Juneau invented cruise ship shore power. Doing it again costs $111.5 million

In 2001, Princess Cruises, Alaska Electric Light & Power and the City and Borough of Juneau built the first cruise ship shore power facility in the world, at Franklin Dock. Ships plugged into the grid instead of idling their engines at the dock, and over twenty years the arrangement has put about $9 million in credits on Juneau residents' power bills.

Neither of the city's two other downtown berths can do it. Electrifying them would now cost about $111.5 million, according to an estimate produced a third of the way through design and going before the Docks and Harbors Board on Thursday. Earlier city budgets carried $24.9 million, though that figure covered construction only. Labor and materials by themselves are nearly three times it.

The design would tap the utility's transmission line above South Franklin Street, run an overhead extension downhill to a new substation on the lower slopes of Mount Roberts, and put two transformers there, on ground already cleaned up after historic fuel tanks came out. Room is reserved for a third transformer to serve a future Huna Totem dock. Each berth would get a power outlet mounted in a trench and a mobile crane to handle the cable.

There is a limit on how much of this Juneau can actually use. A 2022 city study found the borough has surplus hydropower to serve docked ships roughly a quarter of the time. The rest of the year the power is spoken for. The utility has separately raised concerns about the plugging and unplugging of each ship, about system stability, and about what it means for ratepayers.

Nobody has said who pays for the $111.5 million. The city granted the utility $1.8 million in 2024 to carry the design through 2027, and a city official told an Assembly committee at the end of August that a funding gap remains.