2019 Alaska Summit for Place-Based Resilience

From 4-6 September, representatives from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, Alaskan startups, Alaskan research entities, and Alaskan communities convened to discuss overlapping priorities between these stakeholder groups. The goal was to surface shared problems in order to align interests, pool resources, and minimize duplication of efforts

PRIORITIZED PROBLEMS

  • Alaska’s transportation infrastructure, including ports, rail, roads, and facilities, require improvements in resilience, redundancy and capacity to support growth.
  • Alaska communities - including military sites - need modular, mobile, energy-efficient, durable, healthy, cost-effective housing solutions in order to sustain livelihoods and operations in changing conditions.
  • Renewable technologies need models to predict provided inertia to grid systems in order to reduce the impact of disturbances on the grid (e.g. loss of generation, loss of load).

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Several organizations have their own individual “innovation pipelines” breaking down the steps needed to transition from a problem to a pilot and eventually scale. ** The value in these collaborative sessions is forming connections with other organizations that have expertise or resources in specific parts of the pipeline.
  • Scaling from a prototype to a permanent solution is a challenge across the board in both local communities and Department of Defense programs.
  • Follow ups from local Alaskans do not necessarily have to manifest in demonstration-ready prototypes; collected data and well-crafted presentations are much more agile methods to inject locally incubated solutions into DoD challenges.
  • Cross-pollinating between all of the stakeholder groups present (DoD, AK startup community, AK universities, and Fairbanks local leadership) was critical to establishing crucial stakeholders and shared problem sets

NEXT STEPS

Further engagement in local Alaska Events, calendar linked here

  • Accelerate Alaska Meeting - discussion forum for private investors on Alaska projects and efforts - 19-20 September in Anchorage, AK
  • Planning Conference for Arctic Edge, a joint readiness exercise - 3rd December at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson
  • Alaska Defense Forum - meeting to form linkages between local and state resources with DoD focuses - 3-4 October in Fairbanks, AK

PRESENTATIONS

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Individual out-brief presentations:

Agenda summary with shared documents and the out-brief presentations available as a zip bundle which includes:

zip bundle of available materials (46MB)

For our DoD partners that may have trouble accessing the files, please feel free to reach out to Nick Ueng (nueng@bmnt.com). Nick can stage files via DoD SAFE.

THANKS

The 2019 Alaska Summit for Place-Based Resilience was organized by the Office of Naval Research, BMNT, the ARCTIC program partners. The event was hosted hosted at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Center for Energy and Power BP Design Theater.

Special thanks to Whitney Tallarico (ONR), Ellen Chang (BMNT), Nick Ueng (BMNT), John Petkosek (BMNT), Tonya Evans (ACEP) and Dayne Broderson (ACEP) for helping organize and facilitate the event.