MEA to chamber: Buried lines expensive

WASILLA — What’s it going to cost to bury the power lines Matanuska Electric Association plans to bring through Wasilla?

According to MEA General Manager Joe Griffith, burying lines costs, on average, $11 million more per mile. And utilidors, the underground hallways that some countries use to house these kinds of lines?

“Utilidors are terribly expensive,” Griffith said, adding that they’re also hard to maintain. “Usually they fill with water and then they freeze solid and then you’ve got a mess.”

And, he told the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce Tuesday, MEA will seek to have those cots borne exclusively by ratepayers inside city limits.

“We will go to the (Regulatory Commission of Alaska) and ask to create a special rate area,” Griffith said.

He noted that both Eagle River and south Anchorage have similar rate areas.

Griffith estimated that the increased costs would be something on the order of $30 to $50 per month for homeowners and could climb as high as $100,000 to $200,000 for commercial customers.

Griffith said the lines are needed to bring power from the natural-gas-fired power plant MEA is building at Eklutna to the center of its power load, which is currently in Wasilla, where commercial and residential development continues to grow. The lines are also needed as a redundancy in the system, something power companies rely on when something goes wrong in the system. Either you route the power a different way or you shut down parts of the system, he said, and businesses hate having to lose power.

Assemblyman Steve Colligan asked Griffith why MEA was building its power plant at Eklutna. Griffith responded that borough permitting requirements forced that decision.

“It was absolutely out of the question to attempt to locate the plant in the borough,” he said.

Colligan asked why MEA didn’t sue to get those permit requirements — which the borough passed in a hurry when MEA was still considering a natural gas plant and a coal-fired plant — repealed.

“It would be cheaper to build a new power plant than to build an underground utilidor,” Colligan said.

But, Griffith pointed out, even if MEA could build in the borough closer to where the power is needed, that doesn’t solve the problem.

“Even if we put the plant at Hollywood (Road) and Vine (Road) where we own some property, we would still need to run transmission lines to (Wasilla),” Griffith said.

So what about the route along the railroad tracks?

MEA Director of Engineering Gary Kuhn said the route along the railroad has steep slopes and turns to negotiate. Also, the railroad hated having MEA near its tracks, insisting that the poles be a certain distance away, which would in places put them into wetlands that would need special permits.

“It was technically not feasible to work within the constraints they gave us,” Kuhn said.

So what happens if MEA doesn’t build the lines?

Griffith said they’d have to stop bringing on new customers in Wasilla. But that’s also kind of out of the question. MEA isn’t a typical business. It can’t just refuse customers.

“We have a requirement that we provide power. That’s the law,” Griffith said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.