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Keeping the Railbelt power flowing Main Alaska population centers face challenges with electricity delivery amid tightening gas supplies and an aging infrastructure Alan Bailey Petroleum News
The average shopper walking through an Anchorage mall probably takes for granted the flow of electrons that power shop lights, keep the heating system working and enable that quick cell phone call to home. But with many of those electrons originating from power stations burning a continuous flow of natural gas from the aging Cook Inlet gas fields, and with the electrons traveling from power stations to power demand centers through a fragile power transmission network, much of it built many decades ago, staff in the region’s electric utilities worry about the reliability of those vital power supplies.
Winter concern On Oct. 20 Joe Griffith, president of the Alaska Railbelt Cooperative Transmission and Electric Co., otherwise known as ARCTEC, described to the Alaska Senate Resources Committee the steps that the utilities are taking to ensure power supply reliability.
The bulk of the power used in the Alaska Railbelt grid, stretching from Homer in the south, through Anchorage to Fairbanks in the north, comes from gas-fired power stations. But with most of the gas flowing from gas fields that are decades old, gas and power utilities have struggled in recent years to ensure an adequate flow of utility gas to meet peak winter demand. In the event of a serious gas shortfall, the power utilities would have to protect the pressure in gas distribution pipelines by instituting a series of rolling blackouts to reduce gas usage — the utilities have already worked out a plan for how to allocate the blackouts among themselves, Griffith said.
Griffith expressed particular concern about the coming winter, saying that the mothballing of a liquefied natural gas facility on the Kenai Peninsula will lead to less robust gas supplies during periods of peak winter demand, while a new gas storage facility being built on the peninsula by Cook Inlet Natural Gas Storage Alaska will not come on line until the spring of 2012.
“Every one of us believes that this will be the most difficult year to face,” Griffith told the lawmakers.
Griffith said that, although there are proposals for delivering North Slope gas to Southcentral Alaska by pipeline, a pipeline cannot be built in time to solve the immediate gas shortage problem. New gas development in the Cook Inlet basin is the least expensive energy option and should be encouraged through appropriate incentives and rapid permitting, he said. However, the import of liquefied natural gas into Southcentral Alaska, to bolster local gas supplies, appears to be inevitable at some point, he said.
“Unfortunately I don’t see any way of getting out of importing LNG,” Griffith said.
Generation & transmission co-op In December 2010 five of the six Railbelt electric utilities formed ARCTEC as a power generation and transmission cooperative to pool their resources, to achieve economies of scale for grid operations and to provide a vehicle for the funding of grid upgrades. Founding members were Chugach Electric Association, Matanuska Electric Association, Homer Electric Association, Seward Electric and Golden Valley Electric Association.
And the cooperative has what it terms the “Railbelt Energy Plan,” derived from an earlier plan developed by the Alaska Energy Authority and designed to address a number of issues that the Alaska Railbelt power grid faces, Griffith explained.
Within the power generation components of this plan, Chugach Electric Association, in partnership with Anchorage utility Municipal Light & Power, is building the Southcentral Power Project, a state-of-the-art, high-efficiency gas-fired power station in Anchorage. At the same time, Matanuska Electric Association, or MEA, is pushing ahead with a plan to build a new power station at Eklutna, at the base of the Chugach Mountains to the north of Anchorage. MEA plans to run the Eklutna power station on natural gas but the plant will also be able to accept other fuels, thus enabling the use of diesel fuel or perhaps propane in the event of a gas shortage.
Hydropower Hydropower, especially from the Bradley Lake power plant in the southern Kenai Peninsula, makes a significant contribution to the Railbelt power generation capacity. One component of the Railbelt Energy Plan is an upgrade to the Bradley Lake facility, adding 30,000 megawatt hours to the capacity of that plant through the diversion of an additional creek into the facility’s water supply, Griffith said.
And, looking further into the future, the Alaska Energy Authority is moving ahead with a plan to build a major hydropower plant at Watana on the Susitna River, 125 miles or so upstream of the town of Talkeetna. ARCTEC supports this project and the Alaska Energy Authority has just asked the utilities for information about how much power they are likely to need from the plant, Griffith said.
From the perspective of wind power, Chugach Electric Association has recently agreed to buy power from Cook Inlet Region Inc.’s Fire Island wind farm, offshore Anchorage, with that wind power purchase agreement now before the Regulatory Commission of Alaska for approval. Matanuska Electric Association has also agreed to take 15 percent of the power from Fire Island but has yet to finalize a price agreement for the power — the price looks like being somewhere in the range $90 to $95 per megawatt hour, Griffith said.
Fairbanks utility Golden Valley Electric Association is in the process of building another wind farm at Eva Creek near Healy, on the north side of the Alaska Range.
And on another front, Ormat Technologies is proceeding with a geothermal power project on the flanks of Mount Spurr, an active volcano to the west of Anchorage.
$56 million In the last legislative session, the Alaska Legislature appropriated $56 million for upgrades to the Railbelt power infrastructure, with much of that money going into upgrades of aging power transmission lines. One series of transmission interties connects Fairbanks to a coal-fired power station at Healy, and hence to the Matanuska and Susitna valleys and Anchorage. Another intertie system connects Bradley Lake with Nikiski and Quartz Creek on the Kenai Peninsula, with this system also connecting through to Anchorage.
Those are the highways that carry the power to our people, Griffith said.
“It’s a weak system … but it’s so important,” he said.
Coordinating the operation of the complete transmission grid can be a major headache, with the potential for a major power outage if things go awry.
“The last big one we had in 1989 took five days to put … back together, so it’s no small undertaking to coordinate that,” Griffith said.
The utilities operate the transmission network under the terms of a joint Alaska intertie agreement. However, a new Intertie Management Committee is being formed to oversee intertie operations — this committee will replace the committee that used to operate the intertie north from the Matanuska and Susitna valleys, Griffith said.
“We think we will have that in place within 60 days,” he said.
New requests And ARCTEC anticipates a number of further intertie upgrades as part of a package of legislative requests that the cooperative is preparing for the upcoming legislative session.
Some of the current state funding is also going into work on the pipeline system that carries natural gas under Cook Inlet. The system, known as the Cook Inlet Gas Gathering System, is being modified to allow gas to flow east to west under the inlet, rather than just west to east as at present. Bidirectional flow in the line will enable greater flexibility in transporting gas to locations such as Chugach Electric Association’s Beluga power station on the west side of the inlet.
Looking more broadly at energy issues along the Alaska Railbelt, Griffith commented on the difficult energy cost situation in Fairbanks, a city with limited access to natural gas supplies in the form of trucked-in LNG. The high cost of fuel oil for heating homes drives people to use firewood, a cheaper fuel option, while the burning of wood is leading to air quality problems. Energy cost issues in Fairbanks could place at risk some of the federal installations that are so important to the Alaska economy, Griffith said.
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