Instead of a seat in the cockpit, he's occupying a chair in the corner office at Matanuska Electric Association and plans to pilot the utility toward a new future.
He's assigned himself a mission completion date too. He hopes to secure a future power supply and work out an agreement to cooperate with other utilities along the Railbelt between Homer and Fairbanks in the next three to five years.
MEA's long-term contract to buy power generated by Anchorage-based Chugach Electric ends in 2014. Utility leaders are working to start building a natural gas-fired power plant at Eklutna to supply most of the utility's future power needs but haven't picked a builder yet. Until the plant is built, MEA may have to continue buying power from other Railbelt utilities to resell to its customers.
A cooperative agreement among Railbelt utilities to share new capital costs might affect those plans. An agreement among those utilities has been discussed in one form or another for decades. But with state leaders pushing for cooperation among the locally controlled utilities, Griffith says he thinks an agreement is inevitable.
As someone who has been involved in the politics of electrical cooperatives for nearly 20 years, Griffith is in a position to know what he's talking about.
Griffith is well-versed in utility politics, but his first career was in the cockpit. He flew 275 missions in F4 Phantoms during three tours in Vietnam and then served as test pilot and commander for F-15 jets. By age 35 he was a full colonel and went to work in the Pentagon before moving to Alaska to be the wing commander at Elmendorf Air Force Base.
It was at Elmendorf that Griffith got his start running power plants. The base controlled 10 to 15 power plants across the state when he was commander. But his interest in electrical utilities really took off when he retired from the Air Force.
This month, the MEA board unanimously named Griffith, 68, general manager after his seven-month stint as interim head of the utility after the firing of Wayne Carmony. Griffith talked about his history and his plans for how soon MEA will have a new power plant.
Q. Your background includes an illustrious Air Force career. How did you jump from that to electrical utilities?
A. You leave the Air Force and go work for five years for the Anchorage Municipal Assembly as their budget analyst. That really is where I learned my community. ... After working for the Assembly for about five years, Dave Highers, the then-general manager at Chugach, asked me to be his CFO (chief financial officer). I spent the next 13 years as CFO, head of planning and eventually I took over the generation side of the company. Then in the early 2000s they asked me to be the CEO (chief executive officer).
Since then I was in energy consulting, working with ANGDA (Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority) and others on power plant issues, fuel-supply issues, gas fields. During that period this board came to me and asked me, "Would you consider being an interim?" I thought long and hard about it. This is not an easy job. The history of this entity in particular was fraught with difficulties in the past.
Q. Politics is always an issue at electrical cooperatives. You were pushed out of Chugach by a new board a few years ago; Carmony was pushed out by the new board here. What kind of body armor are you wearing?
A. You write a contract and you do a reasonable deal with them and then you let the chips fall where they will. This is the same deal I worked with Chugach.
I'm an old enough guy, I could probably retire tomorrow and be OK. I'm not doing this to get rich or to have a new career. I'm doing it because I think it's the right thing to do and I believe I have the knowledge and the ability to do it.
Q. Do you have a golden parachute, even if you don't have to use it?
A. We're working on a contract. I do not have a golden parachute. I asked them for six months severance if they give me the boot to leave. They may not grant that. If I get it, I'm fortunate -- that's what I had leaving Chugach.
Q. You said you don't want this job forever but you need three to five years to get MEA on stable ground. What decisions need to be made in that time?
A. The biggest is future power supply. What are we going to do, come Dec. 31, 2014 (when MEA's contract to buy power from Chugach Electric ends)? Are the lights going to go out? That's not an option.
We have to find some kind of joint activity we're going to have in the Railbelt. We've got to figure out how the state is going to play into that.
The other issues are manning up to the level we ought to be. For years, MEA has been growing the membership and cutting people. We haven't trained anybody in years. We're down to 14 linemen and are hiring two more. We're the same size as West Virginia and we cover the whole system with 14 linemen. It's phenomenal that it works as well as it does.
Q. Regarding MEA's future power supply, what's really on the table? Do you think it's going to involve purchasing power?
A. That's the only way to make it work together. I can't envision us being able to get the financing or the gas supply to be able to do it all independently, just to sever all connections and go do it ourselves.
First we've got to transition. It takes about a year to transition to new machinery. If we have to build a new plant, it will take it at least the time we have (before 2014) to build it. And that's a very optimistic schedule.
We will end up with some mix of a transition power supply and then we'll ramp our own up slowly so we don't, first, have terrible rate shock and, second, exceed our capacity to finance these things.
Q. Is there an upper limit to what you can finance?
A. If you could get the RCA (Regulatory Commission of Alaska) to agree and you were willing to accept running rates up a little bit, you could probably kluge together $250 million to $300 million in financing. But that's going to raise the rates.
Much above that is probably not feasible. That's the problem with the whole Railbelt today. Collectively, we probably can't raise more than $1.5 billion or so, all of us. And the requirement, if you look out 10 years in the future, is about $10 billion. So we only need about $8 billion. That's where the state comes in.
Find Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call 352-6709.
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