**Title**: Energy in the North - Phil Wight
**Date**: July 22, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Phil Wight

00:00:00:11 - 00:00:09:27 [Phil Wight] I think driving up the Alcan, there are actually more places to refuel your vehicle with electricity than there are places to refuel your vehicle with diesel or petrol.

00:00:09:27 - 00:00:41:19 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Phil Wight a UAF associate professor of history and Arctic Northern Studies. A couple of years ago, I was at K’eisugi Ken Campground with a friend, and I saw a Tesla with Minnesota number plates. I did a double take. How on earth did an electric vehicle get from Minnesota to Alaska? I spoke to the owners and they asked me if I knew Phil Wight. Of course I do. So how on earth did a electric vehicle get from Minnesota to Alaska?

00:00:41:19 - 00:04:11:11 [Phil Wight] Yeah. Great question. And you know this this is a big state, but it will always be a small world. I became connected with these folks because I was interested in electric vehicles, and my family was growing, and we needed to procure another vehicle. And this was back in 2022. So I decided to buy a very reasonably priced Chevy Bolt. And I found it in the Midwest and it begged this question. Can you drive an EV from Ohio to Alaska? And the answer is yes you can. And there were pioneering folks who had come before me and people like Tim Treuer and, you know, a few different folks in Teslas who had made the journey in the past. So I knew it was possible. I drove up with my dad, had a fascinating adventure and journey, and learned a lot, and there was a little bit of hardship, but mostly fun moments. And, you know, it was a real experience to understand the nature of this, emerging network. Right. The EV charging network. And there was a bunch of lessons that came out of this. One is, I think, driving up the Alcan, there actually more places to refuel your vehicle with electricity than there are places to refuel your vehicle with diesel or petrol. And the reason for that is all of these RV parks, there are RV parks spread along there, and they're each their own little microgrid. And yes, they're burning diesel fuel for electricity, but that enables you to recharge your vehicle in a way where you can't just pull into one of these parks with a normal vehicle and expect that you're going to get fuel. So it was it was a fascinating journey. And as a historian, I wondered about, you know, in the past, when else has electricity helped to move people or things? Because we think about EVs in this recent chapter, but they're really the continuation of a century long history of electric mobility. And as a historian, I was blown away to go back in this history in, in 1913, in both Fairbanks and Juneau. We had electric trains moving people and or commodities in Juneau. It was an electrified mining locomotives at the at the Gastineau Mining Company that were moving ore from deep underground because again, you can't you know, you couldn't have a steam engine down there. You'd all die if you did that underground. So you needed electricity to enable you to extract the ore. Here in Fairbanks, we actually we you know, we didn't have electric locomotives in the same kind of way where they're run off an overhead line. What we had are two different battery electric speeders. They were called at the time. One went between Fairbanks and Chatanika, and they would only use this in the summer because they had very crude batteries back then that did not perform very well in the winter. And then actually in the 1920s, we had an all electric car that would deliver. It would take students from downtown Fairbanks to campus and back. So it's pretty amazing. So so, you know, electrification is not a new thing. Electric mobility is not a new thing. It's it's really a process. And this also applies to automobiles as well. Right. We can we can go back to the original electric starter, which made it much easier to operate internal combustion engine vehicles. And that in some way is the predecessor to the modern hybrid vehicle. Because cars have just been becoming increasingly electrified over time. Not to mention the fact that we also had, you know, at the turn of the century in New York City, you know, a third of the cars were electric, a third were gasoline, and the other third, remarkably, were steam powered automobiles.

00:04:11:11 - 00:04:25:18 [Amanda Byrd] Phil Wight is an associate professor of history and Arctic Northern studies at UAF. 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.