$95 million for dam project

MAT-SU — The largest Valley earmark in the as-yet-unofficial state budget is $95 million to work on the Susitna-Watana Hydroelectric Project.

“That’s through the next fiscal year,” said dam spokeswoman Emily Ford. Next year at budget time, “It’ll require another annual appropriation.”

That $95 million will put 185 people in the field this summer to work on 58 studies in a constellation of academic disciplines including everything from multiple sub-disciplines of geology to biology and archaeology. To do those studies, the state’s Alaska Energy Authority, which is tasked with building and operating the dam, had to get permission from the federal government. Forty-four of those studies were approved in February and the remaining 14 on April 1.

“At the end of 2015, we hope to have this package to be able to submit to (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) that is our license application,” Ford said.

Two years later, she said, the agency will hopefully issue a license. The license could come sooner, but two years seems like the right amount of time.

“The first power is anticipated to come online in 2024,” Ford said.

The dam is expected to generate half of the power needed in Alaska’s Railbelt — generally defined as the area from Fairbanks to the Kenai Peninsula where the bulk of the state’s population lives.

It will be one of the largest dams constructed in the United States in decades and is expected to cost $4.5 billion, making it the state’s largest ever public project. It would also be among the tallest dams in the nation. It would also be the largest piece of fulfilling a mandate from the governor’s office to provide half of the state’s power with renewable sources of energy.

The land on which the dam is to be built, from which the project will draw its gravel and other resources, and on which it will build its access road belongs to a mixture of public and private entities. Part of the project cost includes buying land from those private entities — mostly Alaska Native corporations including some big players like Tyonek Native Corp. and CIRI.

But the project, which would sit north and east of Talkeenta below the Denali Highway, isn’t without its detractors.

An organized opposition to the dam has sprung up coalescing around groups like the Coalition for Susitna Dam Alternatives. The group worries about impacts to wildlife populations and salmon habitat as well as the potential for a dam failure in one of Alaska’s all-too frequent earthquakes.

Located at River Mile 184 above Devils Canyon, the Susitna-Watana Hydroelectric Project would be an estimated 700-feet tall, 39-miles long and 2-miles wide. The project is expected to provide long-term, stable electric rates for generations of Alaskans while diversifying the state’s energy portfolio and moving Alaska toward its goal of using 50 percent renewable energy for 2025.

Preliminary studies include three generating units with an installed capacity of 600 megawatts. The powerhouse, dam and related facilities, expected to be online by 2023, will be linked by transmission lines to the Railbelt Intertie and produce an annual average of 2.5 million megawatt hours.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.