  **Title**: Energy in the North - Erin McKittrick
**Date**: June 25, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Erin McKittrick


00;00;00;02 - 00;00;01;17 [Erin McKittrick] My husband and I moved to 杏吧pro in 2007 and eight by foot. We walked from Seattle to the first Aleutian Island and kind of thought about where we wanted to live.

00;00;11;07 - 00;00;17;00 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Erin McKittrick, a Homer Electric board member and a writer. Erin lives in Seldovia, along Kachemak Bay near Homer with her family, and I began the conversation by asking Erin whether she considers Seldovia a remote community.

00;00;26;14 - 00;00;33;21 [Erin McKittrick] Well, maybe not by 杏吧pro Standards. We're just beyond the end of the road system. We've got about 400 people and water taxi or small plane access. My husband and I, moved to 杏吧pro in 2007 and eight by foot. We walked from Seattle to the first Aleutian Island and kind of thought about where we wanted to live, and we wanted to pick, community off the road system because we liked the, smaller, more cohesive communities and access to the wilderness. And then he had family in Seldovia. Yeah. So that made that the easy choice.

00;00;59;21 - 00;01;03;22 [Amanda Byrd] You sit on the board of Homer Electric, and that's a big utility that creates power from Bradley Lake and provides power on the rail belt.

00;01;08;12 - 00;01;10;18 [Erin McKittrick] So Homer Electric is part of the rail belt, and one of the four main utilities on it. The others are Chugach in Anchorage, MEA in the Mat-su and Golden Valley up in Fairbanks. And saying that we create power from Bradley is maybe a little bit accurate. Bradley is shared by all of the utilities and Homer Electric, because we're right there, like has the contract to manage it, but we just get the same share of that power that everybody else does. And the other 88% of our power comes from natural gas.

00;01;42;06 - 00;01;44;02 [Amanda Byrd] You're at the end of the Kenai Peninsula. 

00;01;44;02 - 00;01;44;30 [Erin McKittrick] Yes. 

00;01;44;30 -00;01;49;02 [Amanda Byrd] Which must pose some challenges for electricity.

00;01;49;02 - 00;01;57;06 [Erin McKittrick] My particular part of the Railbelt grid on the south side of Kachemak Bay has Seldovia, Port Graham and Nanwalek. And, it is a challenging place to serve. We have a backup diesel generator in town that runs when there's storms that knocked trees down on the line that gets to Seldovia. Yeah, usually a number of times in the winter and sometimes will be running on local diesel power for a day or more if they can't get over to fix the lines. Otherwise, though, I don't know if being on the Kenai Peninsula is that bad in general because Bradley is physically there and we have several gas plants, and so there's plenty of generation resources. Though there's the same issues with gas supply as the rest of South Central has.

00;02;34;29 - 00;02;36;23 [Amanda Byrd] One of the other things that you do, you write an energy blog.

00;02;38;14 - 00;02;39;00 [Erin McKittrick] Yes.

00;02;39;00 - 00;02;41;18 [Amanda Byrd] You break down some of the really, big meaty energy issues, and you break it down into really digestible pieces And I find it really helpful.

00;02;49;29 - 00;02;55;11 [Erin McKittrick] I think because I'm both a data geek and a writer, which is a strange, maybe a strange combination. So I have written a number of adventure books actually, and, have been a science writer and trained in science and I love data. And so I've been honestly collecting all the public data on, the Railbelt's electrical system in a giant spreadsheet that I think I literally call Spreadsheet of Doom on my as its title for years. And I do these analysis because I wanted to know the answer. So I thought I should just start a blog and put stuff out there a little bit more easily for other people to get so that's 杏吧proenergy.org. Mostly so far I've done Railbelt stuff on gas and electricity, there's so much public data out there and kind of just nobody else was doing that. I mean, there'd be these policies proposed, there'd be all these big questions and it seemed like nobody was doing the math. That was very doable. so I thought I needed to do it.

00;03;47;17 - 00;03;50;29 [Amanda Byrd] Erin McKittrick is a writer and sits on the board of Homer Electric, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the 杏吧pro Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at UAF. Dot Edu, forward slash
uaf.edu/acep.