Senator Murkowski Offers Amendment to Expand Terror Lake Hydroelectric Facility

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

United States Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska stood before the Senate Tuesday and spoke in favor of hydropower as an energy resource. The talk was part of Murkowski’s representation of a bipartisan bill, called the Energy Policy Modernization Act, which according to Murkowski is the first energy bill the Senate has debated in more than eight years.

Murkowski urged the senate to move in a direction that supports not only creating new facilities, but maintaining the existing ones. She said it can do this by improving the regulatory process and making it more affordable and efficient for hydropower projects to continue.

She said, as it stands, one third of existing facilities will have to go through a relicensing process by 2030 that lasts a decade and costs millions of dollars.

“What we need to do here, folks, is we need to make the relicensing process more efficient by reducing bureaucratic and administrative delays that end up increasing electricity rates, slowing hydropower’s expansion, and actually delaying the adoption of environmental mitigation measures.”

Murkowski mentioned initiatives by different senators, and spoke about an amendment of her own, which would expand the existing project at Terror Lake. 

“And allow the local community there, Kodiak, to remain powered almost entirely by renewable energy. Right now they’re 99.7 percent powered by renewable energy between wind and their hydro capacity. We want them to get to that full 100 percent. It’s pretty cool.”

The senate is currently considering the energy bill.

In a previous presentation, Murkowski said she worked on the bill with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which she chairs, and received feedback from members of both parties on and off the committee. She specifically thanked Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington State, also on the committee, for helping craft the bill.