Golden Valley’s first chief operating officer on Strategic Generation Plan: ‘a lot of complexity, lot of moving parts’
Golden Valley Electric Association’s newly hired chief operating officer is wrestling with several challenges laid out in the co-op’s Strategic Generation Plan, including setting a shut-down date for the Healy 2 power plant and finding alternative sources to replace its generation.
Travis Million has been on the job as Golden Valley’s COO for a little over two months now, since he left his old job as chief executive of Glennallen-based Copper Valley Electric.
“I actually wasn’t looking to leave Copper Valley Electric when Golden Valley came to me and kind of recruited me for this position,” he said in an interview last week.
Million says he’s Golden Valley’s first chief operating officer.
“They didn’t have anyone as a COO, but they had been evaluating whether to open that position up, or not,” he said. “And I guess the timing worked out well.”
The position is considered a sort of second-in-command in the corporate world. It requires Million to oversee some of Golden Valley’s most important functions, including power supply, operations and engineering. And he also faces the stiff challenges spelled-out in the coop’s Strategic Generation Plan.
“There is a lot of complexity to it, a lot of moving parts,” he said. “Y’know if this was a simple thing to do, it would’ve been done it already.”
Golden Valley’s board passed the plan in June of 2022 to guide a partial transition from fossil fuels like coal and diesel to more renewable sources, like wind, solar and hydro power. Million says those changes were needed, because of volatility of oil prices and their tendency to rise in the winter.
“When it’s out of your control, it makes it really tough on your members when those fuel prices go up,” he said.
The price of fuel isn’t the only cost factor he’ll have to consider. The co-op’s priority of providing power affordably and reliably are the main factors driving the planned closure of the problem-plagued Healy Unit 2 coal-fired powerplant by the end of next year.
“The costs to maintain that plant are quite high,” he said, adding, “The reliability has not been where we had expected it to be when we took ownership of that plant.”
Million says a proposed Healy 2 shutdown date will be presented to the co-op’s board early next year. Meanwhile, he says work continues on a deal with Southcentral utilities to replace most of the coal-fired plant’s 50-megawatt capacity with cheaper natural-gas generated power.
“However,” he said, “in the last six months or so, there’s real concerns with gas shortages in the Cook Inlet.”
Some of that electricity could instead come from renewable energy sources through federally funded projects, like a new high-voltage submarine cable to transmit more hydropower from the Kenai Peninsula to the Railbelt utilities.
“The cheapest power in the entire state for the Railbelt right now is Bradley Lake power out of the Kenai,” he said. “So, this line would give an additional path of redundancy and additional capacity to move more Bradley Lake power if needed further north.”
Million says the Strategic Generation Plan also calls for development of other large-scale renewable power sources to help fill the gap from Healy 2’s closure, like a proposed 200-megawatt wind farm near Fairbanks. And he says the federal grant that’s paying for the submarine cable off the Kenai also will fund large-capacity batteries to buffer fluctuations in wind and solar power.
