Power plant rules review put off to Dec. 16

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough Assembly has delayed a decision until next year that would have made sweeping changes to the way it handles power plant projects.

The ordinance before the assembly on Nov. 19 would have repealed its current power plant ordinance and replaced it with a much smaller bit of code requiring a conditional use permit rather than a big, extensive power plant permit.

“We took 96 pages down to 13,” said Berkley Tilton, who served on the borough committee that reviewed the ordinance.

He said the intent wasn’t always to repeal the ordinance and replace it, but when they dug into the details, that seemed like the best option.

Jim Walker, a former in-house attorney for the Matanuska Electric Association and currently an employee of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, told the assembly that it should reconsider a part of the code that made it applicable to power plants that produce 101 megawatts or greater because, “101 makes no sense to me.”

He pointed out that the most efficient generators in Alaska put out 60 megawatts each and those are the only ones that meet the current proposed Environmental Protection Agency limits. The borough should therefore be thinking in terms of 60-megawatt increments, he said.

“If you’re going to set a limit on this ordinance the appropriate limit would be 120 so that the one that you get is not going to be one that pays carbon penalties under the regulations the EPA is proposing,” he said.

Mark Masteller, another member of the board that reviewed the power plant regulations, urged the assembly to pass the changes.

“I think the important thing to think about in this situation is, we’re basically saying, you know, this is a relatively rare occurrence that needs to have a conditional use (permit),” he said. “We whittled it down and took out a lot of different stuff that didn’t need to be in there but the key is making sure that when something like this happens, which is pretty darn rare, there needs to be a conditional use process.”

He wasn’t as much in favor of setting a megawatt threshold on the ordinance.

“For me it comes back to different types of fuel have different impacts,” Masteller said. “A 20-megawatt wind farm has a huge footprint and the community should probably have some input on that.”

Assemblyman Jim Sykes mentioned a proposal for a generator on Fishhook Creek that would involve all the water in the creek and maybe more but would only crank out two megawatts.

Earlier in the meeting, Tilton said that the committee had surveyed other power plant ordinances in the nation and found that even the most restrictive drew that line at 150 megawatts, while the borough’s current ordinance puts it at 50. The 101-megawatt threshold was an attempt to split the difference.

Sykes, though, pointed out that there are many power plants in the country that put out more power than Alaska’s entire grid.

“I just wonder about this size issue because we’re on a much smaller size scale than the Lower 48,” he said.

Eventually, the assembly put off deciding on the ordinance until Dec. 16 and made plans to meet for a work session to talk about the issues beforehand.

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