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Who will foot the transmission bill? Should the State of Alaska fund major upgrades to the Railbelt power transmission grid as part of the state’s infrastructure? Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The vexed question of what to do about the Alaska Railbelt’s aging power transmission network emerged again during a discussion at the Anchorage Mayor’s Energy Task Force on Oct. 2.
The network suffers from risks associated with single points of failure were an avalanche, for example, to damage some remote stretch of transmission line. And, with recent and continuing changes in power generation capacity around the grid, the grid configuration is no longer fully capable of flexibly delivering power from some generation plants to electricity demand centers. In particular, the Alaska Energy Authority has recently concluded that the grid layout artificially constrains the use of power from the Bradley Lake hydropower facility in the southern Kenai Peninsula — the authority has recommended nearly $1 billion in grid upgrades, including a new subsea high-voltage direct current transmission line from the northern Kenai Peninsula to the west side of Cook Inlet, to de-bottleneck power transmission and reduce the risk of a major transmission outage.
But who is to pay for upgrades to the grid?
A state role? Officials from Railbelt electric utilities told the task force that the utilities do not have the financial resources to foot the transmission upgrade bill. And there seemed some level of agreement between the officials and the members of the task force that the state should play a role in the funding, with the transmission network being a key component of the state infrastructure, somewhat analogous to the highway system and the ports.
Joe Griffith, general manager of Matanuska Electric Association and president of the Alaska Railbelt Cooperative Transmission and Electric Co., told the task force that he had met with Gov. Sean Parnell to discuss the problem.
“Frankly the utilities are out of slack,” Griffith said. “We’ve spent all our money on gas contracts and new (generation) plants and we don’t have any more latitude to take on additional debt.”
Griffith said that inefficiencies in the transmission network cost the utilities about $150 million per year and that the current network is inadequate to support a new major hydropower facility being planned for construction at Watana on the Susitna River.
“You know you’re not going to get a Watana if you don’t fix the transmission because no one will ever sign a sales agreement if you can’t deliver the energy and the capacity,” Griffith said.
Jim Posey, general manager of Anchorage utility Municipal Light & Power, said that the transmission problems could be resolved with adequate state funding.
“The transmission piece will probably come together if the state puts enough money on the table to make sure that we’re doing the robust $100 million to $120 million per year of connectivity improvements,” Posey said.
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