Randy Bezdek nudged a birch log into one of his pizza ovens, and bright flames briefly lit up the inside. Bezdek, the owner of a popular Fairbanks pizza restaurant called The Hungry Robot, said his ovens eat up to 60 cords a year to keep up with orders.
“You can feel that intense heat coming off in there,” he said. “People are always like, ‘I taste the smokiness.’ No, you taste the heat.”
Bezdek said those wood-fired ovens are part of what makes his pizza special — so much so, that they inspired the restaurant’s name.
“The ovens, to me, look like robot heads,” Bezdek said. “They're always hungry. We feed them wood all day long, and occasionally they'll eat a pizza.”
But keeping those robot heads fed is about to get a lot harder. The region's largest firewood supplier is closing, leaving thousands of customers scrambling before winter.
“If we can't find alternative sources of wood, then we will have to modify the core of the business,” Bezdek said.
A local company called Aurora Energy Solutions has been the Interior’s main dryer and supplier of firewood since 2020. It announced in mid-July that it will wind down operations by the end of this year.
For many of the company’s customers, that firewood isn’t just a luxury — or fuel for making delicious pizzas. Thousands of households burn that wood to keep warm through the Interior’s brutal winters.
It’s not as simple as just cutting your own supply
Most firewood users will tell you that you can’t burn just any old wood. Burning undried, or “green” wood is dirty, dangerous, and inefficient. And now, there’s hardly enough time before winter to build up a new supply. It can take up to two years to properly dry wood for burning.
Unless you have an industrial kiln.
Aurora Energy Solutions, a sister company of the Usibelli Coal Mine, had a unique system and the right equipment for drying large amounts of firewood. Usibelli sold coal to a Fairbanks power plant, which sold steam to Aurora Energy to dry the wood.
Susan Shopper, Aurora Energy Solutions’ outgoing general manager, called it an innovative idea that ultimately wasn’t profitable.
“I want people to understand that the cost to make this isn't the cost of the logs,” she said. “It's harvesting them and trucking them, and then the labor to cut and split and then dry. I wish we could have had a chance to raise the price one more time, but this is what the company decided, and so this is where we are.”
All of the company’s ten employees, including Shopper, are losing their jobs by the end of the month. Meanwhile, she said the phones are ringing off the hook, with many customers angry or in tears.
“I suspect our wood drops will be very tense as the fall approaches and more people become desperate,” Shopper said.
It’s not as simple as swapping out your stove, either
Jomo Stewart is the president and CEO of the Fairbanks Energy Development Corporation, a nonprofit that promotes business growth in the Interior. He said that when you live in one of the coldest, darkest cities on the planet, the cost and availability of energy is of the highest importance.
“A lot of people have come to rely on this readily usable, kiln-dried wood,” Stewart said. “I just don't know how we're going to thread that needle.”
He said when Aurora Energy Solutions came on the scene several years ago, many locals began relying on the company instead of smaller firewood sellers.
For many of those customers, upgrading their business or home with an electric or natural gas heating system is far too expensive. Though federal air quality subsidies have helped, Stewart said they’re not making a huge dent in the cost anymore.
“The cost of changing out your furnace entirely was somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000,” he said. “Flash forward to last year, that price is more like $20,000.”
The looming shortage imperils more than pizza
Back at The Hungry Robot, Randy Bezdek said replacing his ovens is almost unthinkable. He’d have to shut down the restaurant for a long time and retrofit the entire building, retrain his staff members and even recalibrate his pizza dough recipe.
But he said he’s most worried about his fellow community members who might get left out in the cold. He said every time he went to pick up his firewood order, he would see a line of people waiting to buy discounted bark and scraps of wood to heat their homes.
“Now they're not going to have access to that,” Bezdek said. “So, what are those people going to do? They were obviously not able to afford heating oil because they were buying junk wood to heat their house. That's a bigger deal than a pizza place.”
Aurora Energy Solutions hopes to sell off its assets to another business that can fill the gap. Until then, many Interior residents will be left wondering how they’ll stay warm this winter.