District 4 incumbent: Strategic Generation Plan will cut costs; District 7 challengers oppose Healy 2 shutdown
The deadline to vote for Golden Valley Electric Association board candidates and by-law amendments is Tuesday. The five candidates running for two seats on the co-op’s board of directors all agree reducing the cost of energy is their top priority, but they differ on how to make that happen.
District 4 Director Gary Newman says the board has always sought to provide electricity reliably and at the lowest cost. But he adds there wasn’t much the co-op could’ve done to avoid the March 1 rate hike that increased the average member’s monthly bill by $29.
“I think most members understand that we don’t control inflation, the supply of Cook Inlet natural gas or the price of oil,” Newman said.
Inflation increased the overall cost of producing electricity, and a Cook Inlet natural gas shortage reduced the availability of lower-cost power from utilities in Southcentral. “And the economy energy we anticipated getting -- we weren’t able to,” he said.
Newman says that required Golden Valley to generate more of its own electricity, but ongoing problems with the coal-fired Healy Unit 2 power plant have reduced its reliability so much that it operated only about 40 percent of the time over the past several months. That required GVEA to instead use its most costly fuel to generate electricity.
“So what we have to back that up with are our expensive diesels (generators) in North Pole,” he said. “And they’re, I don’t know, 35 to 45 cents a kilowatt, just to run them.”
Golden Valley officials announced last week that the co-op’s Fuel and Purchased Power rate will go back down over the next three months, reducing the March 1 rate hike by nearly 50 percent.
Newman faces a challenge for the District 4 seat, which represents Fairbanks’s east side and areas to the north and south of town, by Harmony Tomaszewski. She declined to respond to questions and instead sent prepared statements that declare that she’s “deeply concerned about high utility rates,” and “committed to championing solutions that prioritize cheaper energy sources.”
Newman says Golden Valley’s board took a giant step toward stabilizing fuel prices and using more cost-efficient and reliable power sources with adoption of a Strategic Generation Plan.
“Having a firm price for non-fossil-fueled power, primarily wind and solar that we would purchase from independent power producers, is going to reduce the volatile rates and operational costs,” he said.
Tomaszewski’s statement says she’d “prioritize cost-management strategies to mitigate the burden of electric expenses for our members, while maintaining the cooperative’s financial stability.”
Healy Unit 2 shutdown
The GVEA generation plan also called for shutting down Healy 2, which Newman says he strongly supports, to help hold down costs. But the board postponed that provision earlier this year, to give time for Railbelt utilities to work out a solution to the natural-gas shortage.
District 7 board incumbent Todd Adams says that delay will give Golden Valley time to improve the grid and its battery-storage systems so it can better manage new sources of energy that the Strategic Generation Plan calls for, including wind and solar.
“We’ve had to change some of our plots and plans in the generation plan,” said Adams, whose district includes communities south of Fairbanks along the Parks Highway, including Healy.
Adams says he supports programs that promote efforts by members to stabilize electricity rates, by among other things incentivizing commercial and industrial customers to operate more energy-efficiently. And for residential customers to voluntarily reduce power use, especially during peak-demand times.
“In its simplest form,” he said, “if it’s 40 below, plug your vehicle in two hours before you crank it. If it’s 20 below, one hour may be enough time.”
Two challengers for the District 7 seat say if elected they’d lower electricity costs by adopting better business practices, like cutting travel and vehicle expenditures and prepositioning maintenance crews and equipment in outlying communities in the GVEA system.
Both candidates strongly oppose shutting down Healy 2.
Cyrus Cooper says that in part is due to the board of directors’ failure to advise District 7 members about the closure plan until they announced it two years ago.
“Nobody really had any forewarning for that,” he said. “Not our local leaders. The state wasn’t well-apprised of that. And those are big fouls, because that impacts our energy security.”
Cooper says closing Healy 2 will endanger Golden Valley’s ability to generate enough electricity for its members, especially big industrial customers like mining operations and military installations.
The other District 7 challenger, Krista Zappone, agrees. She says shutting the plant down not only would be unwise -- it also would be unfair to the people of Healy and the community’s businesses.
“I’m not for shutting down Unit 2 down,” said Zappone, who lives in the Healy area. “I think that would be a bad move. You’re talking about taking our autonomy away, when we don’t have our own generation.
Still time to cast votes
Members who live in Districts 4 and 7 still have two days to cast an electronic ballot in the two board candidate races, by logging in to their Golden Valley accounts using the password the co-op mailed to them last month.
Meanwhile all of the co-op’s members can vote on a series of amendments board members have proposed for Golden Valley’s bylaws.
Board candidate and by-law ballots must be received by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
Golden Valley will announce the results of the elections on Thursday.
Editor's note: More information about GVEA board and bylaws amendments elections is available on the GVEA website's Elections page.
