Wiehl family fish camp near Rampart Village. Photo by Sherry Stout, NREL.

As members of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Indian Energy’s technical assistance team, Sherry Stout and Jared Temanson of DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently traveled to the Native village of Rampart, Alaska, to fulfill the Tribe’s request for technical assistance with strategic energy planning.

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A small community on the Yukon River about 90 miles northwest of Fairbanks, Rampart was established in 1897 as a supply point for placer mines  when gold was discovered in the surrounding creeks.  With prospectors flooding into the area, Rampart grew to nearly 10,000 residents, but the boom was short-lived. The population plummeted after the gold rush ended in the early 1900s and has stayed well below 100 since.

Today, Rampart is a predominantly Koykon Athabascan community with a subsistence economy.  With just under 30 year-round residents, the village was forced to close its only school several years ago because of an insufficient number of students.

In an effort to address this and similar challenges associated with a declining population, Rampart’s leadership is aggressively working to develop the community and expand the population. The community recently received funding to renovate the school building, which it intends to reopen in the fall of 2015 as both a school and a multi-purpose community building.

The anticipated growth will have a significant impact on the community’s energy landscape, and tribal leaders recognize the importance of taking a proactive, strategic approach to planning. To meet this need, Rampart applied to receive assistance with developing a community-wide energy plan with an overarching goal of reducing energy costs for residents and community facilities.

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Assistance was provided by the DOE Office of Indian Energy, which pairs selected Tribes with technical experts from DOE’s national laboratories for up to 40 hours to address a specific challenge or fulfill a need that is essential to a current project's successful implementation. In this case, NREL’s Stout and Temanson facilitated a strategic energy planning session, working closely with the village energy coordinator and the Chief to first articulate the community’s energy vision and then identify the energy impacts of Rampart’s expansion plans. Next, they worked on refining the energy vision and developing a prioritized list of goals, along with strategies and tactics for achieving them.

“Rampart has ambitious development goals, and such goals often have an energy component,” said Temanson. “What the strategic energy planning session did was help the community understand the energy impact of their goals and craft a plan for achieving those goals in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Now Rampart can be confident that it is on a good path toward efficient, sustainable development.”

In the months ahead, the DOE Office of Indian Energy and NREL will keep in touch with the community to ensure that it is making progress. Rampart’s energy coordinator is pleased with the results of the strategic energy planning effort and said she intends to reapply for project development technical assistance as Rampart begins implementing its plan.