The U.S. border crossing near Tok is slated to be rebuilt. Planners of the reconstruction said it’s not only a chance to update the facilities, but also make the new buildings significantly more environmentally friendly. They hope it will reduce the buildings’ fossil fuel usage by about 60 percent.
“We have an opportunity now to greatly decrease the energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions of the buildings themselves,” said Aaron Evanson, capital project manager with Region 10 of the General Services Administration, which oversees border crossings.
The Alcan border crossing is the only year-round port of entry between the Yukon and Alaska. It was constructed in 1972, and Evanson said it needs to be replaced due to age and wear from hard weather conditions.
Anytime the federal agency rebuilds one of its buildings, they have to meet standards of sustainability. The Alcan border crossing proved to be a particularly difficult place to avoid fossil fuel use, Evanson said.
One of the biggest challenges: the remoteness of the area. The border crossing has several buildings, including housing for people who work there. The buildings are completely off-grid, and use diesel generators to produce electricity on-site. Evanson and his team wanted a way to replace some of that diesel usage with something else, but it was difficult to figure out how.
“The most surprising part of this was how limited our natural resources are at the Alcan,” Evanson said. “The wind patterns are very slow on the Interior, there’s no raging rivers that we can tap into for hydroelectric power. Being in such a beautiful, environmentally-diverse area, we thought there’d be a lot more capacity to look at other avenues for power generation, but there’s not.”
The project will use other tools to lower diesel use. The buildings will use super insulation which reduces the amount of energy needed to heat the buildings in the winter. They will also install solar panels, which will almost entirely eliminate needing to use the generators during the summer.
“We have the ability to incorporate other aspects of the environment itself,” Evanson said. “Being in Alaska and being at such a high latitude, we’re going to have a lot of sun during the summertime, the sun barely goes down sometimes. So that photovoltaic system will be able to run almost continuously.”
Since the area can get down to negative-60 degrees in the winter, Evanson and his team are also looking at other ways to reduce the energy it takes to heat the buildings, including the possibility of geothermal heat pumps.
“The most bang for your buck on any of this is reducing the amount of cooling and heating necessity in a building, and especially when you take that to an entire campus that gets magnified and it becomes very impactful,” Evanson said.
The buildings will be built to Passive Housing Standard, which is a certification that means a building is very energy efficient. For the certification, a building must follow certain criteria about space heating and cooling, airtightness and energy demand. The Alcan Border Crossing project is the first time that GSA has used Passive Housing Standard in any of their buildings.
Construction will be done in phases so that the crossing will not have to close during the rebuild. Evanson’s team is hoping to finish the design phase by the end of the year, and plans to finish construction by January 2029. The estimated budget for the project is between $170 million to $190 million.
Anisa Vietze is Alaska Public Media's 2024 summer reporting fellow. Reach her at avietze@alaskapublic.org.
