Chris Rose addressed us via Zoom from his home, located between Sutton and Chickaloon.  Mr Rose, a lawyer has been with REAP since it’s formation in 2004.  The group administers 270 million dollars of State of Alaska sourced funds for energy related projects.  That fund has leveraged over 200 million dollars of federal funding for 80 projects completed to date.  He started by reminding us that Alaskan’s spent about 5 billion dollars on energy last year and about 20 percent of that was wasted.  The REAP administered weatherization fund alone saves Alaskan homeowners and building operators 25 million gallons of fuel yearly.
 
Mr. Rose noted that the Railbelt electrical utilities are not required to use a centralized power dispatch agency.  This results in consumer often paying inflated cost for electricity as a utility makes use of it’s own power rather than cheaper energy from another utility. Rose showed us a story from a 1983 issue of an Anchorage newspaper with plans to end this practice.  Due to individual utilities institutional interests, it has never happened.   On a similar note Regulatory Commission of Alaska has limited authority to ensure that utilities are not duplicating power generating capacity.  The entire Railbelt electrical market, 600 megawatts, is roughly equal to half of a single plant in the lower 48.  While we certainly wouldn’t want to rely on a single source for power, bigger plants are more efficient.  In the past decade Chugach Electric, Anchorage Municipal Light and Power (recently acquired by Chugach) and Matanuska Electric Association have all built generation facilities in Anchorage.  Taken together the utilities have spent 1.6 billion dollars on these projects. The result is  a excess of capacity that is being paid by the rate-payer from Fairbanks to Homer.  This is made worse by the fact that our utilities are paying about 300% as much for the gas that fuels these plants as utilities in other states.  Natural gas generates the vast majority of our power.
 
Finally, Rose talked about the need for a “Green Bank” to finance small scale energy projects, such as home solar installations.  14 states have established these.  A Green Bank provides loans, often unsecured, at rates between 3 and 7 percent for energy conservation or generation projects.  Alaska Industrial Development Authority is proposing to establish such a bank through the investment of between 10 and 30 million dollars.  Government investment is currently necessary because there is no secondary market for existing lenders to sell this kind of loan.  The local bank would have to carry the loan for the entire term.