Gustavus has green power after 27-year effort
The small Southeast Alaska community of Gustavus has finally given up diesel for its day-to-day electricity needs, and it only took 27 years and an act of Congress.
Photo: Craig Medred
FALLS CREEK -- At the end of a three-mile road to nowhere, on the southern edge of one of North America's wildest national parks, the sound of a clean, environmentally friendly energy future is drowned out by the noise of a gurgling salmon stream. Just feet to the side of that stream, a hydroelectric turbine for Gustavus Electric Inc. spins in a small metal building not much bigger than a farmland garage.
Any day, salmon will start spawning in the gravels beside the power plant which takes its water from behind a 12-foot cement wall high above two towering waterfalls on a creek that headwaters in the Fairweather Mountains of Glacier Bay National Park, then diverts that water 600 feet downhill through about two miles of buried pipe to generate electricity before putting the water back into the stream at the upper limit of where salmon spawn.
The dream of electrical engineer Dick Levitt, the project is about as environmentally friendly as man can get. There is no towering dam cutting off passage to fish. There are no spinning windmill blades to kill birds. There are no banks of solar cells covering the floor of a valley. And there is, because of this project, no longer an exhaust-spewing diesel generator burning costly fossil fuels in the 400-plus community of Gustavus with a summer population at least twice that.
All it took for Levitt to get this so-called "run-of-river" project built was 27 years of effort, a legal battle with some of America's most influential environmental organizations and, finally, an act of Congress. Gustavus residents who know the 65-year-old Levitt well contend that if he wasn't such a hard-headed old cuss, their green-leaning community built on an old glacial moraine on the edge of the park would still be getting its power from the aforementioned diesel generator.
That generator went silent when the hydropower project went online earlier this summer. Levitt hopes it will sit silently for the next 100 years, though it is being maintained as an emergency backup for community power just in case. Nobody wants to see it run. Along with adding to atmospheric pollution, the generator each month burns about 20,000 gallons of expensive diesel that significantly boosts the cost of power. The fuel alone costs 20 to 44 cents per kilowatt hour, Levitt said.
