What Is ‘Sustainable’ at the Governor’s Energy Conference?

A topic that was barely on the horizon four years ago was AI. Months after the 2022 conference, Open AI released ChatGPT to the public, launching a race akin to the Information Superhighway build-out in the ‘90s.

“It’s our opportunity to step up and grow into it,” says Sparrow Mahoney, founder of STAK Energy, a North Slope data center startup. To power all that computing, Mahoney cites US Department of Energy figures: “We need 100 gigawatts in America by 2030… But you can take this to the bank: it is real, it is sustainable, it’s not a bubble.”

Former US Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, now co-chair of the AI Infrastructure Coalition, told conference attendees, “The number one bottleneck that we face is energy.” Which raises the question, why is AI featured at a sustainable energy conference as anything other than an obstacle?

One answer comes from Venkat Banunarayanan, VP of Integrated Grids at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “You can turn around and use the AI to better serve the data centers, more efficiencies right there. Then automation can augment the workforce as needed. There are a lot of use cases in AI that would both serve the data centers and make the utilities operate more efficiently,” he says.

In addition to efficiency driven by AI itself, the technology is spurring overdue energy upgrades. David Terry, president of the National Association of State Energy Officials, says, “This is not a new investment in the grid that’s being done just because of data centers. We have underinvested in the grid for thirty, forty years, and this was coming with or without data centers.”

Sam Enoka, founder and CEO of Greensparc, agrees. His company installed a cabinet-sized data center inside a Cordova Electric Cooperative hydropower station in 2024, and he hopes that approach demonstrates how computing serves as a steppingstone to improve utilities. “It becomes new and very stable revenue for that utility,” says Enoka. “When we come in and we don’t require major new network upgrades for the utility, we eat up a fair share of the fixed overhead for that utility. We put downward pressure on the rates for everyone on that system.”

Great Grandmother

To be clear, Greensparc has a very different business model than “hyperscale” data centers, like the recently blocked proposal in Utah for a 9 GW facility, equivalent to the Beehive State’s entire current consumption. In contrast, Enoka targets communities that might’ve just lost a major industrial customer; a Greensparc data center can monetize the local utility’s surplus capacity.

For a hyperscale project in Alaska, there’s STAK Energy. A year ago, Mahoney launched the company with the goal of siting a cryptocurrency mine on the North Slope: turning stranded natural gas into electricity, electricity into computing cycles, and computing cycles into money.

For a much, much grander vision, Mahoney is proposing Project Aaka, named for the Iñupiaq word for “grandmother.” Documents released by the state this week notify the public of a preliminary lease of approximately one square mile along the Dalton Highway, about 25 miles south of major Prudhoe Bay infrastructure. Although Mahoney was deliberately vague on details at the conference, the filing calls for a 3 GW power plant burning twice as much natural gas as all of urban Alaska. Project Aaka would need a federal Clean Water Act authorization to create a gravel pad nearly twice as big as the one at ConocoPhillips Alaska’s Willow oil field.

The North Slope has the advantage of an average annual temperature of 12°F, so the data center could flush away its processors’ waste heat with outdoor air. Furthermore, Mahoney suggests the hot exhaust could warm greenhouses to grow food, enough for a large fraction of the state’s population.

STAK Energy aims to begin operations in 2028, which would beat Glenfarne’s gasline by one year, under the most optimistic scenario. Yet Glenfarne already has suppliers lined up to fill its pipeline, while STAK Energy has none. The company has said it’s raising funds through McKinley Alaska Private Investment, but it has a long way to go for the half-billion-dollar target.

Banunarayanan says of data centers generally, “One of the biggest challenges is speculative projects. There’s hundreds across the country that’ve been proposed; how do you know which ones are real?” He does appreciate that Alaska has some ideal qualities, given a cooler climate and experience in microgrid integration that most Lower 48 projects lack.

Broader Definition

A 3 GW gas-fired power plant isn’t exactly 100 percent renewable, but data centers are part of the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference under Dunleavy’s broader interpretation of “sustainability,” when he speaks of energy in terms of security. “It’s really energy surety,” Dunleavy says. “Are we going to get the energy that we contracted for? Are we going to get the energy we expect?” The governor points to the recent craving for Alaska crude in Asian markets, during the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Alaska has no contested waters, Dunleavy notes.

Security has become part of the remit of federal renewable energy agencies. Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary at the US Department of Energy, oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, which did not exist during last year’s conference. She notes that a former office of renewable energy gained responsibility for the mineral supply chain late last year. Robertson says, “The success of any community is based on its energy security and its predictability.”

Likewise, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is no more; the Trump administration renamed it the National Laboratory of the Rockies. The lab’s director, Jud Virden, considers the new name to reflect a broader purview. “We look at critical minerals, we look at data centers, we look at energy security,” says Virden.

If the conference sustains under a new governor, it might be similarly rebranded as an energy security gathering. In his welcome remarks, Dunleavy expressed hope that his successor would continue the event: “Coming together like this and sharing what you know and what we know, bringing that together, is going to make a more energized world, as they say.”