The election for the board of Chugach Electric Association ended Friday, and the green candidates backed by Outside money made headway.
Nine candidates were competing for three seats to guide the future of Anchorage’s electric utility. Three of the candidates were endorsed by Outside dark money through the Alaska Center for the Environment.
The results were that two of the green-endorsed candidates won seats on the board: Susanne Fleek-Green and Jim Nordland.
The results:
14,156 votes of 90,210 members voted.
Susanne Fleek-Green 6,725
Jim Nordland 6,417
Bettina Chastain 6.258
Shaina Kilcoyne 6,002
Harold Hollis 4,944
Brad Authier 4,056
Steve Konkel 2,109
Scott Von Gemmingen 1,871
James Wileman, 1,341
By-law change passed: 7,712 ves to 6,202 no
Because it is an electric association, campaign transparency laws do not apply and so the public will not know how much dark money came into play to influence voters, but across America, the environmental industry is trying to take over electric utilities and force them into solar and wind energy.
The electric utility, which bought Anchorage Municipal Light and Power two years ago, has nearly 500 employees.
The 2023 annual meeting, election, and member appreciation event was held Friday afternoon, with the annual meeting following at ChangePoint Alaska.
14,000 out of 90,000 voted. 90,000 will complain when their electric bills skyrocket. You get what you vote for, and not voting is still a vote. SMH…
What about the winner of the $$ door prizes??
Who won???
The CEA Board had no explanation on why GVEA and other utilities offered credits for residential wind and solar installations and CEA does not. CEA members obviously did not buy into the Board’s flimsy reasoning of higher utility rates. While on the subject of future natural gas supplies, why is Anchorage’s Beluga natural gas scheduled to be diminished by the Donlin Gold Mine?
Scheduled when? Please explain.
Watch your electric bills go up!
If all the Must Read Alaska readers living in Anchorage had voted—there would have been NO CONTEST! WTF are you readers doing out there. . . haven’t you observed, seen, experienced ENOUGH results of not voting!!
It’s time you accept this is the kind of society Anchorage wants.
Not bothering to vote is a vote. And the bulk of voters in Anchorage want Portland.
Does the AK gop take the time to send out anything on the candidates? I would bet the left isn’t sitting on their hands. I would bet there are texts and emails and 8 ways from Sunday they are getting their people to vote for their candidates.
What do we need to do to keep the DARK money out of ALASKA?
Left = Organized. Right = Stubborn and apathetic. You get what you don’t vote for. I’m with No Longer Sleeping, Lady! and I’m beyond sick of this. This city and state are being given away.
Can’t bother to vote, you deserve this.
Hope you like high bills, reduced power, and more concerns about social issues than customer, err serf, service.
Tell me again this is a conservative state. I love a good joke.
Those that claim to be conservative and are too lazy to vote aren’t hurting enough yet. It’s coming, just not soon enough.
Finally some good news.
In the backward and upside-down Bizarro World that you inhabit, maybe.
I honestly hope you’re on a fixed income and the rate increases that are on the horizon hurt you more than others. I have no idea why folks with your mindset are good with making abundant energy sources so much more expensive.
Where does that leave the makeup of the board in regards to believing rainbows and unicorn farts are a plausible way to provide electricity to their members and those who understand what it actually entails?
This result sets up an interesting dynamic, with by my count a 4-3 majority on the Board for the Alaska Center for the Environment (Fleek-Green, Nordlund, Wiggins, and maybe Morse). The two new Directors have close ties to Mark Begich. Wiggin is the perfect democrat candidate. Begich is gonna have a lot of say in the direction of the new majority.
The wild card here is Nordlund, who is a self-serving snake. While he does things in his own self interest, he is usually a reliable flag carried for all things democrat. Sadly, today, that flag is all things climate.
The campaign was an interesting episode of Blue on Blue, with everyone running either elected with or supported by the IBEW or the new player in town, the Alaska Center for the Environment. I suspect the new goal is to cash in on the zero carbon free federal $$$ floating around. And if we are lucky, that’s all they will end up doing. OTOH, if they are allowed to start shutting down natural gas fired generation or exploration in Cook Inlet, things are gonna get very cold, very dark, and very expensive in the not so distant future. I predict the public response will be home generators, either natural gas or propane fired, hardly a zero carbon world.
One final little observation: The bill is coming due this fall for some things left over from the Chugach – ML&P merger. Chugach spent all the free $$$ from that merger, so that is not available to pay the bills when they come due. I predict they will go to the RCA for a rate increase, likely a big one, sometime later this year. Cheers –
Why should voters, justifiably skeptical about everything else that happens during elections, unquestioningly trust government or utility officials to tell them the truth about election turn out and results?
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Their numbers can’t be indepently verified. Voters have no separate advocate with the forensic skill set to verify election results and turnouts were what officials said they were.
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Customers know that motive, means, and opportunity existed to tilt election results in a way not favorable to them. But the good faith efforts of those who have the most to gain by doubling the cost of electricity will persuade them that didn’t happen, could never happen?
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Some voters still seem almost desperate to accept, without question, any statistic reported to them by election officials who are in no way accountable to them for statistical accuracy or moral rectitude.
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Why is that?
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Could this be seen by Anchorage Assembly members as a beta test, a next step, to see whether trusting voters will accept convenient, computerized elections which can never be accurately verified?
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We’re in deep trouble if it is and they did.
I think you’re overthinking this.
Occam’s razor: alleged conservatives are too lazy to vote. Progressives aren’t.
Overthinking can be problematic. On the other hand, conflating simple with correct can be risky.
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The risk lies in assuming: (a) it’s reasonable to impose philosophic, scientific precepts on every messy day-to-day challenge, and (b) it may be used as a way of glossing over complex, crucial components of an argument, thus leaving one vulnerable to confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret, in this case, election data in a way that affirms one’s prior hypotheses.
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Wouldn’t call it overthinking to raise reasonable questions about an election which seems remarkably lacking in transparency.
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Then again, you can’t blame folks for not wanting to hear such questions if it looks like the answers might be too upsetting to contemplate.
Generate you own power and use the waste heat to heat domestic water and heat the house. Enstar and Chugach have finally reached the level where a prime power small system is cheaper.
What a surprise. Not.
ANC is Blue.
The beauty of living totally off-grid is….. magnificent!
Anyone who thinks that living “off the grid” is “beautiful and magnificent” is also someone who still has an electricity meter hooked up to his/her house. A neighbor has been off the electric grid for years. He says it is the most expensive thing he has ever done.
And he isn’t very far off the grid, after all.
His batteries that run the house, in turn are powered by generators that all need a constant supply of gasoline to function. The batteries need store-bought distilled water poured in them every week. Any supply chain disruption and that is the end of his heating and hot water systems. Plus, his enormously expensive battery stack has to all be replaced periodically, for thousands of dollars each time. (Can’t just replace one or two, as the money becomes available- have to change them all over at the same time.)
He has said many times that it is really dumb to think that going off the grid will save any money. His only satisfaction so far has been telling the electric company to take their 5G smart meter and shove it.
NOPE!! I’m totally off-grid. No electric meter or lines to my house. Sure, I’ll have to replace my battery bank in maybe….. 20 years from now. This is because I take care of my system and by thay time, battery technology will have matured to something even better. Yes, in the winter I use Diesel for my genset to charge the system. The magnificent part is that I can control my expenses and yes, I’m not beholden to the power company. Sure, I need to buy fuel and maintenance supplies, but you know what? My utility costs over the year aren’t any more than the average house that’s on the grid. Oh, and another advantage is that when a storm takes out the grid for any amount of time, I’m still up and going.
You sound petty and jealous. Why? At least he isn’t paying $400 electric bills every month like the rest of us suckers – likely to go up to $500 now that the communists have take over the electric board.
if you took the time to investigate for yourself the opportunity that wind power presents to Alaskan ratepayers you might realize that there are advantages over the gas and oil games being played on us now . Do you really think there is no value to millions of mega watt hours of power that will come from the inclusion of local ,sustainable wind power . The guessing and uninformed assumptions are just that and if you do the math yourself you might see a different reality playing out . Green or not wind is a better buy in the energy market that Alaskans have been saddled with .Useless coal plant (HCC) in Healey, billions spent on overcapacity (gas plants) in ANC, unstable gas supply’s these things are what is driving up the power rates.15 years of operating the Delta wind farm has proven to me that the COST of wind power is cheaper than what we are doing now, GREEN or not !
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