**Title**: Energy in the North - Ron Vinson
**Date**: November 5, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Ron Vinson


00;00;00;14 - 00;00;09;11 [Ron Vinson] We have our intake structure here. This is the shaft that goes down into the, into the mountainside, and you have a slide gate that opens and closes, and that's what controls the flow

00;00;09;11 - 00;00;16;13 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, we traveled to Blue Lake Hydroelectric Dam with Sitka City and Borough Utility Director Ron Vinson. In 2015, the dam height was raised around 80ft as part of an expansion project to double the dam's capacity to generate up to 16MW of electricity. Let's go check out the dam.

00;00;27;22 - 00;00;30;15 [Ron Vinson] This is Blue Lake. Yeah, it is very clean water. So we just want to make it clear that this this is our drinking source. So, aside from, like, chlorination or UV, we try to keep this water as clean as possible. Our filtration plant would probably help with some of the other stuff, but, you know, we we prefer people don't spill oil and things like that. Yeah. So essentially what happens, we have our intake structure here. This is the shaft that goes down into the, into the mountainside, and you have a slide gate that opens and closes, and that's what controls the flow in the penstock that goes down the plant. So a pretty basic system. Same thing. If you think about those generators down there, it's the same thing as, like what you would see on a in an old movie with a paddle wheel next to it like a mill or something that generates or transforms electricity to power. 

00;01;15;15 - 00;01;16;12 [Amanda Byrd] There's the dam.

00;01;16;12 - 00;01;18;27 [Ron Vinson] And there's the dam.

00;01;18;27 - 00;01;24;19 [Amanda Byrd] And so had the dam not been here, this would have just been a natural river flowing down.

00;01;24;19 - 00;01;25;11 [Ron Vinson] Yeah.

00;01;25;11 - 00;01;26;14 [Amanda Byrd] It's raining again.

00;01;26;14 - 00;01;27;10 [Ron Vinson] It does that here. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward. The lake is beautiful. It extends way up into this valley here quite a ways. Much of the year, you'll see it this high. I think normally we start spilling, and it's it is pretty darn accurate, normally we start spilling right at the beginning of July. And an interesting thing is, I want to say we had about about 50% of our typical snowpack this year. So even in a quote unquote, like I don’t want to call it a drought year, but a low precipitation year, we have really good reliability when it comes to the ability to produce hydropower. Yeah, that's something that, you know, down south you don't see very often.

00;02;27;10 - 00;02;18;29 [Amanda Byrd] Wow. That's really....

00;02;18;29 - 00;02;20;11 [Ron Vinson] So here's what's really cool. Like you can see where the old spillway used to be. That's the 80ft.

00;02;24;18 - 00;02;26;06 [Amanda Byrd] Yeah, I can see the difference.

00;02;26;06 - 00;02;36;04 [Ron Vinson]  This is considered a it's called a plunge pool down here. When they do inspections on that, every time we spill, they'll do an inspection down there to make sure that we didn't get any excessive erosion.

00;02;36;04 - 00;02;39;09 [Amanda Byrd] How do you spill water if you wanted to let water go through

00;02;39;09 - 00;03;48;15 [Ron Vinson] We have two ways. So you can see this piece right here, the little round circle and you can kind of see the concrete structure around it. It's called a cone valve. Have you ever used, like, like a garden hose? And you, you kind of squeeze a little trigger thing and it opens up. It's the same kind of valve. Dissipates water, by spraying it out, and so it doesn't erode the whole plunge pool area. So we have that, that is kind of our low level outlet for, for this dam. Other than that, the only way that we're getting water around this dam is either it spills or goes through, through the, intake over there. This project has let us basically store enough water to where we are solid throughout the year. And we have quite a ways to grow. And again, if we can do like offline storage, with something like hydrogen or battery bank or there there is potential for us at some point in the future to charge people's batteries remotely. Like we can charge up their batteries in the middle of the night when no one's using electricity, when essentially our water would have just spilled anyways, we can charge up their batteries and then they can run off those batteries for a couple days.

00;03;48;15 - 00;04;00;08 [Amanda Byrd] Ron Vinson is the Sitka City and borough utility director. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.