KTOO’s Meredith Reddick recently gave us the scoop on the start of the $34 million hydroelectric project in Angoon (pop. 357). We follow up to see how spending nearly $100,000 per resident on a hydro plant will affect the town and the taxpayers.
As KTOO reported, the tiny village of Angoon is embarking on a 44 year-old pipe dream of building a hydroelectric plant to provide power to its mere 357 residents.
“34 million dollars?! Are you shitting me?” the right-leaning boat captain asked as we crossed through mild chop on our way from Juneau to Angoon. “Jesus Christ! That’s more than $95,000 per man, woman and child in that tiny village!” he exclaimed. “Who thought that made sense?” he asked, in a confrontational and angry manner. “Plus, people are moving out of Angoon is droves” he said. “There’s just no reason to live there anymore.” He rejected our repeated attempts to address his fallacies.
While $34 million is indeed a significant investment, there really is no other alternative. Angoon lies on the seaward side of Admiralty Island and it a very isolated Tlingit community. “People blame us for the cost because we choose to live out here in the middle of nowhere” said Dan Russell, a noted local leader. “They don’t realize how much we have to pay for our electricity out here. Why should we have to pay that much?” he wondered.
Angoon residents currently depend on diesel generators to provide their electricity. They pay almost $0.64 per kilowatt hour, while the average Alaskan family uses 650 kilowatt hours per month, resulting in an average household electric bill of around $404 per month. “We can probably knock that down by least 25%” Russell said, noting further that “we’re talking about saving the average Angoon family a hundred bucks a month, maybe even a bit more.”
While residents in Angoon almost universally favored the hydro project, other Alaskan residents were surprisingly critical of it, citing the $34 million price tag as the only reason for their concern. Like our boat captain, the critics we encountered could not be persuaded to reconsidered their narrow-minded opinions. So we decided to put the question to a real test.
Quentin Cash is a certified public account and also a licensed actuary who specialized in cost analysis. We asked him to evaluate the cost of the program to provide us with an opinion as to its feasibility and propriety. We were amazed when he spoke up at the conclusion of our initial meeting. “Are you nuts?” he asked. “You’re telling me that that want to spend $34 million in order to save the average household around $100 a month? Seriously?” When we confirmed, Cash started chuckling. “Well, you are talking about spending almost $100,000 per person. What if you took that money and bought a 5% CD with it?” he asked, as if he didn’t know us to do the math. “You would make $5,000 a year in interest. That comes to more than $400 per month per person. Or more like $1000 per household”. Frustrated that we could not make the connection, he tried to uncomplicate the accounting for us.
“Look!” he gasped “you are spending $34 million in order to save a household $100 in electricity, but if you just put that money in the bank, you could pay each household’s entire current electric bill and have $600 per month left over. The project just doesn’t make sense.”
It became clear that simple accounting alone could not explain the importance of the project, so we took the matter up with Professor Mitch Garvey, Chairman of the Department of Republican Induced Climate Disruption at the University of Washington. “The money doesn’t matter” Professor Garvey made clear at the beginning. “Those diesel generators are dumping capitalist poison into the atmosphere and they need to be stopped. They are killing the planet. If you need help, I have a group of students that ride up to Angoon in the dark and take those generators out.” When I asked Professor Garvey for help quantifying the environmental impact of the diesels, he said “math has never been my strong suit. Plus, I can’t get behind a hydro plant either. I had to organize three student protests and a walkout before I could get the University to put in our solar plant. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Finally we turned to A’nn’na’green’gable Sherman, a local Tlingit shaman for her take on the cultural and spirtual impact of the dam. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Why would you think a hydroelectric plant would have any cultural or religious significance to anybody? Are you stupid?”
On the way back from Angoon, we struggled to find a way to articulate the need for the hydro plant. The conflicting information we received was disturbing – almost disturbing enough to make us question not only the basis for the project, but to make us wonder if somebody should have to account for it. But as the sun set over Admiralty Island and we cracked open a cold beer, our minds cleared and we moved on to other things.