Time to get serious about alternate energy

Someday someone might find more gas in the Cook Inlet region or bring gas from the North Slope. I don't see anyone out there drilling in the Inlet, though, and it will be years before gas can be piped from the Slope. That could cost as much as imported LNG too.

We have before us, however, a wind-power project on Fire Island in Cook Inlet just offshore from Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. It could be in construction next summer and supply enough electricity to push off the import of LNG for two to three years. Electricity supplied from wind to the electric utilities lets them reduce their use of natural gas, which stretches out supplies.

Wind power wouldn't be really cheap, but Cook Inlet Region Inc., or CIRI, which is developing the project, says it will probably cost about what natural gas power will cost by the time the 33 wind turbines planned for the island begin turning in late 2012. It also would give the power utilities a chance to resolve the technical glitches of absorbing wind into the regional grid so that the bugs are worked out when other wind projects are built, like one planned by Golden Valley Electric Association near Healy.

Negotiations between CIRI and four Railbelt utilities on power-purchase contracts are under way. CIRI hopes to get contracts signed by November and enough construction done by the end of the year to qualify for $44 million in a federal renewable energy grant. The grant would reduce the amount needed to finance, and the cost of the power sold to utilities. CIRI has about $7 million of its own money in the project and has started construction. The company will contribute about a third of what's needed to finance the project, or about $40 million.

POSSIBLE GLITCHES

All this sounds good, but are there problems? Of course there are, as in any new endeavor.

For the utilities, incorporating variable wind power into a relatively small grid (by national standards) poses technical challenges and risks of system upsets, or what we consumers call outages. We don't want those, particularly in winter.

The problem is that sometimes the wind blows and sometimes it doesn't, so the power output varies. The grid, however, is set up to take constant amounts of power generated with gas on the south end and coal and oil on the north end, in the Interior. Integrating the variable and constant power is an engineering problem that is serious, but it's also an issue that other utilities buying wind have solved.

Because Fire Island will provide only about 3 percent of the electricity used by the grid, I don't understand why there's a big problem in integrating this, but apparently there is. I'm sure the smart people we hire to run our utilities will figure it out.

There are also concerns, no doubt, about costs and whether there will be overruns in construction. CIRI has secured very attractive bids for Fire Island, but there's always a worry about glitches, change orders and other unexpected things that run up the cost.

There may also be institutional resistance, perhaps ingrained in the culture of the utility management, to having independent power producers in the Railbelt.

Utility people believe they do a pretty good job in supplying power, and they do. Are they wary of new guys on the block? Of course they are. Reliability in supplying power is serious stuff in northern climates, so this concern is understandable. Track record is pretty important.

GAS STORAGE, HYDRO

All that said, let's not quibble too much when it's time to make a big decision.

Do we believe ourselves when we talk about diversifying our sources of power, particularly with renewable energy (the wind is free, remember)? Do we really want to reduce the risk of a serious gas supply shortage? If we answer yes to these, we need to bite the bullet and buy into wind power.

We need to do other things too, like support the plan by Enstar Natural Gas Co. to build natural gas storage, which will ease the danger of a midwinter supply problem. We'd better get serious about hydro too. That's longer-range, but it needs to be part of the solution.

There are risks in these things, sure. But just imagine the cost if we just do nothing. Think of turning on your gas furnace and there's no gas, and the lights go dim. This isn't far-fetched. It could really happen.

It doesn't have to, though.

Time to face facts and do something about the regional energy problems.

Tim Bradner writes for an Alaska economic reporting service. He also consults for private clients and writes for business publications. His opinion column appears every month in the Anchorage Daily News.