**Title**: Energy in the North - Adam Jensen
**Date**: October 7, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Adam Jensen

00;00;00;07 - 00;00;18;12 [Adam Jensen] Whenever you have polar nights, right, people are like, oh, there's no sun. And for some periods of the year there isn't. But again, we have rural small communities where you need to ship in fuel. So that means that you have extremely high fuel prices. So alternative solutions can be more expensive in for example, the Lower 48 and still make great sense.

00;00;18;12 - 00;00;53;23 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Adam Jensen, an associate professor and scientist studying solar modeling assessments, performance modeling of solar photovoltaic systems, and the optimization of solar trackers at the technical University of Denmark. Adam also teaches building in extreme environments in Greenland. He was recently in Alaska as part of the University of the Arctic's North2North program, which provides researchers the opportunity to study in different parts of the Arctic. I began the conversation with Adam by asking, how does solar irradiance change across the Arctic?

00;00;53;23 - 00;01;44;02 [Adam Jensen] The Arctic, Alaska specifically, that's that's severely a big variation in solar resource, not only because of the latitude differences that you go for the north, but also because of the mountains, and especially sort of cloud pattern. So if you're on the coast versus sort of inland, as it's almost a factor of two in a certain place in Alaska, that receives almost twice as much of irradiance as other places. So accounting for this when you're designing a solar energy system is extremely important. And so a couple different data sets out there that we can use. So part of what I've been doing here is that I've given a couple of workshops on how to use open source software, PVLib to get different sort of irradiance data sets that's suitable for the Arctic. And also for how to then simulate how much energy we can expect out of a given system. And particularly we looked at an example system in Kotzebue that is being built right now.

00;01;44;02 - 00;01;54;27 [Amanda Byrd] And during your first presentation to ACEP, you remarked that Alaska is doing a great job in collecting solar irradiance data across the state.

00;01;54;27 - 00;02;45;00 [Adam Jensen] Yeah. So those two really good monitoring stations. And when you look at the Arctic in general, there's very few stations. But ACEP here in Fairbanks are running a station. So this is a station that has a solar tracker that tracks the sun continuously throughout the day. Every day of the year. And measures both the diffuse and indirect components of irradiance. So that kind of gives us some more insight into how the irradiance distribution is. And then there's the ARM program. And NOAA has a station up in Barrow. So these two stations, you know, give us opportunity to kind of benchmark these model data sets that, for example, that the NSRDB, the National Laboratory of the Rockies has come out with a data set recently. So these model data sets will cover the entire state now. But we need to understand how good they actually are. And they're we need the ground measurements that, you know ACEP for example is delivering. And it's really good quality from what I've seen.

00;02;45;00 - 00;02;51;15 [Amanda Byrd] The reasons that we care about solar irradiance is mostly just for energy production.

00;02;51;15 - 00;03;33;17 [Adam Jensen] Yeah. I mean, certainly we also care about it from a climate perspective. And, you know, this is a lot of what, you know, of course, radiation is what's, you know, driving the Earth's energy balance. And when we look up at Barrow for example, we can see that there's some particularly cloud patterns that are seasonal. So you'll see direct irradiance in 1st March and then again in June. But the fall will be extremely cloudy compared to the spring for example. And so that's something that we need measurements for. But yes, or for solar energy applications, we need to have these time series so that we can, you know, make good decisions in terms of can we does it make sense to invest in solar, and how much, you know, diesel fuel can we offset by installing solar, for example.

00;03;33;17 - 00;04;18;20 [Amanda Byrd] When I think of Greenland, I don't exactly first think of solar energy, you know, and the same I guess goes for Alaska, right? You know, whenever you have polar nights, right, people are like, oh, there's no sun. And for some periods of the year there isn't. But again, we have rural small communities where you need to ship in fuel. So that means that you have extremely high fuel prices. So alternative solutions can be more expensive in for example, the Lower 48 and still make great sense. And the solar resource is not as bad as people think it is. The solar resource in Greenland, for example, is almost the same from mainland Denmark, where I'm from. It's distributed differently because, you know, that's higher seasonal differences, but it's not as bad. And the same goes for Alaska. That is, in many places, actually a quite good solar resource.

00;04;18;20 - 00;04;24;29 [Amanda Byrd] While you were here, you also embarked on a crazy adventure.

00;04;24;29 - 00;05;12;23 [Adam Jensen] Yes. Crazy is an understatement, I think. Yeah. So I've long had a dream of participating in what's called the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. Which is an adventure race, but very informal, very Alaskan. You are essentially given a two coordinates point A, point B, so you start out, and you have to get to point B on your own, without any kind of supply, and you can't cross any roads and you can't use any motorized transport. So this year was from Kenai Lake up to the Glenn Highway, some 120 miles. But I'm fairly confident that not a single person that I've heard of has finished this year. Out of the 30 participants, just because it's it's very treacherous terrain and the ¾Ã¾ÃÈÈÊÓƵ was horrible and a storm came in. But yeah, it was a magnificent experience, kind of to see the the true Alaskan wilderness.

00;05;12;23 - 00;05;16;28 [Amanda Byrd] Adam Jensen is an associate professor from the Technical University of Denmark, and I'm Amanda Byrd chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep and follow us on social media.