Energy task force rejects Dunleavy plea for "moonshot" plan to cut electric rates to 10 cents by 2030

When Gov. Mike Dunleavy launched his energy task force last spring, he said he wanted to see plans by the end of this year to cut electricity prices in Alaska to 10 cents per kilowatt hour by 2030.

“Now some people will say that’s incredibly optimistic, we can’t do that, etc., etc., etc. But I’ve gotta remind you of a couple of things done in history here in the not-too-distant past. 1961, John F. Kennedy said we’re gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade,” Dunleavy told his task force on April 25.

“People laughed at him, nobody can go the moon. That’s impossible. It can’t be done.”

“We went to the moon,” said Dunleavy.

“When I was a kid in the 1960s, we would never have dreamed of things like cell phones or breaking up AT&T, from Ma Bell into different phone utilities. We would have never thought about being able to speak simultaneously with somebody in North America, in Asia, in Australia. There are a lot of things we never thought could happen, but because people believed. And I’m going to underline that, believed that it could, we did,” he said.

“You guys have been selected due in large part to the belief on my side of things that you guys can make things happen,” he said at the first task force meeting, repeating the 10-cent goal.

He asked the task force members to believe in 10-cent power and figure out how to pull off a moonshot.

Dream the impossible dream if you must. I’m not sure we’re going to make it to the Valley of the Moon, let alone the moon.

In Fairbanks right now, the cost of power is 25 cents a kilowatt hour. In Anchorage it’s 18 cents to 21 cents.

The cost is not going to be cut by more than 50 or 60 percent in the next seven years without multiple political miracles. Believing or saying you believe isn’t enough.

Since I first wrote and published the text quoted above October 4, the task force has completed its report to Dunleavy.

Despite Dunleavy’s pleas that the task force members believe in 10-cent power and produce a plan showing how to make that happen by 2030, the task force couldn’t find a way to believe.

The group has created a cornucopia of Alaska energy reports that overflows with ideas, charts, slides, graphs and hope for new technologies. If not exhaustive, it is exhausting to try to reckon with nearly 2,000 pages of energy information. The options are many and the costs are enormous. Some of the key recommendations are listed below.

Most of the ideas in the energy encyclopedia will go nowhere unless the governor is prepared to make hard choices, defend his choices, take political risks, knock heads together, come up with billions and try to win the backing of the Legislature, the major players in Alaska energy, communities across the state and the public. I don’t expect he will do those things.

Here is the 218-page first volume of the report completed by the task force. The second volume, featuring “supplemental information,” tops out at 1,714 pages.

The first volume mentions Dunleavy’s 10-cent goal in passing in an introductory letter by Chair Nancy Dahlstrom, Vice Chair Curtis Thayer and Vice Chair Clay Koplin, who said they “aspire not only to reduce the cost of energy, but also to reach the goal of $0.10/kWh.”

“There is no magic solution to achieve this goal,” they wrote.

The 10-cent number is mentioned several times in the 218 pages, but there is no plan and no hope for 10-cent power by 2030. If Dunleavy wants 10-cent power, he’ll need to say just how many billions would be spent in subsidies and where the money would come from for his “moonshot goal.”

It’s easy to talk about going to the moon. Getting there is hard.

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