Cook Inlet

From Jeffrey Kennett at Homer News.

Under the current plan? Approximately 330 to 350 marine hydrokinetic turbines would be placed in Cook Inlet alongside 66 modular data center pods.

FERC says the pods would use electricity generated directly by the turbines and rely on the surrounding water for passive cooling.

Plans also include a roughly 3.5-mile 115-kilovolt power and fiber-optic cable running from the offshore development to a landing site in the Nikiski Industrial Corridor.

100 megawatts under Cook Inlet, fed by 330 to 350 tidal turbines, hangs on a 3.5-mile 115 kV cable into Nikiski.

Break that cable, and those 66 compute pods have a very expensive view of the seafloor.

FERC accepted a preliminary permit application.

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thing about pike distribution that's kind of come to my forefront through you and through looking at or some of your research and listening to some of the things that you've done here with the department is the fact that northern pike in this area are using a marine environment to uh to distribute themselves and i don't see this as like they're intentionally seeking this as a pathway to to seek out new areas, it's more or less in my assumption, they're being dumped into a marine environment and then finding waters, fresh waters that they can come into.

So speak to that a little bit, speak to the unique aspect of like, you know, pike using the marine environment of Cook Inlet to distribute themselves.

It's fascinating to me.

It is.

It's fascinating to us as well.

And it's interesting because piker thought of as a freshwater fish, right? So what are they just doing out in the ocean? Same thing, like if you found a largemouth bass out there or something weird, but i should clarify they're not found in fully marine waters this is kind of brackish water we're talking about in the upper end of cook inlet now what's kind of interesting for people that don't know is there's actually pike that live in brackish environments in the baltic sea so the baltic sea has a population of pike But the Baltic Sea is kind of a stable salinity, stable with their tides.

Their tides are on the order of like several inches, I think.

Whereas in Cook Inlet, I mean, we have like 30 foot tide swings.

I'm Ava White.

Hillcorp employees say an oily sheen appeared in western Cook Inlet on Wednesday while they were investigating a separate sheen first reported late last month.

Crews say the sheen appeared after the company restarted a water outfall line at its defunct spark platform in the inlet's trading bay.

A joint command of agencies responding to the site said Hillcorp employees noticed the sheen around 11 a.m. near the platform's southeast corner.

So why are we talking about it now?

So you're right, it isn't a new problem in the sense that companies have worried before about demand for Cook Inlet gas outpacing supply.

But we're now at a point where utilities say customers could be impacted by that intersection as soon as this winter.

Cook Inlet is the state's oldest producing oil and gas basin, and for years, big companies and Alaskans benefited from lots of easy to access and cheap gas.

But production started falling in the mid-2000s, and not long after, large producers started pulling out because it wasn't economically viable.

Then Hillcorp Alaska moved in, and over time became the region's dominant developer, but now they're facing challenges too.

I'd be happy to link to a history that I wrote on this for the podcast.

But Alaska actually discovered commercial quantities of oil and gas in the 1950s in Cook Inlet, south of Anchorage.

So this is separate from the big North Slope discoveries, which happened in 1968.

And in 1962, Alaska brings its first gas turbine online on the rail belt.

Our hope with this legislation, now with the tariffs that are on the books, which we can talk about, is that this will enable the majority of Alaskans, again, who live on the rail belt, to subscribe to one of these community solar arrays and get the benefits of the cheapest electricity humanity has ever figured out how to create, which is solar PV.

And I would make an important distinction here between the value of that solar to the individual customer or member owner, because again, all of these folks are member owners of a cooperative, versus the value to the grid.

And we are in a place right now where every single electron that we can bring online is essential for displacing gas because we are running out of that methane gas from the cook inlet.

However, this is also Alaska, right? I'm sitting here at 65 degrees north latitude.