Power plant regs loosened

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough has a new set of power plant regulations in place, more streamlined and less onerous than the previous ones.

“The old one … was a cut-and-paste from somewhere in California where they managed to actually drive out all of the power generation 10 or 15 years ago. It put them in a very bad position as far as their public utilities and ironically it had the same effect here because it pushed MEA over to Anchorage for our next generation of power,” Mat-Su Borough Mayor said on his regular podcast posted Jan. 7.

The ordinance, adopted at the Mat-Su Borough Assembly’s Jan. 6 meeting, is targeted at commercial power operations and requires a relatively simple permit. Before it passed, though, the borough assembly had to do some work deciding on the threshold above which a project would be considered commercial.

As originally written, the ordinance set that threshold at 101 megawatts. A plant putting out more than that amount of power would need a permit, a plant putting out less would not.

Assemblyman Jim Sykes pointed out that the Matanuska Electric Association is building a plant that puts out 170 megawatts in Eklutna. The Mat-Su Borough doesn’t need much more power than that, certainly not 101 more megawatts.

“It’s highly unlikely that anybody is going to build anything to add to that for quite some time,” Sykes said. “Leaving it at 101 megawatts practically ensures that no one would be requested to bring a permit forward ever.”

He recommended dropping the limit to 101 kilowatts, 1,000 times smaller than the original threshold. He said that would effectively exempt personal power generation through things like solar panels and windmills — the home that would need more than 101 kilowatts of power generation is hard to imagine — but would require a permit for commercial operations.

“One hundred kilowatts is not a massive amount of power,” DeVilbiss said. “When we were pumping water out of Wolverine Canyon it took a 100-kilowatt generator to pump a six-inch mainline out of there.”

Assemblyman Ron Arvin also opposed the change.

“I think to sit back and say ‘well if we don’t change this from 101 megs to 101 kilowatts it’s meaningless so we have to try to reach out and regulate those (independent power producers) that may or may not come online’ — it’s bad policy I don’t think we should be doing that. I really don’t,” he said.

Eventually, Assemblyman Dan Mayfield came up with a winning compromise, successfully changing it to 10 megawatts.

Later on in his podcast DeVilbiss expressed displeasure with that limit as well.

“It seemed (to be), and I believed was, a very arbitrary line,” he said. “We’re not really the technocrats to really make the best decisions on that."

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