On Thursday night, representatives from Chugach Electric Association visited Cooper Landing — one of several small Kenai Peninsula communities the utility supplies with electricity. The goal of the meeting was to provide the community updates on the utility’s projects in the area and allow members to ask questions.
Julie Hasquet, Chugach’s communications manager, said this is the second meeting of what Chugach hopes will be an annual tradition.
“We realized that we had some challenging outage statistics down here, and that our members weren’t happy,” she said.
According to last night’s presentation, there were more than 35 outages in Cooper Landing in 2021, most caused by trees or weather.
But now, Hasquet said, the company is making investments in infrastructure to cut down on those outages. Chugach representatives say it already seems to be working — last year, Chugach was down to 25 unplanned outages, only one of which impacted the entirety of Cooper Landing.
Mike Miller, vice president of engineering at Chugach, said the company did a study on how to improve reliability in Cooper Landing and nearby Moose Pass, and decided the best option was to rebuild the entire distribution line through the area. He said that project is currently in its final phase, which means crews will soon rebuild a section of line across the Kenai River.
Before that, Chugach rebuilt a section of line from The Sunrise Inn to the Kenai River crossing, as well as a heavily wooded five-mile section of line between the Daves Creek substation and Sunrise Inn.
“We did a lot of efforts to clear in conjunction with that line rebuild, in addition to providing more robust infrastructure, utilizing modern design requirements that we have for ourselves to account for things like treefall, wind, snow and ice,” he said.
Miller said each of these rebuilds causes temporary planned outages, which Chugach communicates to residents in advance. There were two to three planned outages associated with each of the previous two phases, and there will be one planned outage during the current one.
Miller said the biggest difference between servicing Anchorage — Chugach’s primary market — and the small peninsula communities is access to infrastructure.
“Oftentimes, when our crews experience outage conditions down here, they’re traversing the right of way either by foot, snow shoe, snow machine or four wheeler,” he said. “And any materials they’re having to drag behind snow machines or four wheelers.”
In Anchorage, he said, most of the infrastructure crews need to access can be reached by much more efficient bucket trucks.
Miller said it was reassuring to hear from Cooper Landing residents at the meeting that they had noticed improvements to Chugach’s reliability in the area.
This story has been updated to correct the location of the line rebuild.
