Alaska News

Hydropower

A good-sized hydropower project at Chakachamna Lake about 85 miles west of Anchorage looks promising as a major source of renewable energy that can help hold down electricity costs in the Railbelt for decades.

The proposed project would generate enough power to provide electricity to nearly a third of the homes from Fairbanks to Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula -- enough to take the edge off worries that cheap, once-abundant supplies of natural gas from Cook Inlet are drying up.

It's worth a serious look -- especially compared with more costly or most environmentally disruptive alternatives, like using coal, or building a more massive hydro project on the Susitna River.

The Chakachamna project is estimated to cost $1.75 billion. That would be a big investment, but as with all hydro projects, a big up-front investment buys a source of electricity that runs for decades, with fuel costs that are essentially zero. The price of electricity from the project will depend on whether the state contributes construction funds. The more the state contributes, the less the electricity will cost. Power from the state-financed Bradley Lake hydro project, near Homer, wholesales for around 4.4 cents a kilowatt hour compared to about 7.5 cents for electricity from natural gas generators.

Chakachamna was among 33 alternative energy projects that just won a small but encouraging grant from the Denali Commission and the Alaska Energy Authority.

The project was first brought up in the 1980s, but big-dreaming community leaders and politicians at the time favored a huge and ultimately unrealistic hydro project on the Susitna River. TDX Power recently revived Chakachamna Lake, simplified it, and lessened one of the major concerns with the early version -- that it could hurt salmon runs.

The latest proposal, instead of creating a dam, calls for building a 12-mile long tunnel to funnel water from the mountains to a power plant near sea level. The idea is that the level of the lake wouldn't have to be raised behind a dam that would block salmon from swimming upstream.

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It's not clear whether building Chakachamna would hurt the economic prospects for a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope to Southcentral. To make that gas pipeline economically feasible, it needs some big industrial customers to buy a lot of gas -- such as Railbelt electric utilities, which burn the gas to generate most of their power. Hydropower would mean cheaper electricity in the long run, but the gas pipeline will mean cheaper heating fuel in the long run.

Which is the better option? Could the region support both projects? Those questions require speedy attention from the state. Other questions -- such as the impact on fish, risks from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- will need to be addressed too.

Chakachamna is everything the Susitna mega- hydro project wasn't. It is a relatively modest, affordable project with environmental impacts that, at least at this very preliminary stage, appear to manageable. Having the Chakachamna project in the mix of possibilities is an exciting prospect for Alaska's energy future.

BOTTOM LINE: This $1.75 billion project is a potentially attractive option that the state should help investigate.

A great leap

On a June morning in 1937, my father, Fabian, crawled out of his sleeping bag in the brush at the edge of Fairbanks. He was 20 and had just spent his first night in Interior Alaska. The trip from Minneapolis lasted a week.

I have often wondered what he thought as he folded up his bag. Was he anxious? A certain amount of courage was required to head north in 1937.

Fabian's grandfather and great-grandfather needed courage, too, more than a half century earlier when they left Denmark for the United States.

My family tree is filled with Irish names -- Carey, Sullivan, O'Sullivan, O'Keefe -- but there's also a Larsen branch. The Larsens were farmers in the old country and farmers in the new, at Ortonville, Minn., along the South Dakota border.

A popular history of Minnesota says Ortonville was laid out by C.K. Orton who "established a trading post with the Sioux Indians. As the settlers filtered into the country and took up homesteads, Ortonville began to flourish. ..."

The Larsens traveled by steamer from Copenhagen or Hamburg. I don't know where they landed. If they sailed from Hamburg perhaps they heard the ship's band play -- as ship's bands did in Hamburg -- "Must I Then, Must I Then, Leave My Native Town." Yes, they must -- Danish farmers struggled from year to year. Minnesota, they heard, would be better.

Yet what did the Larsens think the first morning they woke up in Ortonville? They had been traveling for days. They didn't speak the language. Their knowledge of American geography was so rudimentary it would be fair to say they didn't know where they were. It would be understandable if at day's end they watched the sun set over South Dakota and asked "What have I done?"

Nevertheless, they got up the next morning and commenced working, becoming in a generation middle-class citizens -- and city people, residents of Minneapolis.

My friend Jerome Lardy, who accompanied me to Ortonville a few years ago, liked to say "Michael, we have no idea where we are going in this universe. At least we'd like to know where we came from."

I came from people who leapt into the unknown -- and landed safely. My gratitude is no bookend to their courage. But gratitude is what I have to offer. I would not be here if they had not leapt.

-- Michael Carey

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