A $413 million cable would give Kenai and Anchorage a second power link

A single transmission path connects Kenai Peninsula power supplies to Anchorage. If it fails, there is no second route.

The Alaska Energy Authority told state lawmakers Thursday it wants to fix that with a subsea cable, 38 miles from Nikiski to Beluga, at $413 million and finished by 2032. Half the money is federal. The other half has not been raised.

The Railbelt system the cable would serve carries power to 75 percent of Alaskans. Executive Director Curtis Thayer said the line would provide "critical backup redundancy for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson" and give utilities more flexibility as Southcentral faces uncertainty over future natural gas supply and cost.

It would be Alaska's first high-voltage direct current project, a design used for long undersea links because alternating current loses too much power over distance. The cable would carry up to 200 megawatts in either direction.

AEA calls the project shovel-ready, with preliminary engineering complete. Two years into the federal award, it has drawn $575,285 of its $206 million federal share, three tenths of one percent. State budget material for fiscal 2027 says the authority still must raise substantial matching funds.

The award is not for the cable alone. It funds the Railbelt Innovation Resiliency Project, which also includes parallel lines and battery energy storage.

Permits covered reconnaissance work in Cook Inlet this summer, and a March AEA presentation said environmental routing was complete and the project was moving into detailed design, permitting and procurement.

The cable was one of four projects AEA presented. The others were a $400 million Bradley Lake expansion targeted for 2031, $173.9 million in Sterling-Soldotna-Quartz Creek upgrades targeted for 2030, and the proposed Susitna-Watana hydroelectric project, 618 megawatts at an estimated $8.7 billion in 2026 dollars.