EDITORIAL: Eklutna power plan: Perfect compromise or failure by committee?

A good compromise, as the saying goes, is one that leaves none of the parties involved satisfied. And by that metric, the hydropower plan for the Eklutna Dam may be the most successful compromise in Anchorage in many years. But the Eklutna plan is also a successful compromise by a less cynical standard: It advances the central interests of all interests, even if it doesn’t check every box for anyone.

The Eklutna plan has been something of a political football within the municipality, with competing plans for the dam, the river, the power generation facility and the lake as a source of Anchorage’s drinking water. These plans have been debated both in public, at utility listening sessions and Assembly meetings (as well as on this page), and in private, as policymakers and power producers have strategized over the balance between power generation, river restoration and the lake as a water source. Where they’ve come down isn’t particularly surprising: The left-wing Anchorage Assembly and the Native Village of Eklutna have favored full restoration of the river and removal of the dam (with various degrees of delay that would, they hope, allow time for the cheap, stable power provided by the dam to be replaced by other sources). The utilities favor options that don’t meaningfully alter the existing power generation mix but have committed to restoring water to the vast majority of the Eklutna River’s run, via a diversion pipe that would route some water around the dam and into the river bed a mile downstream.

Ultimately, the decision rests with Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s office, and he seems likely to approve the utility plan. But Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has asked him to hold off on making that call, citing Anchorage residents’ lack of a formal voice in the process despite the municipality being the majority owner of the project. That’s a departure from former Mayor Dave Bronson’s position, which urged the governor to proceed full steam ahead with the utilities’ plan.

Mayor LaFrance and the Assembly are right that Anchorage residents — who, in addition to being owners of the project, are ratepayers for both the power and water it provides — deserve to have a voice and a vote when it comes to the disposition of the Eklutna dam. The mayor and Assembly’s arguments that those voting rights should be restored have merit, and in the absence of voting power, the elected policymakers of the municipality — who are more directly accountable to Anchorage residents than the governor — are appropriate entities to speak out on the people’s behalf.

But it’s also clear that the solution that Mayor LaFrance and the Assembly favor is not aligned with what Anchorage residents themselves want. Energy costs are already high and will climb further once Alaska is forced to import natural gas in the near future. The utilities have been right to prioritize the stability and low cost of Eklutna’s power, as that baseline capacity will be crucial in helping even out the generation peaks and troughs of other renewable energy projects in development over the next 10-15 years. The governor should approve the utilities plan as proposed.

Restoring river flow on 11 of the Eklutna River’s 12 miles doesn’t bring salmon all the way back to Eklutna Lake, but it does provide meaningful progress toward the river’s restoration in balance with power and water supply for a large fraction of Alaska’s residents. And it will allow the utilities to pursue green-power projects that would have been more difficult and expensive to incorporate into their generation mix without the stable hydro generation base.

Ultimately, few people may be happy with the Eklutna Hydroelectric Project’s plan. But that doesn’t make it a bad option — on the contrary, the fact that stakeholders in the facility all have aspects of the utilities’ plan that they can celebrate and others that aren’t their preference is a sign that the deliberations have arrived on a solution that balances all of the competing interests at play.