Eklutna power plant is a very big deal

One of the perks of reporting local news is sometimes getting behind-the-scenes access to projects that are important to our community.

We’ve toured so many buildings under construction that it’s hard to remember them all. There have been schools and government offices, prisons, health clinics, sports complexes, police stations and fire halls.

All certainly hold importance for the community, but we’re hard-pressed to think of any recent project that’s as much a game-changer for the Mat-Su as the $300 million Eklutna Generation Station Matanuska Electric Association is building.

A Friday tour of the new electricity generation plant, which is scheduled to come online Jan. 1, 2015, was an eye-opener and is featured in today’s Frontiersman. Its massive, soaring exhaust pipes, 850-ton generators and 390-ton engines dwarf most other projects we’ve reported on. Those 850-ton generators got here on a specially built 144-tire truck.

What we’re saying is this power plant is really neat. It’s awesome, in the literal sense, that it inspires awe.

It is also going to be a very important project for us here with vast implications for how we do business and how we live our lives. It means that when the switch is thrown New Year’s Day 2015, the Valley will no longer be dependent upon Anchorage utilities to provide our power. We can make decisions for ourselves about our power generation future.

It also means the Valley is going to be a major player in the energy market as a customer buying natural gas at a rate of 7 billion cubic feet per year. We now have much more at stake in the state’s natural gas decisions and the taxes and regulations that affect supply.

Over the course of the last few months as the Goose Creek Correctional Center has come online, the newsroom has periodically hosted discussions about how the story of prisoners and their rehabilitation is now a Frontiersman narrative. We had prisons before, but not like this. It’s changed our lives already.

We expect the same will be true come Jan. 1, 2015, when MEA goes live with its 10 piston-driven, 17.1-megawatt engines and starts burning natural gas to provide us the power we need.

This is going to be very big for us here at the Frontiersman, and for all of us in the Mat-Su.