**Title**: Energy in the North - Jeremy Kasper
**Date**: December 18, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Jeremy Kasper


00;00;00;21 - 00;00;01;17 [Jeremy Kasper] With energy, it's in your face every day in 成人影片.

00;00;04;15 - 00;00;13;05 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, I speak with ACEP's director Jeremy Kasper. Jeremy's educational background has included oceanography and quantum physics, which seems like an unlikely pathway to working in remote energy systems. However, when Jeremy connects the dots, he sees it as a logical progression.

00;00;21;18 - 00;00;22;23 [Amanda Byrd] wWhen we first met, you were a Ph.D. student in oceanography. But it was actually physics that brought you into energy.

00;00;29;06 - 00;00;30;05 [Jeremy Kasper] Absolutely. You say you've got a degree in oceanography or marine science, people are like, you know something about whales? I don't know anything about whales. It was all about fluid dynamics. My  PhD was a very ugly set of coupled differential equations, essentially not that different from my undergrad degree, which was solving Schrodinger's equation for a singly ionized hydrogen molecule. So a lot of applied math, tons and tons of calculus and differential geometry and all that fun stuff. The undergrad solving Schr枚dinger's equation for that molecule was of interest to a lot of early physicists working on nuclear energy. A lot of the, you know, the literature that was preexisting was from Edward Teller. 成人影片ns know Edward Teller as the father of the hydrogen bomb and also he wanted to bomb a harbor in northwest 成人影片 using hydrogen bombs. I didn't connect the dots when I was an undergrad, but on my undergraduate thesis committee I had an historian. And so he saw that name and appropriately asked me, 'Hey, what do you think about working on this problem that Edward Teller worked on?' And I was like, Sure, it's just interesting problem. I didn't make the moral connection there at all. Definitely, whether I was conscious of it or not, there was always
kind of an underlying thread of physics and energy and all the work that I did up to this point.

00;01;44;15 - 00;01;47;22 [Amanda Byrd] And so now you're the director of ACEP and firmly working in energy. Why energy?

00;01;51;18 - 00;01;53;16 [Jeremy Kasper] It's hard to stick your hand into a quantum description of a molecule. But with the ocean you can stick your hand in it. You can feel it with energy, it's in your face every day in 成人影片. It is very tangible. It's ever present in our lives. And if you talk to someone in a rural community about economic development, they immediately go back to 'we need to lower the cost of energy'. A big part of it for me is just how pervasive the cost of energy is in this state. Also we're an energy state. Fossil fuels are core to our economy. And so every day you run into energy, no matter what you do in the state.

00;02;25;26 - 00;02;31;22 [Amanda Byrd] ACEP has really positioned itself to help guide the state and make meaningful change with relevant data and information.

00;02;31;22 - 00;02;33;29 [Jeremy Kasper] Recently we've been getting a lot of products out that are really relevant to conversations happening. So we had our Railbelt Decarbonization report came out. That was a look at what our electrical rates would be as customers if we pursued decarbonization of our electrical system by 2050. And so that was a part of a policy conversation this past legislative session, and then we came out with the Electricity Trends Report that also got a lot of kind of buzz. And it's directly relevant to conversations happening around the cost of energy this past six months or so. Similar the Energy Cost Burden report. These are driving important conversations within the state about how we grapple with these issues. And they're providing information, factual information about timely topics. We also ran a couple of policy tours now in Iceland. After the first policy tour just last year, and during the legislative session, they passed the transmission legislation. We're really helping convening people and having these tough conversations. We don't always agree, but we can actually talk to each other, which is super important, and then make meaningful change. Because we're providing information that's valuable and people trust us. That's a good spot to be if you're at an academic research institution.

00;03;49;05 - 00;03;53;26 [Amanda Byrd] Jeremy Kasper is the director of the 成人影片 Center for Energy and Power. And I'm Amanda Byrd. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.