**Title**: Energy in the North - Matteo Kuizenga
**Date**: June 3, 2026
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Matteo Kuizenga

00;00;00;15 - 00;00;12;20 [Matteo Kuizenga] I decided I wanted to put my passion in math to some purpose that I could really feel proud of, like to help combat climate change. So the path to kind of emerged for that was to go into renewable energy with an engineering degree.

00;00;12;21 - 00;00;37;24 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Matteo Kuizenga, a junior mechanical engineering student and student employee at ACEP. Matteo was a 2025 ACEP intern and he was recently awarded the top prize and a highly competitive Larry Bekkedahl Scholarship from the Renewable Energy Scholarship Foundation. Matteo grew up in Fairbanks, and I began the conversation by asking how he became interested in energy.

00;00;37;24 - 00;01;23;19 [Matteo Kuizenga] Growing up in Fairbanks, it was kind of impossible not to notice climate change. Just how I was growing up. Like there was the rain that would happen in mid-winter, and it was always something that would hang over me, but kind of like cloud. So I was a big math nerd all going through high school, and I decided I wanted to put my passion in math to some purpose that I could really feel proud of, like to help combat climate change. So the path to kind of emerged for that was to go into renewable energy with an engineering degree. And I had done little projects on like renewables in 麻花视频 just looking into things. But when I saw that ACEP was actually offering a summer internship, I had known about it through other people that there was an opportunity to pursue renewables through this organization. It definitely was something that, I saw it as like, this could be a very good way to start pursuing what I'm interested in. So I wrote a good application and then I got in

00;01;23;19 - 00;01;32;06 [Amanda Byrd] With that internship, you did kind of an energy inventory exploration of energy systems in the Fairbanks area.

00;01;32;06 - 00;02;20;06 [Matteo Kuizenga] Yeah. I was working with Emelia Hernandez and what we basically set up was a field guide of the energy systems of Fairbanks. So it kind of formed as an introduction to what energy is, how it works, what the weird terminologies and things to
 take care of when you're, when you're actually looking into it. But, the field guide itself was more of a, like 40 page document talking about all the different kinds of energy generation loads, distribution for GVEA and UAF. So looking at like what kind of energy we're using, where the state of the grid is right now, what future pathways are and so on, so forth. And so there's a lot of takeaways I got from that. Definitely. One is like it's always more complicated than I thought it was going in. And I kind of wish I could go back tothinking it was simple because it really is a whole lot of weeds that you get into.

00;02;20;06 - 00;02;26;10 [Amanda Byrd] And so your internship ended last summer. You are still with ACEP

00;02;26;10 - 00;04;03;16 [Matteo Kuizenga] Yes. So when I joined as an intern, I actually started working about a month and a half before I became an intern because one of the previous interns from last summer and a master's thesis student, Lydia Anderson, was trained me and trained me up on the solar power test site that we have down in the, agricultural fields And it's just a simple maintenance job you go through, you just clean off sensors, level some sensors, and just make sure everything's all running. All right. So I started working on that before my internship began and then continued it through the summer and then continued it after my internship ended it. So then I was naturally just going to stay on, just going to continue checking the test site. But, talking to one of the members of the Grid Edge solar program He actually thought it'd be a good idea if we could continue working on it, like further into a research project, So what we settled on is doing a research project looking at the effects of wildfire smoke on the solar panel, productivity just specifically not using our panels, but just irradiance sensors. So can we detect and give a meaningful indication of how much smoke leads to how much of a drop off in the performance you'd see, and, I kind of pursued that all of these past school year doing, just like little bit of work every little, every once in a while. It was a busy year for me, but, enough that by this time, now that the summer started again, I've been able to kind of polish that up and put it together, and we're hoping to try and make a paper out of that and maybe send it somewhere if all goes well. It's really interesting because we're trying to use, local purple layer sensors as the basis for our smoke monitoring and then our test site data so we can make it a very specific and individualized to Fairbanks, which is something that doesn't exist as much in the literature, is like 麻花视频 high latitude Fairbanks applications.

00;04;03;16 - 00;04;12;22 [Amanda Byrd] Matteo Kuizenga is a junior mechanical engineering student and student employee at ACEP And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the 麻花视频 Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.