Gustavus has green power after 27-year effort

FALLS CREEK -- At the end of a three-mile road to nowhere, on the southern edge of one of North America's wildest national parks, the sound of a clean, environmentally friendly energy future is drowned out by the noise of a gurgling salmon stream. Just feet to the side of that stream, a hydroelectric turbine for Gustavus Electric Inc. spins in a small metal building not much bigger than a farmland garage.

Any day, salmon will start spawning in the gravels beside the power plant which takes its water from behind a 12-foot cement wall high above two towering waterfalls on a creek that headwaters in the Fairweather Mountains of Glacier Bay National Park, then diverts that water 600 feet downhill through about two miles of buried pipe to generate electricity before putting the water back into the stream at the upper limit of where salmon spawn.

The dream of electrical engineer Dick Levitt, the project is about as environmentally friendly as man can get. There is no towering dam cutting off passage to fish. There are no spinning windmill blades to kill birds. There are no banks of solar cells covering the floor of a valley. And there is, because of this project, no longer an exhaust-spewing diesel generator burning costly fossil fuels in the 400-plus community of Gustavus with a summer population at least twice that.

All it took for Levitt to get this so-called "run-of-river" project built was 27 years of effort, a legal battle with some of America's most influential environmental organizations and, finally, an act of Congress. Gustavus residents who know the 65-year-old Levitt well contend that if he wasn't such a hard-headed old cuss, their green-leaning community built on an old glacial moraine on the edge of the park would still be getting its power from the aforementioned diesel generator.

That generator went silent when the hydropower project went online earlier this summer. Levitt hopes it will sit silently for the next 100 years, though it is being maintained as an emergency backup for community power just in case. Nobody wants to see it run. Along with adding to atmospheric pollution, the generator each month burns about 20,000 gallons of expensive diesel that significantly boosts the cost of power. The fuel alone costs 20 to 44 cents per kilowatt hour, Levitt said.

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Water to generate hydropower costs nothing. Although there is a sizable payback required on the $8.1 million investment in infrastructure, the power produced by hydro now costs about half as much as diesel power, and the community is free from the constant threat of electric costs rising as global fuel prices rise.

Some do worry the privately run hydropower project makes Levitt something of a Southeast Alaska energy baron, but they are thankful for cheaper power. Levitt, along with running the electric utility and the local "Petroleum Museum," a fully operational 1930s gas station that serves as both local fuel stop and tourist attraction, is the community fuel distributor. He used to have a corner on that market, but there is now competition.

And Levitt, who has seen an old hydropower dream finally come true, admits to being now more focused on a clean-energy future than a dirty energy past.

"I'm going to start pushing electric cars," he said.