The federal Department of Agriculture is offering grants to help people who live and work in Alaska’s rural areas reduce their energy costs. The program is available to rural small businesses, cooperatives and agricultural producers.

The federal Bureau of Land Management is planning to create a recreation management area around the Castner Glacier, in the eastern Alaska Range near Black Rapids. The BLM proposed the plan largely to deal with the increasing number of visitors who come to see the glacier’s ice cave.

Golden Valley Electric Association’s board of directors is expressing support for legislation that would require Alaska utilities to use more renewable-energy sources like wind and solar to generate power. But board members also raised concerns about provisions in the measure that could discourage utilities from using more renewables.

The Bureau of Land Management is holding meetings in three eastern Interior communities over the next several days to get public feedback on a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed removal of federal land use restrictions on up to 28 million acres around Alaska, including some in the Interior.

A new program will help Alaska nonprofits with their heating and electricity bills, so the groups can focus their budgets on providing services to disadvantaged people.

Golden Valley Electric Association’s newly hired chief operating officer is wrestling with several challenges laid out in the co-op’s Strategic Generation Plan, including setting a shut-down date for the Healy 2 power plant and finding alternative sources to replace its generation.

The Army Corps of Engineers is looking at the feasibility of burying non-radioactive materials removed from Fort Greely’s old nuclear power plant at the Delta Junction landfill. The review is part of the final phase of preparation for dismantling the plant that was shut down 50 years ago.

Members of the state’s Energy Security Task Force ran into a buzzsaw of criticism during a public hearing Tuesday on Governor Mike Dunleavy’s plan that supports more natural gas development and mandates cutting the cost of electricity to 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma joined a group of Alaska Natives, artists and environmental activists last month in Fairbanks for a performance that expresses Indigenous peoples’ grief over the shrinking population of salmon and other impacts of climate change on the far north.

Federal mine-safety regulators have cited the owners of the Red Dog mine for 13 violations that agency inspectors found at the mine in August. But agency officials say Teck Alaska has addressed the violations at the zinc mine near Kotzebue.