Infrastructure builds wrap up: construction also underway in Anchorage's housing market.

• Author: Maloney, Lisa
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

December means wrap-up time for a number of infrastructure projects throughout the state. The list includes power stations and water treatment facilities in rural Alaska, an impressive rush job to repair the Ouzinkie community dam, and an award-winning series of communications towers installed in rural Alaska for GCI's TERRA project.

Infrastructure developments continued apace in Southcentral too, as ENSTAR took just two years to wrap up what would normally have been a ten-year natural gas delivery project in Homer, and the Matanuska Electric Association's (MEA) Eklutna Generation Station is just about ready to come online. Southcentral development is rounded out by an increase in affordable housing and several new office towers at various stages of construction.

Rural Alaska Infrastructure

This year the Alaska Village Electrical Cooperative (AVEC) added a new power plant and fuel tank farm in the community of Stebbins. An intertie between Stebbins and nearby St. Michael will be completed by March 2015, at which point the existing St. Michael power plant will be converted to standby status. AVEC is also in the early stages of designing and funding a Stebbins-St. Michael wind turbine.

This year AVEC also completed a new tank farm in Emmonak and will begin building a new power plant for the same community in spring 2015, with an estimated build time of six to eight months. Once complete, the power plant will supply power to both Emmonak and nearby Alakanuk, where an intertie and wind turbines are already installed but not yet fully integrated.

"Pretty much everything we do is grant funded, either through state or federal funding," says Steve Gilbert, AVEC's manager of energy projects and key accounts. AVEC currently operates fifty power plants and 170 diesel engines in the fifty-six rural communities they serve; add the populations of those communities together, and they'd be the fourth-largest city in Alaska. AVEC also has the largest fleet of wind turbines in the state, with a total of thirty-four in eleven communities.

In July, STG Incorporated began installation of a Buckland wind-diesel turbine for the Northwest Arctic Borough; construction should be complete by late January 2015. They have also installed a number of communications towers for the GCI TERRA project to provide telecommunications and Internet service in rural Alaska. Build sites included Galena, Ruby, Tanana, Gold, Grant Creek, Melozitna, and Mission Hill; this project earned the Engineering News Record award for 2014 Best Regional Project in Specialty Contracting.

Tunista Construction, which belongs to the Bilista holding line along with STG Incorporated, was recently awarded contracts for vertical construction on a Kodiak triplex for housing employees of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge and construction of a 13,164-square-foot Company Operations Facility for Aviation Task Force Phase 3B at Fort Wainwright. Both facilities will meet LEED Silver certification requirements once complete.

In October, Naknek High School received what installer Lime Solar describes as the largest solar array in Alaska. The 310 solar panels (80kW) are expected to produce an average of 200 kilowatt hours each day for the Naknek High School, which is purchasing the power from Capstone Solutions, the system owner. Capstone worked with the RCA and the school to determine the appropriate business structure and paid for the installation; the school is saving money by buying a portion of its energy from Capstone at a fixed rate, below utility cost. "Tire payback on the system is less than five years," explains Chester...