to innovate toward affordable, reliable energy, and this name change must not disrupt that critical work,” Shaughnessy Smith continued.

NREL’s history started in 1974, when the organization was established as the Solar Energy Research Institute. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush elevated it to national lab status and changed the name to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The Cold Climate Housing Research Center was established in 1999 with a mission of improving housing and building conditions in Alaska’s extreme climate. The center has focused on renewable energy, along with energy efficiency, structural integrity for buildings on permafrost, indoor air quality and designs that are sustainable in the far north. The center headquarters is the world’s farthest-north building with a platinum rating, the highest possible, bestowed by the U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The NREL-Cold Climate Housing Research Center partnership has participated in numerous recent energy and environmental innovations, including the development of non-plastic housing insulation made from a fungi-wood pulp blend.

The NREL name change adds to a list of government agencies and geographic sites changed by the Trump administration this year to align with the president’s agenda.

On the day he was inaugurated for his second term, President Trump issued an executive order directing that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed “Gulf of America” and that Denali, North America’s tallest peak, revert to its previous federal name, Mount McKinley.

The Denali name comes from the traditional name for the Alaska peak used by the Koyukon people, the region’s Indigenous residents. The name, which translates to “the high one,” has been the official state of Alaska name since the 1970s. The McKinley name, for former president and Ohioan William McKinley, has been widely panned in Alaska, and state lawmakers passed a resolution asking for the Denali name to be restored for federal government use.

In September, Trump issued an executive order directing that the U.S Department of Defense be renamed “Department of War.” That resurrected a department name that was dropped in 1947.

Update, 9:30 a.m. Thursday:

The repeal resolution passed the Senate Thursday by a vote of 49-45. It goes next to the president’s desk.

Original story:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate is about to vote on a resolution to toss ex-President Biden’s limits on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and ensure nothing like it is imposed again.

The measure would expand the area available for leasing to the entire coastal plain of the refuge, in the northeast corner of Alaska. It is part of a strategy to dismantle Biden’s environmental legacy, much of which took place in Alaska, the state with the most federal land.

The sponsor of the repeal, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, described it as removing Biden’s barriers to resource development in Alaska.

“We opposed their central Yukon Resource Management Plan, their integrated activity plan for our National Petroleum Reserve, and their decision to shut down any potential development on a very small part of the coastal plain,” she said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

Congress and the Trump administration have already nullified the Biden limits on leasing in the Arctic Refuge. But the latest nullification method uses the Congressional Review Act. That means a future president could not impose substantially similar limits without an act of Congress.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., spoke against the resolution. An outdoorsman who has travelled to the region, Heinrich described the refuge as a breathtaking wilderness that’s vital for hundreds of species of birds and wildlife.

“”The Arctic Refuge is the crown jewel of our National Wildlife Refuge System, and it belongs to every single American,” he said. “It deserves our protection.”

Market forces may, in effect, provide that protection. No major oil companies bid when the first Trump administration held an ANWR lease sale in 2021. A lease sale during the Biden administration, with more restrictive conditions imposed, drew no bids at all.

The resolution cleared a Senate procedural vote largely along party lines Wednesday, with only Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, crossing the aisle to vote with Democrats. It’s expected to pass the Senate on a final vote Thursday. The House has already passed an identical resolution so it would go next to the president for signature.

Haines’ mayor would like the borough’s Tlingit Park to be owned by the Tlingits.

In November’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee, the Mayor Tom Morphet made the case for granting the land, part of which is a Tlingit cemetery, to a local tribe, the Chilkoot Indian Association. The plan was met with mixed reactions.

The mayor first brought up the concept this spring and says he has had conversations with the Chilkoot Indian Association’s tribal administrator.

“I’ve been having informal discussions with Harriet Brouillette … and I posted back in March on my site,” he said. “And I also posted on Facebook, and I just figured the public wasn’t interested because I never heard anything bad. But there was quite a bit on Facebook this week, or the past few weeks, and a lot of people have questions.”

Morphet stressed that the idea is conceptual, and would need to be approved by the Tribe and the Haines Borough Assembly.

“The idea that we’ve refined, as much as it’s been refined, is to transfer the park property, the grassy part to the Tribe,” he said. “… this would require a new property line to be drawn. But the borough, at this time, would retain ownership of the … senior center and the playground of our dreams next to it. So this would be just the tribal house pavilion, the Native grave sites and the picnic tables restroom that would become owned by the CIA.”

The land would come with a caveat, according to Morphet’s plan. The trail through the park would remain open to public use.

Morphet said there are two reasons to change ownership of the land. The first is that he believes the land should already be Native-owned. He said it was originally granted to the Presbyterian Church to be used as a mission school. Federal law says that property used for indigenous mission schools should revert to Tribes.

On his mayor’s web page, Morphet wrote the following:

“The park, a Tlingit graveyard, should have gone back to the Tlingits 40 years ago when the Presbyterian Church was deeding the last of its vacant mission properties back to the Tribe. But by then the City of Haines had scooped up the parcel for a downtown park.”

Morphet said another reason is cost. The borough has less money and more responsibilities than ever.

“The borough has a million-dollar deficit,” he said. “Also, we’ve just accepted a new park, park land from Margaret Piggott, that will cost money to maintain over time, or develop or do whatever we’re going to do.”

Former Mayor Jan Hill listened to the presentation and expressed concern. She worried that changing owners could cause unintentional harm.

“I understand the warm and fuzzy feeling that some people get from this,” she said. “But it just feels like this is a way to slough off borough responsibility and liability onto an organization that’s totally grant driven — and that doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy to me. It could put this organization in a really tough financial spot.”

Georgiana Hotch is a Chilkoot Indian Association council member. She spoke at the meeting in favor of more discussion.

“… this is a really great gesture,” she said. “Because we do have, we do have a cemetery. You can look at that as sacred, like sacred sites to our people. It’s community-oriented, which is good for the entire city. And we appreciate being able to put it on the table and talk about it.”

Members of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee agreed that more information is needed. Their next meeting is Jan. 14.

You can contact this reporter at melinda@khns.org.

Next week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will hold a closed-door, three-day meeting in Juneau to discuss long-term solution options for glacial outburst floods in the Mendenhall Valley. Federal agencies, local officials and researchers will participate. 

During the meeting, the group will discuss the pros and cons of five options to prevent homes from flooding in the coming years. Those options are:

• a dam at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake 
• a permanent levee 
• a lake tap or tunnel through the mountains to drain Suicide Basin 
• a bypass channel through the Mendenhall River floodplain
• relocating impacted residents from the Valley

The Army Corps will host the multi-day meeting, called a ‘charette’, at The Huddle in the Mendenhall Mall Dec. 9 through 11. 

Army Corps Spokesperson John Budnik wrote in an email to KTOO that the meeting will be closed to the public to “ensure open dialogue, idea and information sharing is achieved and uninhibited amongst the experts and stakeholders that will be there.”

Press briefings will be held at The Huddle after each day, and the Army Corps plans to publish a report summarizing the meeting for the public in January. 

The Army Corps solicited public input on potential solutions during a month-long public comment period that closed last week and received 34 comments. 

Two options received more attention in those comments than the others. The first is a lake tap or tunnel meant to drain Suicide Basin before it can fill to the point of bursting. The second is a dam or levee at the outlet of Mendenhall Lake. A few commenters favored a bypass channel through the floodplain. 

Some commented on the benefits and drawbacks of each solution, without necessarily favoring one. Others said they didn’t have enough information from the Army Corps about what each option would entail to weigh in. 

Many said that finding a solution is urgent for the hundreds of Valley residents who face annual flooding. The current levee, made of HESCO barriers, is temporary and protected homes from catastrophe by a slim margin during the most recent flood in August. 

The agency aims to recommend a long-term flood solution and design it by the end of May 2026. Budnik anticipates the public will have another opportunity to provide comments on the prospective solution in June 2026. 

The City and Borough of Juneau is seeking ideas from Juneau residents about how to spend the fees paid by cruise ship passengers this coming year. More than $20 million is expected to be available for tourism-related projects. 

Juneau residents and businesses can now submit proposals to the city through Dec. 31. The last round of funding paid for things like free public Wi-Fi downtown and increased bus service to the Mendenhall Valley.

Alix Pierce, the city’s visitor industry director, said community suggestions play a critical role in what gets funded and what doesn’t. 

“We do get a lot of good ideas for what residents are feeling the need for in the community,” she said. “And, not spending general fund on our waterfront infrastructure and our visitor services does free up budget elsewhere in the city to do other things.” 

Every cruise season, the city collects a $5 fee from each passenger who comes into town from a ship. The fees can fund tourism projects that benefit visitors and locals in Juneau. In the past, these fees have funded upgrades to downtown public restrooms and improvements at Marine Park.

The city expects to collect about $22 million in fees this year. But the money collected can’t go toward paying for just anything. A lawsuit the cruise industry filed and settled with the city in 2019 clarifies the limits on how and where the city can use the funds, and some projects require approval by the cruise ship industry. 

Pierce said that people often don’t understand those parameters and that leads to a lot of proposals being rejected. 

“It’s unfortunately not money that’s just available to fill the hole in the city budget,” she said. “We are restricted in how we use those funds.”

Usually, the projects are downtown near the waterfront area, where the impacts of tourism are felt the most. But other parts of town can still secure funding for projects, like near the Mendenhall Glacier, as long as tourism reaches that area and the project would benefit tourism. 

Residents can submit their suggestions for projects in a few different ways. The city has a web form where people can submit proposals. It outlines what types of projects would fit the criteria. The Assembly will ultimately decide which projects to fund during the spring budget cycle.

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that the lawsuit settled between the City and Borough of Juneau and the cruise ship industry in 2019 lays out constitutional limits on how passenger fees can be spent. 

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has approved a U.S. Defense Department request for Alaska National Guard service members to assist the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Anchorage with “administrative support,” the guard office announced Tuesday.

The Alaska National Guard said five service members will assist with “administrative and logistical” duties at the Anchorage ICE office for up to a year.

“The Alaska National Guard members are administratively supporting the Enforcement & Removal Operations section and Homeland Security Investigations section, ensuring seamless operations at the Anchorage ICE office. Their mission includes a wide range of duties, from vehicle fleet management and safety compliance to office support and processing purchase orders,” the Guard statement said.

The announcement included a list of clerical duties, including data entry and creating reports, answering phones, managing fleet vehicles and checking fire extinguishers. Officials said the partnership is authorized by Title 32 Section 502(f) of the U.S. Code, which enables National Guard members to perform additional duties under the direction of the President or Secretary of Defense.

Grant Robinson, Dunleavy’s deputy press secretary, confirmed the governor approved the request.

“The Alaska National Guard members joined the guard to serve our nation. This support they are providing the Anchorage ICE office is in service of the nation,” he said by email Tuesday.

Grant did not say whether the National Guard would provide further assistance with immigration enforcement actions.

“Any future requests for administrative and logistical support will be considered on a case by case basis,” he said.

The Trump administration has continued to accelerate immigration enforcement operations, and officials have promised to “limit legal and illegal immigration,” after the shooting of two National Guard service members in Washington, D.C. last week. The Trump administration has also continued to roll back humanitarian programs for immigrants, including ending the temporary protected status of 330,000 nationals from Haiti last week.

While ICE has been conducting mass raids, court house arrests and large-scale detentions and deportation operations across the United States, in Alaska ICE has focused enforcement efforts on specific individuals identified through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or having interactions with law enforcement, according to the ACLU of Alaska. 

Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage is the co-chair of the Alaska Joint Armed Services Committee and has been outspoken about his concerns about the Alaska National Guard being deployed domestically for “civil disturbance operations.”

“I see it’s a long list of boring, banal administrative tasks that are in no way controversial or concerning in and of themselves,” he said of the National Guard announcement. “What’s concerning is that Alaska ICE is requesting additional support, and the assumption that I make is that it’s because Alaska ICE intends to be doing more detainments, and intends to be doing more field operations in which they’re going to need this administrative support behind them. So that’s my concern.”

Gray was reached by phone Tuesday leaving a meeting with U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan in Washington, D.C. Gray said he expressed his concerns at the meeting about the leadership of U.S. Department of Defense, which the Trump administration has renamed the “Department of War,” and Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Gray said he’s also concerned about a wider chilling effect of ICE activity and increased immigration enforcement in Alaska.

“It’s going to increase fear, not only in the undocumented folks that might be in Anchorage and the rest of Alaska, but also fear in people who are here legally, and even U.S. citizens who might be mistaken for someone who might be undocumented,” he said.

An October investigation by ProPublica found that more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in raids and at protests, and the government does not track how many citizens are held by immigration agents.

Dunleavy’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the concern around ICE overreaching its authority, and arresting and detaining U.S. citizens.

“It seems that Alaska’s notorious SNAP backlog caused by a lack of workforce doing many of the tasks in this memo would be much better use of our Guard,” Gray added. “Why not deploy Guard members to feed Alaskans instead of deploying them to earn brownie points with the Trump administration?”

Cindy Woods, senior staff attorney on immigration rights with the ACLU of Alaska, said they have tracked at least 70 ICE arrests this year, as reported in the custody of the Alaska Department of Corrections. That’s an almost 500% increase from last year.

“We have been seeing a growing ICE presence in the state and a growing trend of ICE enforcement,” she said. The ICE activity has been largely in Anchorage, she said.

“We are very concerned about what this signals in relation to our state government’s willingness to cooperate with federal law enforcement, specifically in relation to ICE enforcement operations,” she said of the National Guard announcement. “I think it can’t be overstated the negative impact that increased enforcement has had across the country and Alaska, unfortunately, is not immune to that.”

An estimated 7.7% of the population, or more than 57,000 people, in Alaska are foreign-born, Woods pointed out, and the Trump administration’s continued restrictions on paths to legal immigration and citizenship, as well as humanitarian and refugee resettlement programs are impacting Alaskans.

“It’s kind of an assault from both sides, and so we’re really concerned about that as well,” she said.

Woods said the ACLU is not aware of any U.S. citizens being detained by ICE in Alaska, but there is heightened scrutiny.

“One case that we have heard of recently is of a longtime Anchorage resident who has been happily married and was going to their interview for their green card based on that marriage, and being arrested with basically accusations of marriage fraud,” she said. “And so we’re seeing folks who are in affirmative applications, who are not in any sort of civil enforcement proceedings, who are also being subject to heightened scrutiny and enforcement actions.”