Climate change and an impending gas crisis are heating up Alaska’s power companies. are they going to challenge?

In December, I decided to attend the board meeting of the Chugach Electric Association, Alaska’s largest utility and cooperative serving more than 90,000 members in and around Anchorage.

After filling out the form, an employee sent me a Zoom link. I replied that I would like to participate directly as a member of the co-op and as a reporter.

Seven minutes later my phone rang.

Chugach’s senior manager of corporate communications, Julie Hasquet, is a veteran publicist and spokeswoman for Mark Begich when he was in the US Senate.

Haske wanted to know what I was up to. After some back and forth, I explained that I had heard some complaints and criticisms about the way Chugachi was run and wanted to attend a board meeting to see for myself.

Hasquet asked who I was talking to and if I had been “straightforward” with her. I said yes. A few hours after that, she sent a follow-up text asking her to stay away from executives and employees during evening meetings.

“They have a pretty packed agenda,” she said. “Since there is no opportunity to ask questions during the meeting, I received a request to send any questions by email after the meeting. Thank you.”

According to basic journalism principles, when someone challenges your approach or tries to tell you how to ask a question, it usually means that your approach and questions are on point. increase.

I didn’t actually question the board members until I received Hasquet’s text. But now I did.

New Perspectives for Utilities

To understand why you should care about Chugach, let’s back up.

If you’re paying your electric bill in Anchorage or the northern Kenai Peninsula, you’re writing a monthly check to the co-op. For example, my small Anchorage house bill is about $40.

Until recently, I didn’t spend much time thinking about where that money would go. I don’t think most others did either. Across the country, utility members and shareholders have come to expect conservative management and consistent rates, not far-sighted thinking.

However, two things have changed dramatically in the last few years. One on a global scale and one on a regional scale, where people are paying more attention.

First: A rapidly warming planet and plummeting costs for wind and solar power are putting pressure on utilities to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. Second, Hillcorp, the Anchorage area’s major natural gas producer, said its utility customers shouldn’t expect fuel supplies to be guaranteed for more than a decade. I am warning you.

Those are the two reasons I wanted to hear the discussion at Chugach’s board meeting last week.

The same issue is also the focus of a small group of renewable energy and transparency advocates, who have followed the actions of Alaska’s utility companies much longer than I have. As we poise to invest heavily in imports, some worry that potentially cheap renewable energy sources will be left out.

“The decisions that Chugak and all the other joint ventures make determine the energy policy for all of us,” Renewable Energy Alaska Projects analyst Anthony Scott told me this week. “And we are now at a time when some big decisions are being made that could potentially have very long-term consequences.”

Scott is a former member of the Regulatory Board that oversees public utilities in Alaska. He has a doctorate in natural resource economics and two of his master’s degrees, and was one of the people he referred to when speaking to Hasquet that he listened to questions about Chugach’s governance. .

One of Scott’s central criticisms, and others in the same position, is that Chugach’s board of directors spends too much time in public meetings known as executive sessions. It means that there is

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Scott testified publicly about this before a board committee earlier this month, and his criticisms came to my attention for the same reasons as Hasquet’s message. It has something it’s trying to hide.

After arriving at Chugach’s boardroom last week, I heard staff give presentations to board members on topics such as the cooperative’s decarbonization plans and local solar projects.

Then came the most interesting part of the agenda: a discussion of potential new legislation on the state capitol to set clean energy targets. It was a controversial proposal for

After that agenda item, the Board was set to discuss the five-year strategic plan, as well as the operating and capital budgets.

However, me and the other members present were unable to hear that portion of the meeting.

Instead, we had to leave the room as the board voted unanimously to hold these discussions in private.

“Fresh Air and Sunshine”

Alaska’s Electricity and Telephone Cooperative Law mirrors the state’s public meeting law and gives members of the public utility the right to attend board meetings, as do I and other members of the cooperative.

There are four waivers that allow Board Members to use Executive Sessions. But they are limited and specific. personnel matters, advice from lawyers, discussions that may affect a person’s reputation or character, and “problems that, of immediate knowledge, obviously adversely affect the co-operative’s finances.”

At a meeting I attended, Chugach’s board used that last exemption as the basis for holding executive sessions on five different topics. These items include the five-year strategic plan subsequently approved by the Board and announced after the meeting, the operating and capital budgets, and “Possible Legislation in Juneau Relating to Advances in Clean Energy, Including Renewable Power”. was included.

My reaction was: Will simply talking about renewable energy bills that could be introduced in next year’s parliament “clearly hurt” Chugach’s finances?

This seemed very unlikely to me. It also sounded implausible to a lawyer with experience in media law who I asked about it.

This is not the only time Chugach and other Alaskan utilities have made headlines about using Executive Sessions. Just a week ago, renewable energy analyst Scott questioned the Chugak board’s steering committee as they entered his executive session to discuss decarbonization goals and gas supply. was

A separate working group of utilities formed this year to discuss Alaska’s impending natural gas shortage holds all meetings behind closed doors.

After last week’s Chugach meeting, I called all seven directors and asked about their votes to attend the board meeting. Some did not return my calls. One was former state attorney Sam Kason.

Kayson said that once the executive session began, there was “lively conversation” about whether the discussion on the Clean Energy Act should have been public. They tend to want to keep things private,’ he agreed with some of Chugachi’s critics that cooperatives could be made more transparent.

“I don’t always agree with calls to participate in executive sessions,” Cason said. “And I welcome scrutiny.”

Chugach’s chairman of the board, Bettina Chastain, was a little more defensive, at least at the start of our conversation.

“Everything that was available without endangering the organization was put into public sessions,” she said. “Then we go into an executive session to discuss the details of topical areas that could put the organization at risk.”

Chastain sent back to the Chugach staff with detailed questions regarding the use of Executive Sessions. Hasquet said in an e-mail that “because of the privileges associated with the discussion of the executive session,” the cooperatives could not offer any justification other than citing exemptions from public meetings in the Telephony and Cooperatives Act. Follow him up.

“We endorse our assessment that the materials and information discussed in the executive session meet the requirements,” she said.

When I spoke with Chastain, a longtime engineering and oil and gas consultant, I found her uncomfortable. But she was still on the phone for over 45 minutes of hers.

Chastain admitted to telling Hasquet to send me questions in writing, but she said she wasn’t afraid of it. Instead, she said, she was worried about getting caught up in the interview during intermission and keeping her jam-packed agenda off track.

Chastain was frustrated by the criticism that Chugach was hearing about transparency and executive sessions, saying it “came from an outside organization and was not necessarily a member’s comment.” During her eight years as a director, the power company has operated in the same way, she added.

“This is how we do business,” she said. “I am fully aware of my role and have nothing to hide.”

I was struck by Chastain’s honesty. And we think she’s probably right that Chugak hasn’t changed how she does business lately.

I am just one example. In the last eight years, I haven’t thought enough about my electricity bill or the importance of the cooperative to Anchorage residents and businesses to attend or follow a single board meeting. Chugach is Alaska’s largest power company, but Hasquet said he could go a year or more without the reporter attending the meeting.

But now, with Alaska facing natural gas scarcity and the increasingly dramatic effects of global warming, I’m more concerned with what Chugak is doing. managers, policy makers and business people do.

In other words, the approach and vision that has worked for Chugach over the past eight years may be very different from the approach and vision required over the next eight years.

As Chugach and other Alaskan utilities meet these challenges, Scott said doing more business in public is essential.

He added that this is particularly important as utilities consider future generation mixes and use cost models and assumptions comparing renewables and natural gas.

“I can tell you: As a former bureaucrat, when you have to show your work publicly, you work very hard to make sure it’s pretty impeccable.” I work at

“Maybe every decision is the best you can do and I’m wasting my time. But he added, ‘I want to know that.’

This article appeared in The Northern Journal, a newsletter published by Nathaniel Hertz.apply Here.