Assembly to revisit power plant regs

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly is scheduled to take up major changes to the way power plants are permitted Wednesday evening.

“I guess the biggest change really is that the group through, in my opinion a fair amount of good consensus, took a pretty large and unwieldy ordinance and kind of focused it into what is more important for what the borough needs when it comes to addressing some new power plant,” said Mark Masteller, a member of the Mat-Su Borough 8.32 Review Commission.

The commission takes its name from the borough code that currently governs power plants. The codes were enacted at the tail end of a summer’s worth of contentious public meetings in 2006. Back then, the Matanuska Electric Association was considering building two power plants in Mat-Su, one fired by coal, the other by natural gas. The power company fought the regulations at every turn but eventually lost.

It’s power generation plans eventually became the Eklutna Generation Station, which will run on natural gas and which was built outside of borough limits in the Municipality of Anchorage. In choosing the location, MEA said that the borough’s ordinance made power plant construction in Mat-Su unfeasible.

Masteller said that the language on the table tonight removes that large, standalone ordinance and replaces it with a section of the borough code that deals with con- ditional use permits. Such permits are for projects with a big potential impact but that come along only infrequently.

The question the review committee grappled with was, “what do we actually need for an ordinance when it comes to an event that is relatively rare like building a big power plant and what kind of public process needs to go into that?” Masteller said.

His seat on the committee was the one reserved for someone with experience in renewable energy, which he comes by as a professor at Mat-Su College running that institution’s renewable energy program.

In addition to greatly streamlining the permitting process, the new ordinance also raises the threshold for when a project would need such a permit from projects greater than 50 megawatts, to those larger than 101 megawatts. Masteller said he actually argued for a lower number but that either one means large, commercial projects need such permits, not backyard wind turbines and solar panels.

“There is no residential system that comes close to even one megawatt,” Masteller said. “The residential systems that I would hope we would want to encourage are never going to have to worry about this.”

It would, however, probably impact something like the proposed 650-megawatt Susitna-Watana Hydroelectric Dam.

The changes cleared the Mat-Su Borough Planning Commission unanimously, and is one of two tasks the Review Committee was tasked with. The other passed in June and established a Mat-Su Borough Energy Policy that first and foremost emphasizes conservation and efficiency.

“I think it’s amazing that the borough has an energy policy. That’s not really all that common and I think it’s a really good thing,” Masteller said. “We also have a policy on lots of other things that we routinely ignore but hey from an energy cost perspective it’s great.”

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