2026 Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference Wednesday part 2

Doing double duty this week. NHA holds 4 meetings every year around the country. We go to different regions every year, but we always choose to do one of our regional meetings here in Alaska. And we're doing it later this week to kind of coincide with this event. And there's a reason— I'm told, you know, I'm not supposed to pick my favorite region, I'm not supposed to pick my favorite child, but it's not a secret that Alaska is my favorite region.

Coming up here every year, seeing the ingenuity, the entrepreneurial spirit, just the problem solving, the challenges that you've got to face up here are so unique, and the people who choose to be here are amazing. So thrilled to be— thrilled to be back here. Alaska is a place where hydropower just makes sense. It's 30% of Alaska's electricity mix for a good reason. Let me share a few of those reasons why it provides so much electricity here.

And let me just maybe start with the name of this session, Dam Proud. Love the name. We are damn proud of the hydropower here in Alaska. And I think it's got a great, great legacy here and a great future here in Alaska. So Alaska In Alaska, hydropower makes sense for a number of reasons.

First, it's got great terrain and climate for hydropower. Between the mountains and the water you get in Southwest Alaska, Southeast Alaska, it's a tremendous hydropower resource. Secondly, you've got over 200 communities that are not road connected. You know, these communities need independent microgrids to be able to survive. As someone from the lower 48, that is mind-boggling to me to have that, you know, hundreds of microgrids to be able to have sustainable electricity and a modern lifestyle.

That's an achievement that really hydropower can play a tremendous role in powering those microgrids. Third, due to weather, hydropower really can provide a resource that some other resources like solar aren't able to provide up here in Alaska. We are allowing hydropower to bolster the grid when the sun isn't shining. Finally, I also want to highlight the tremendous potential of other water power resources. Marine energy technologies like wave, tidal, and current technologies are an amazing resource for coastal rural communities, particularly here in Alaska.

And that's one of the reasons why I love coming back every year.

As you can see from this slide, hydropower in Alaska exists It's clustered around population centers where there's more mountainous terrain, where there's higher rainfall. This map probably isn't a surprise to many of you. You can see the different kinds of hydropower. There's conventional hydropower with reservoir storage. There's run-of-river hydropower.

There's marine energy technologies and Igiaqing and other communities. It really is an amazing mix of technologies here in Alaska. I can't highlight all of the facilities in Alaska. There's too many hydropower facilities. And the joke in the hydropower industry is that if you've seen one hydropower facility, you've seen one hydropower facility, because they all are very, very unique.

Let me just highlight a handful then. The first I wanted to highlight is Gold Creek facility in Juneau. That was one of the first hydropower facilities I got to visit here in Alaska. One of the reasons I love it is it's literally downtown Juneau. It was a few blocks from the hotel where we're holding our conference.

It dates back to 18— look at my notes here— 1896 was when that facility first went online. And it's still providing affordable, reliable, emission-free power to Juneau from 1896. I had to Google to see who was president 1896. It was Grover Cleveland. McKinley was going to get elected at the end of the year, and that facility is still producing power.

It's a real credit to the ingenuity of the pioneers in Alaska to help build that facility, and then all the creative engineers since then that have kept it running for all these decades. The Eklutna facility near Anchorage is another facility I wanted to highlight. It's on the national list of National Registry of Historic Places. It's relatively new, dates back to the 1920s. The modern facility built in the 1950s provides about 40 megawatts of power to Anchorage and others.

I'm excited to actually be touring that facility later today with some of my NHA and hydropower colleagues. Curtis earlier this morning highlighted the Bradley Lake facility. Largest hydro facility in the state, 120 megawatts of installed capacity, generates about 10% of the annual electricity used by the rail belt utilities. And he touched upon as well the proposed Dixon Diversion, which could increase the generation by almost 50% from that facility. The last one I wanted to highlight is Igia iq.

And I wanted to highlight it just because it is different. Rather than a traditional hydropower technology. This is using marine energy, a tidal defense, a tidal device that produces power in the small community. I think there's about 70 people who live in the native village. And like so many rural Alaska communities, they're dependent on, you know, number 2 diesel being flown in by seaplane.

And by providing this tidal device, they're able to to offset a significant portion of that diesel fuel. And it runs 24/7. It's just providing power as the river current turns it. So an amazing array of technologies up here in Alaska. The Igia iq facility is the first tribal entity to receive a FERC permit for a water power device that's not connected to a dam.

So a lot of creativity, a lot of variety of the hydropower here in Alaska. What's the future of hydropower in Alaska? There is a lot of momentum for new development. There are a variety of projects in different stages of development, whether it's new pump storage, new transmission, expanding existing facilities, marine and tidal projects. At the regional meeting later this week, we're going to hear from developers who are exploring 11 different projects for new or expanded hydropower in the state.

I wish there was as much enthusiasm and energy in the lower 48 for new hydropower. There's a lot of interest in new pumped storage, but in terms of new hydropower, Alaska is really where the creative solutions are taking place. Let me switch. And go out a little bit from Alaska to talk a little bit about the rest of the United States. While Alaskans have an especially close relationship with hydropower, in the lower 48, hydropower is the quiet, unsung hero of the grid.

It delivers power to 25 million Americans, yet it doesn't get that much attention. It's over 100 gigawatts of either traditional hydropower, run-of-river hydropower, or pumped storage. The first commercial facility started in 1883, so the folks up in Juneau were adding hydropower just about a decade later. There were two main waves of hydropower, the first in the 1920s and '30s, and then again in the '50s, kind of '60s and '70s, and most of those assets are still going strong today. It's found in all 47 states.

States. There we go. All 48 states around the country, every state except for Delaware and Mississippi. Overall, it's about 6% of US generation, but it's a much larger portion of the critical heroes on the grid, the essential reliability attributes that you need, whether that's black start to restart the grid when it goes down, or long-duration energy storage, 8+ hours to provide grid reliability when there's extreme weather events. Hydropower plays a disproportionate role on the grid.

As you can see from this map, hydropower spans across the nation, even in places where you may not expect it. I would encourage folks to check out NHA's website, hydro.org. A lot of really interactive tools, maps. You can dive in and really see where hydropower is. In your community, even where proposed projects are in your community.

So now let me switch for a moment and talk a little bit about the challenges faced by hydropower. We are a mature technology. We're more like the Edison Electric Institute managing kind of existing utilities than some of the developer-focused wind and solar entities. But there are a lot of existing challenges that we are faced with. The first are regulatory hurdles, and you heard the EPA panel and Governor Dunleavy yesterday talking about this, how we have to streamline the licensing process.

For me, it's amazing to think that it takes longer to re-license an existing hydropower facility than to license a new nuclear facility in this country. So that's just mind-boggling. Hydropower facilities are I think, more like infrastructure. They shape communities. They've been around for 50, sometimes 100 years.

They're integral to that community. Often they created the reservoir that now is the home to vacation homes and a whole recreational industry. And it's crazy that we treat them like they're a brand new energy project. So we are working to urge lawmakers to streamline the licensing process, to make sure that mandatory conditions that are imposed in a facility's license actually relate to the project. That may seem crazy, but right now project owners are asked to complete a virtual wish list of regulatory desires that often have nothing to do with the facility itself.

And that's not me saying it has nothing to do with the facility. FERC actually puts that in the license and says, we don't think this has anything to do with the facility, but we're powerless not to include the license conditions anyway if they're being imposed by another state or federal entity. So we've had facilities have to build amphitheaters for the Boy Scouts, eradicate feral pigs, build US Forest Service roads that don't go to the facility. These may be worthwhile projects, but the hydropower facilities cannot afford to pay for these projects that are unrelated. So my ask is simple: pair the permit to the project.

That's how we need regulatory streamlining reform. We are also dealing with a second challenge, the wave of relicensing in the industry. It is a mature industry. The average facility is over 65 years old. These facilities can be forever facilities if you maintain them like a bridge or a road.

They can last forever, but you do need to maintain them. 40% Of the non-federal fleet is up for relicensing right now. That means that those facilities are making a decision. Should we spend millions of dollars just for the paperwork to go through the relicensing process? It's going to take about a decade, and we're not going to know what's going to be imposed upon us at the end of it.

We may have to make hundreds of millions of dollars at the end of that relicensing process. Or should we just surrender the license and build something different? Um, 68 facilities in the last few years have chosen to surrender the license. So this isn't a hypothetical risk. Most of those facilities have been tiny, but unfortunately at our conference we're now talking about surrender, license surrender for the much bigger facilities as a very real risk.

Again, that's 1,600 megawatts of existing hydropower that could go away, mostly because of self-inflicted wounds of these regulatory burdens. I do want to talk about that aging infrastructure. I mentioned that the average facility is 65 years old. One of the things that's often needed are upgrades of both dam safety and the environmental protections. You may need to dredge behind the reservoir.

You may need to upgrade so that you've got fish-friendly turbines. Any of those investments take money. We're pleased to work with Alaska's own Senator Lisa Murkowski. She's championing a bill to create a federal tax support for those kind of dam infrastructure investments, dam safety, environmental improvements could really help lengthen and the viability and the economics of these facilities. She's working with Senator Maria Cantwell in a bipartisan effort to try to make that happen.

Fourth challenge is just the reality of extreme weather. We're seeing hydropower being tested by extreme weather ranging from mudslides in Juneau to the megadrought that's threatening the Colorado River system. DOE models show that rising temperature creates more moisture in the air. And that means that the lower 48 is actually expected to see more water in the next 50 years than we have been. That creates both opportunities and challenges for hydropower.

Final challenge that I wanted to highlight is what I think of as a lack of champions. Hydropower actually enjoys broad bipartisan support. There was a bill just enacted, signed by President Trump a couple weeks ago, called the Build More Hydro Bill. It passed the Senate unanimously. Democrats, Republicans generally like hydropower.

But I sometimes joke that it's like a sports team. We've got lots of fans. You know, a lot of people buy our fans, but very few buy our jersey. They're just not as dedicated. We're just out of sight, out of mind, and we need more champions at all levels of government.

Many assume that hydropower is already taken care of and will always be there, but that's simply not the case. Let me switch to end my presentation talking more about the opportunities. Um, I do see a number of opportunities and reasons why I'm optimistic about the future of hydropower here in Alaska and in the lower 48. The first is simply load growth. You're experiencing it here in Alaska, certainly experiencing it in the lower 48, whether it's because of data centers and AI or reshoring manufacturing.

We're seeing big tech companies and others increasingly signing power purchase agreements with hydropower, and that's exciting. These companies need reliable baseload power and they're looking to hydropower to provide that. Second reason for support, and this I think is underappreciated, is new tax support.

You want to build new hydropower here in Alaska or anywhere else, it's now up to 50% off. I'll say that again. Hydropower is currently on sale between 30% and 50% off depending on where it is. So when you're thinking about various projects in Alaska, whether it's Bradley Lake or, well, let me not get into all, into specifics, particular projects. But I think it's worth reexamining hydropower in Alaska because of the tax support.

Specifically, what I'm referring to is the One Big Beautiful Bill last year. Preserve the full value of the IRA tax credits for hydropower and other water power technologies as long as you begin construction by the end of 2033. So if you could begin construction in the next 7, 8 years, you can get a significant federal tax support. It significantly— it also maintains the elective pay provisions or direct pay provisions that allow government entities, public power, to literally get a check from the federal government for taking advantage of these tax credits. So if you're a public power entity, if you're a rural community and you think, tax credits don't really apply to me, I'm not a taxable entity, well, the Tennessee Valley Authority got a check for $25 million, literally a paper check, from using this program.

So it's available to you, and it really is a game changer. Trump's support is also a reason for optimism. He enthusiastically signed that Build More Hydro bill a couple of weeks ago. He's repeatedly said that hydropower is fantastic. That permeates throughout the administration.

I also believe that hydropower is essential to any climate solution. As I mentioned earlier, more extreme, you know, Hotter climate, more water, that actually helps hydropower. There was a study coming from the Department of Energy that looked at the drought in the West, the mega drought that they've been experiencing in the Colorado, and found that hydropower's actually performed really well even during that mega drought, reaching 80% capacity every year during this drought. So I think we've proven ourselves to be a reliable source of power. Final source of optimism is the Department of Energy.

The Department of Energy has recently agreed to resume negotiations to release $430 million for upgrades at 300 facilities around the country. That includes 4 projects in communities around Alaska, including Chugach Electric with the Alaska Energy Authority, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Alaska Electric Light and Power in Juneau. And I'm pleased that Alex Mendek, who runs that system, is here today. And so his project should get $5 million as part of this. And Alex is not only a friend, but also a member of NHA's board of directors, which just shows how kind of central Alaska is to NHA and the hydro industry.

So in— final reason for optimism deals with workforce. And that's a challenge here in Alaska, as it is everywhere in the energy industry. Uh, and I'm pleased to say that NHA and our sister organization, the Hydro Foundation, are working harder than ever to address workforce challenges in the energy space, which some refer to as the silver tsunami. The Hydro Foundation is hosting career expos alongside industry events, helping to establish waterpower clubs at colleges and trade schools, sharing amazing waterpower careers on social media, and offering scholarships to deserving students. So we've also started a Future Leaders of Water Power group within the industry to encourage early professionals to get the mentoring and the support and the coaching they need to succeed in the industry.

So in closing, I want to say thank you for your time. Thank you for your continued recognition of the core part that hydropower plays in Alaska and can play around the country. My two pieces of homework for you is check out our website, learn more about hydropower. You can burrow in on our facts page about hydropower in your community. Also encourage you, if you haven't done so, take a tour of a local facility.

Every facility is different. They're happy to have you. And once you see the facilities up close and personal, it really gives you a greater appreciation for this amazing technology and the people who operate them. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Malcolm, for that insightful presentation and for highlighting the importance of hydropower in Alaska and across the nation. Our next presentation.