Terror Lake Hydro Expansion Pushed in Senate Committee

Jay Barrett/KMXT

Thursday morning in Washington D.C., the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee took testimony on a bill that would allow Kodiak’s hydroelectric water reservoir to be expanded. Chaired by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the committee spent most of its session discussing ways to deal with the drought in the Western Lower 48, but she did make a few comments about Terror Lake in her opening comments.

“Right now, the area around Terror Lake is powered solely by clean, renewable hydro power and a small wind turbine,” Murkowski said. “So we’re in kind of an interesting situation. If we can’t allow for the expansion, what we do then is we turn back to expensive diesel fuel instead.”

The bill amends the special-use permit for the Terror Lake Hydroelectric Project to authorize Kodiak Electric Association to construct a tunnel and associated facilities for the Upper Hidden Basin Diversion. It will allow more snow melt and runoff to reach Terror Lake and be made available for power generation. Electrical capacity was increased last year, when a third hydro turbine was installed there.

“The news across the country that was highlighted when President Obama was up in the state was that we’re making some remarkable headway with our microgrid systems and Kodiak is always pointed out as the second largest island in the United States of America getting to the point where they can be 100 percent on renewables,” Murkowski said. “But we’re going to have to go back to diesel if we can’t get an expansion around Terror Lake.”

The Terror Lake project displaces the need for Kodiak Electric to burn about 2-million gallons of diesel fuel a year. Murkowski pointed out that hydro power supplies 24 percent of Alaska’s electricity needs and the state has identified more than 200 promising sites for further hydro power development.