Regulators approve Golden Valley's plan for rolling outages in the Interior

State regulators on Thursday approved Golden Valley Electric Association's plan for rolling outages, which would cut power to parts of its Interior service area for about 30 minutes to an hour at a time if the co-op runs short of electricity.

Under the plan, which takes effect Oct. 30, Golden Valley would rotate outages through 13 zones, cutting only as many as needed, until it has enough power again. A 14th zone, which includes Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, Fairbanks police and fire, emergency dispatch, Fairbanks International Airport and water treatment facilities, would be left out. Members can find their zone on maps on Golden Valley's program page, and the co-op is working to print it on bills.

Outages would come only at the highest of three alert levels, when the co-op has no spare generating capacity left. Golden Valley's first-ever alert, on Oct. 12, reached Level 2 when a third generating unit went down unexpectedly while two others were out for maintenance. On Friday, its alert page showed Level 1, the lowest alert level.

Golden Valley cannot exempt its 118 accounts coded for medical necessity from the rotation, Regulatory Manager Jessica Broker told commission staff.

"The CLSP zones are based on substation feeder locations, not individual member meters," Broker said. "Some of the medical devices you identified do have short-term battery storage which should be sufficient to withstand a 30-minute rolling black out."

Commission staff said those members should get as much notice as possible.

The only public comment came from the Alaska Public Interest Research Group. It wrote that the Fort Knox and Pogo gold mines use 30 percent of Golden Valley's power and asked whether any industrial members are in the outage zones and, if not, whether that would violate state law by creating two classes of customers. The approved tariff says the program affects "all customer classes." Golden Valley says it would first work with its largest industrial members to cut their use.

The co-op has struggled to keep up with demand since February 2025, when Cook Inlet gas shortages cut off the gas-fired power it had long bought from Anchorage-area utilities. Staff told its board in August that it had lacked enough generation in reserve on 236 of the previous 250 days, which staff described as a measure of reliability risk.