**Title**: Energy in the North - Sigrid Miller
**Date**: September 30, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Sigrid Miller

00;00;00;04 - 00;00;06;05 [Sigrid Miller] Truthfully, I never thought I would be an engineering student at all. Everyone in my life has always told me I should be a lawyer.

00;00;06;05 - 00;00;325;29 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Sigrid Miller, a UAF mechanical engineering student and an ACEP undergraduate student intern funded by the Office of Naval Research. Sigrid is working with Magnus deWitt on her project, looking at sharing Alaska's microgrid knowledge with other areas of the world that could benefit from the experience and expertise gained in remote and rural Alaska. I began the conversation with Sigrid by asking what she's been doing during her internship.

00;00;32;29 - 00;00;39;10 [Sigrid Miller] I have been researching communities with at least medium to high renewable energy penetration.

00;00;39;10 - 00;00;59;11 [Amanda Byrd] When you say renewable energy penetration, you're talking about the percentage of renewable energy that makes up the energy portfolio in the community, like a 20% energy penetration would be wind power producing about 20% of that community's energy needs. Is that right?

00;00;59;11 - 00;02;15;10 [Sigrid Miller] Yeah, that's that's correct. And the communities that I've been researching, I'm not limiting it to just like a medium or to high level of penetration because that's not feasible for a lot of these communities. It's very difficult to implement or integrate renewable energy into an existing grid because, a number of different factors. Cost is, of course, the most immediate barrier to implementing renewable energy. Along with just the terrain of the area, the cost, both immediately in long term of maintaining the infrastructure. And so in Alaska, we have around 200 islanded communities, as in they are either rural or remote. They have no connection to the Railbelt. There's no external transmission lines. So they are islanded and there's no connection. The cost of diesel is getting to the point of being insurmountable. I don't think it's a dramatic statement to make. And for mixed subsistence cash economies that make up rural Alaska, money that is spent on diesel or heating oils is money that you can't then put back into subsistence practices because in rural economies, it takes money to subsistence hunt. Yeah. 

00;02;15;10 - 00;02;18;12 [Amanda Byrd] And you're a mechanical engineering student at UAF

00;02;18;12 - 00;05;04;11 [Sigrid Miller] Truthfully, I never thought I would be an engineering student at all. Everyone in my life has always told me I should be a lawyer, I worked for the Alaska Marine Highway System for around two years, right out of high school. And so I moved to Ketchikan, and I worked as a steward first on the Columbia, and then the Kennecott. I worked on the Tustumena, on the Matanuska, the Lituya. And that was a very formative experience for me because although I was primarily in the Steward Department, which is a lot of housekeeping, I was briefly a terrible line cook, but I got the chance once or twice to work in the engine room. That provided me so much more purpose than, than housekeeping, for sure. And so when I decided or when my, my mom told me I needed to go to school, I was 20. And so I came to UAF as a biology student, before classes had even started, I just switched to engineering because I thought I can get a four year degree here and then go back to the ships and get my engine room sea time just by working my way into it. And then, my path diverged from that when I went to Kodiak as part of the Climate Scholars program intensive to Kodiak. And it was studying their microgrid system, Kodiak, because, as many people know, Kodiak is almost 100% renewable energy year round. And that was such a fascinating experience. I can't think of another time that I was so thoroughly interested in something so immediately, that really cemented for me that I should stay in engineering. And then from there, my classes have guided me, I think, into applying to the, ACEP summer internship program in the first place because I felt confident enough to apply what I had learned from Kodiak. And then, at the point of time that I started the internship, I'd gone to Galena to study their community energy planning intensive. And that was another super formative experience, because Kodiak was all about the engineering, and then Galena was all about what it actually takes to implement renewable energy solutions in the community. And, that was very eye opening to me because I didn't realize how important community engagement was. When you're trying to increase energy resilience and reliability in these rural and remote communities, the involvement of the tribal governance, the, the city, in the people themselves, it's so important to involve them because in my somewhat unqualified opinion, nothing's going to ensure the longevity and success of a project more than the people who actually live there, live with this renewable energy solution. They're the ones who are going to keep it running. They need to be involved every step of the way. Before you even started planning. And I started in engineering because I wanted to go back to ships, and I still do the Climate Scholars Program, and the Honors College here at UAF and then, ACEP as a whole have really shown me tremendous passion I have for, yeah, energy solutions in Alaska.

00;05;04;11 - 00;05;17;11 [Amanda Byrd] Sigrid Miller is a summer intern at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief Storyteller for ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep and follow us on social media.