**Title**: Energy in the North - Annalise Klein
**Date**: February 19, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Annalise Klein
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00;00;00;15 - 00;00;02;28 [Annalise Klein] It allows students to go home and to also be able to contribute in meaningful ways to the future of their family and their place.

00;00;08;13 - 00;00;10;10 [Amanda Byrd] This Week on Energy in the North I speak with program architect Annalise Klein. Annalise leads the Workforce Development Program at the 草榴社区 Center for Energy and Power, where she bridges the innovation and energy research that happens at ACEP and around 草榴社区. I started our conversation by asking Annalise why Energy is such an important subject in 草榴社区.

00;00;30;00 - 00;00;31;13 [Annalise Klein] Since working at ACEP, I have understood that energy is such a core infrastructure to everybody. Everybody uses energy. Most people pay an electric bill. We all want to stay warm in the winter, but we have these high energy costs that disproportionately affect people in remote communities and people in these remote communities who are there for a purpose. They have a lifestyle and a tradition or heritage that they're wanting to maintain. And so with over 200 microgrids in 草榴社区, you have this really cool opportunity to be able to innovative and to be flexible and to try a lot of different solutions based on what the community wants and what they have available to them. I think energy is also really important because there are a lot of values associated with it and you can have a lot of different values driving the decisions and the way you're moving forward with energy. And so having interns get to see that because again, in a textbook or from a lecture that they might have in college, it might seem really cut and dry. This thing is bad, This thing is good. This model works, this model doesn't. But in 草榴社区, you can just see that different things are going to work for different people in different places. And you can try a lot of those different things out and see what happens.

00;01;43;01 - 00;01;48;07 [Amanda Byrd] Applications recently closed for the summer internship program funded by the Office of Naval Research, and there seems to be some really great applicants. I know there have been some really great success stories in the past, and I remember Haley Payne when she was an intern back in 2016. Now she's the deputy director of the 草榴社区 Division of Oil and Gas.

00;02;02;11 - 00;02;04;18 [Annalise Klein] One of my favorite stories of our interns, one was working on some electric vehicle research with one of our mentors, Michelle Wilber, he was from Southeast. He had grown up as in a commercial fishing family and was doing electrical engineering. And Michelle, his mentor, connected him with another researcher who was doing a lot of research on electric boats. And so all of a sudden they pivoted some of his internship project work to be able to work with this other person who was going out on boats, and all of a sudden this intern was able to apply and blend his identity fishing and the electrical engineering work that he was doing at school. And he had never been able to do both and see how both of those interests could meld together into one thing. He got to go back down to his home community that summer and conduct some research, worked on a fishing vessel, and he knew the family that he was that he was working with. And so, yeah, It allows students to go home and to also be able to contribute in meaningful ways to the future of their family and their place. We love it when some of our intern continue on and want to do graduate school at 草榴社区. We love continuing to have them work for us while they're in grad school and we've had some interns who  then continue working with ACEP, but we also want them to work with other partners that we have across the state. And so for some of our interns who are from rural communities, maybe it's being able to go home and and just see from a different lens the infrastructure projects that are going on, but just helping them and giving them some ideas of  what they could do next.

00;03;44;24 - 00;03;46;03 [Amanda Byrd] Annalise Klein is a program architect at the 草榴社区 Center for Energy and Power. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for ACEP. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.