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First Things First by The First Things First Alaska Foundation (FTFAF) is broadcast monthly on KINY on Saturday at 9 a.m. and on KJNO on Sunday at 9 a.m. Each episode explores the balance Alaskans face: protecting our state's rugged beauty and vast wilderness while advocating for sustainable economic growth through responsible natural resource management.
With thousands of jobs lost in the past decades due to restrictive regulations, First Things First raises vital questions about the future of Alaska’s economy. Can we preserve our cherished landscapes, waterways, and wildlife while fostering prosperity for generations to come?
Join FTFAF as we explore essential areas for Southeast Alaska’s growth—highlighting education, advocacy, and smart development.
Time once again for another First Things First podcast. I am Dano, and if you ever wanna check out a First Things First podcast, you can always check out past episodes over at kinyradio.com or more information about First Things First or podcast at ftfakfoundation.org. It is our first spring edition here in the brand new studio as I welcome Don Havager, your executive director. Frank Bergstrom, he is your First Things First president, and we are welcoming Alec Mesdek. He is the president and CEO of AELMP.
Speaker 1:We did it, Spring officially here and in the new studios too. You guys digging in?
Speaker 2:It is beautiful in here. Fantastic. I like the fish on the wall. Very spring like. The fish are coming up.
Speaker 2:They're returning. We're ready to take some spawn.
Speaker 1:It still has that new studio smell in here too, and we're kind of still getting used to the equipment as well. Alec, welcome to the studio. We're really happy to have you here in the spring edition of our First Things First podcast, first one of 2026.
Speaker 3:Thank you guys for having me here today.
Speaker 1:Let's dive into this, Don. I'm gonna hand this over to you because you always are excited.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dano. And I'm so excited to have Mr. Mezdeg with First Things First in this podcast. And the reason for that, I'm going to bring the audience back to our March conversation that was about the second crossing.
Speaker 4:And for a quick reminder for our audience, the second crossing or the state of Alaska DOT set out their Pell study, and they were looking at various options for the location of a second crossing between Mainland Juneau and Douglas Island. And one of the things that they mentioned, particularly at the site location at Salmon Creek, is that a potential problem existed. And that's where at that time we reached out to ALMP to just talk about what would happen if there was any kind of failure with the Salmon Creek Reservoir. And Alec being as busy as he is, we weren't able to schedule him any quicker, but here we are. So Alec, we think, and when I say we, it's First Things First Think, that Juneau would be better served with a second crossing out beyond the airport according to many of my board members or just short of this side of the airport.
Speaker 4:So Alec, what would happen if there were a catastrophic failure, particularly in that Salmon Creek corridor?
Speaker 3:Sure. So with Salmon Creek, the dam itself was built quite a long time ago, so between 1912 and 1916. And it is what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC considers a high hazard dam, meaning that its failure puts at risk life and property down below. So we have to do quite a bit of work to study what would happen or what are some of the potential outcomes of a failure of that dam. And then we have to do work to ensure that that doesn't happen.
Speaker 3:We understand that the risk is there. And if there were a of the worst case scenario for a failure at the dam, a volume of water would travel down very rapidly and quite likely take out the existing two bridges over Salmon Creek on Eagan Drive. And then I suspect that any bridge that landed at that area would also be severely impacted.
Speaker 2:Of course, the likelihood of something like that is very, very low, but rightly so, you're planning, making sure there's an option in the event of the unlikeliest thing possible to actually happen. And that makes me think of that dam, the legacy there, the history is just incredible. It's one of the new technologies that was implemented here in Juneau by miners of old, in that it was over a hundred years ago that they built this thing in the wilderness of Alaska and figured out how to do it and did it to a standard that's very, very high and is still standing and functioning and working for us today. So it's really a phenomenal legacy of our old mining days.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that dam was built by the Alaska Gas Snow Mining Company. And it is the world's first constant angle arch dam, which is something that means quite a lot to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which, named it as a historic landmark for that industry. We are pretty lucky to have it. Project still produces 7% of our electricity here in Juneau and we don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. It wasn't too long ago that we renewed the FERC license to operate that project for another forty years.
Speaker 3:So we have a lot of runway in front of us there.
Speaker 2:To boot, it's one of our water supplies here in Juneau. So it's a dual purpose facility.
Speaker 3:That's right. About one third of Juneau's drinking water is pulled out of the tail race by the city's water utility.
Speaker 2:And Alec, it's just worth mentioning to everybody and reinforcing what probably everybody already knows, and that's that Juno is 100% hydroelectric. All our electricity comes from hydro, although we have diesel and gas backup. So you have a 100 backup for your system. We don't live on a grid, we have our own grid. It's not like when California runs out of energy, they pull some energy in from Utah or something like that.
Speaker 2:We have to run here three sixty five days a year on our own. So you've got a 100% backup, but nonetheless, all the primary power is from hydro. And can you talk a little bit about that and how it's unique in the state, really in the country?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is very unique. When I go around to different utility conferences and talk to folks in this industry and other areas, particularly in the Lower 48, it is hard for me to get them to talk about their systems because they're so interested in what we're doing here. And like you said, we are an islanded system, which means that we are entirely self sufficient in our operations. And that's uncommon in a large interconnected grid where there's a lot more trading happening between different utilities. So here we receive, essentially, we're 100% hydro about 99.7% of the time.
Speaker 3:So we do run those backup diesel generators, you know, every so often to ensure that they're in good working order so that we can be confident that they will operate as intended if we need to use them because of an interruption of a transmission line or something like that. There are five hydroelectric projects. The largest of them is the Senesham project, which is owned by the state through ADA and then operated and maintained by ALMP. And ALMP is essentially responsible for all of the bond payments, things like that. So we carry all of the risks of the project and do our job to take care of it.
Speaker 3:And then we have four hydro projects that are owned by the company. The one we just talked about, Salmon Creek, that is on the same FERC license as the Annex Creek hydroelectric project, which was also built by the Alaska Gas and O Mining Company. And then there is the Lake Dorothy project, which was completed in 2009. And that is the newest project right across, Taku Inlet. And the smallest of our projects is the also the oldest, the Gold Creek hydro project, which is right downtown.
Speaker 3:That's a little run of the river project. So Snedysham, Lake Dorothy, and Annex Creek, those are all lake tap projects. So there's a hole drilled into the side of a lake and then water carried down to the powerhouse at sea level. The Salmon Creek project is our only dam storage project and the Gold Creek project is run of the river.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of unique that hydroelectric comes in big pieces. You talk about four or five different projects. And what would the next piece be if JUNE wanted to grow its economy? Had, say, Auk Landing, back sighted Douglas, a new mine, that kind of thing, just electrification of the docks. How does that come?
Speaker 2:You can't just go out and buy a diesel engine and plug that into some kind of cat generator and add that little bit. You know, you gotta take a big piece and add a bunch. So how does that work out in terms of the mechanics and the financing of it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're right. No hydro projects, the output is determined by the hydrology. So it's not like if we were a natural gas utility, we would just buy little increments of additional capacity or generation capacity as needed. With hydro projects, really need the scale to fit the need and that's very hard to do. Those two things don't align very easily.
Speaker 3:So we tend to think of what would come next as what's a small increment and what's a large increment. And we do have the potential to build a small run of the river project that would add a little bit of energy at Sheep Creek. It is one of those things where what we could do is maybe put a little take a little pressure off some of the reservoirs, because that would be a run of the river project without storage, generate electricity there and and allow us to, take some pressure off the reservoir so they can keep filling during the summer months. Or we could go with a larger increment of hydro, additional storage. And the best opportunity for us to do that is by building out the second phase of Lake Dorothy.
Speaker 3:When the utility built the Lake Dorothy project, rather than spend the additional amount of money to build out the full, potential of the project, it was split into two phases. So they went ahead and drilled into Lake Dorothy, which is at about 2,000 feet of elevation, tapped the lake there. And right now what happens is we control the outlet of that lake through natural drainage. The water falls down into Bart Lake, flows down into Bart Lake at about a thousand feet elevation and that's where it enters the penstock. Now the power output of any hydroelectric generator is the amount of flow times the head pressure of the project.
Speaker 3:So if we go from a thousand feet to 2,000 feet, we can effectively double the power output of the project. And that would require a FERC license modification, FERC license amendment, and then drilling all the way up to the existing lake tap at Lake Dorothy and installing a new turbine generator at the site there. We already have the lake tap completed, transmissions completed, site facilities are there, caretaker facility already exists. And that would add a 30 megawatt unit, which is a pretty big capacity addition, which has a lot of, useful aspects to that. And, it would add about 90 gigawatt hours where right now we generate on average or have the ability to generate on average about four thirty each year.
Speaker 3:So it's a good, good large addition, additional amount of energy.
Speaker 4:Alec talking about small and large projects, it makes me wonder where are we at today as far as meeting Juno businesses residential needs? Are we topping out or do you have excess capacity today?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's actually a tricky, we have a unique situation in that we are still selling a substantial amount of surplus energy to large interruptible customers, the biggest of which being the Greens Creek mine. And then also to Princess and Hall America cruise ships when they plug in at the South Franklin Dock. So that is still, I believe over 15% of our total energy sales are to those customers. So in one sense we have a lot of surplus available for our firm customers to grow into. Of course at this point we are largely selling all of the energy that we have available.
Speaker 3:It's a little bit hard to tell, I think in some ways it's a little bit hard for us to tell exactly, how much we have left because we have had the Annex Creek project offline so much over the last few years while we were working to replace the Pennstock. So we've been without about 6% on average of our energy supply for much of the last few years. And that has impacted our ability to meet 100% of Greens Creek's needs for the last couple of years. They've had short interruptions in the early part of the year in 'twenty five and 'twenty six. And then last year we actually did a very large project at Snedysham replacing two spherical valves on the original two Long Lake units that required us, it limited our power capacity, hydro power availability while those units were offline for that project.
Speaker 3:And so there was a period last summer where we couldn't serve the docks or serve 100% of the Greens Creek mine while that project was ongoing. So I think overall we're still in good shape in being able to meet all or very nearly all of our firm loads plus our interruptible energy sales. But, we are going to have over the next few years some times with the Salmon Creek project offline that will reduce our total energy availability while we're working on replacing the penstock at Salmon Creek. So that is a long way of saying that I think we're still in very good shape. And what we've seen over the last few years is that our looking back say about fifteen years, I was looking at this just recently, where we have had relatively flat energy sales to our firm commercial, and government customers.
Speaker 3:That's been effectively flat. And any growth in energy sales that we have had has come out of the residential sector. And that is mostly and we haven't seen a real much of a change in the average energy used per customer. It seems to be tied to growth in the number of residential accounts. So that seems to be where our growth has happened.
Speaker 3:And then we also still see fluctuations from year to year depending on what temperatures are doing. So we had a pretty cold year a couple of years ago where we saw an increase in our firm energy sales. Last year it got a little warmer. We saw a decrease in our firm energy sales. So we still are bouncing around a little bit there.
Speaker 3:That's pretty common for us to move a lot from year to year. So the overall trend over a longer period is relatively low but not insignificant growth in energy sales.
Speaker 4:Well, Alec, there's a number of things that the community or maybe I'll call them some of our visionaries, growth visionaries, project visionaries are thinking about. One is a project on the backside of Douglas, including cruise ship port, residential growth, potentially. Another one is, of course, Auklanding downtown. We've got the Coast Guard cutter coming in and even potentially another mine, the new Amalga project. If we are to prepare for these, how would AAL and P tackle that?
Speaker 4:And can you meet steady growth?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I feel confident that we will be able to manage or respond to growth in an effective way. The challenge of it is always, I think the biggest challenge for us is actually how long is Greens Creek going to be operating and utilizing the amount of energy that they are today. Because those are fully, that is a fully interruptible customer. And so our confidence in their longevity at the time we're looking at bringing a project online has big consequences for everybody else's rates. Right now, over the last five years, Greens Creek has purchased about around just a little bit below $7,000,000 a year worth of electricity.
Speaker 3:And I think if we look at the types of conversations the city has been having recently, dollars 7,000,000 a year is something that creates impacts in Juneau. So it's one of those things where we don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we take on a large obligation or in revenue requirement. That's something I'll use that term. I think you guys want to talk about the rate case a little bit later, so I'm going to use that term quite a bit. Revenue requirement is the way that utilities are required through regulation to kind of describe, it's kind of the foundation for a rate case.
Speaker 3:Is we use a statutory formula to determine what our annual revenue requirement is based on that, formula. And so if we bring on a new plant, we're going to absorb a certain amount of revenue requirement, the amount of money that we need to generate through rates. And new plant is expensive. So that's the thing. We don't want to take on somewhere between 7,000,000 and $20,000,000 a year of additional revenue requirement without having the security that, for at least a reasonable amount of time, we're going to have those sales, be able to make those sales to Greens Creek and other large customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you might say that electric generation is not quite as granular as other ways of doing it. You guys build a new project, it's a big piece, and it's a lot of money upfront, capital expenditure. So you gotta be able to pay for that right from day one. So optimally you would build it, pay for it, and then run it wide open from day one to day thousand. And that's the best way to manage the finances on that.
Speaker 2:Whereas if it was diesel or something like that, you could idle along from time to time because you didn't really spend that much money. The loan wasn't that big, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. With a hydro project, we're effectively, it's a one way, I think one analogy to use is imagine you built a diesel plant but then you bought all of the fuel upfront that it will ever use for the life of that equipment. And clearly that would make the project quite a bit more expensive out of the gate. We don't get to defer those costs in a hydro project. Everything slams in all at once and the way that the utility makes investment is with capital projects we go ahead and we bring the capital to build the project.
Speaker 3:And then once it is complete and used and useful, is the term in the industry, then we can go to the commission, and ask to include that in rates. So that's akin to what we have just done with the replacement of the Annex Creek penstock. We worked on that project for a number of years. We spent $32,000,000 in addition to another about $33,000,000 of capital investment between 2022 and 2025. And now we've gone to the commission and asked them to allow us to recover that additional capital investment, which is a net addition of $20,000,000 to our rate base.
Speaker 3:We're seeking the opportunity to recover those additional expenses.
Speaker 4:In your filing, or at least maybe it was your press release, I can't quite remember, You kind of say $65,000,000 of expenses that the ratepayer now needs to cover. Is all of that the Penn Stock project? It sounds like it was at this point in time. And I guess the point here is, are we spending money just to take is that $65,000,000 just taken care of our needed infrastructure?
Speaker 3:So it was about half of that $65,000,000 was applied to the Annex Creek penstock. There were a number of other projects that occurred over that time. So things like in our transmission and distribution system, there's a lot of regular replacement of or upgrades to poles and transformers and other substation equipment and things like that. We've done a lot of work to swap out old meters with new more advanced meter technology. So we've had a substantial investment in moving to what they call advanced metering infrastructure or AMI meters that provide a lot of better information to the utility, which we will be able to use to, maintain the system more cost effectively over time.
Speaker 3:And so that customers have better access to how they're using electricity and hopefully can translate that into energy savings over time. One of the things that we've had for a lot of years is a old homegrown, utility billing system. And that is based on, it's built up on Microsoft Dynamics, a version that is no longer going to be receiving support soon. So we very necessarily have begun working to implement a new ERP software system, so new billing system, new financial software. And there was some capital investment associated with that.
Speaker 3:We're still working on getting that implemented, but certain pieces of that capital investment are already in place. So that's a component of this. There's just a lot of stuff to do with the utility all the time.
Speaker 2:And a lot of history there as well. You guys get together and have celebrations from time to time of all the past deeds? I mean, you've had generations working through the company there. I mean, do you have fathers and sons working for you?
Speaker 3:Not at the same time, now, but we have had a lot of, it is at times a family affair. We have more than one married couple works at AEL and P. And it is something where when people get to know the company and understand the culture at the company and that it is a good secure place to work, we work hard to treat employees well and that's something that people learn to appreciate. And so if you've grown up with that and understood that that's what the company is about, then it becomes a desirable place to work, I think.
Speaker 4:You did mention, you know, the rate increase process. You're right, we need to talk about that at least a little bit. And part of it is, first things first, has been involved in community education on affordability. We have a campaign that we often call needs and wants that's directed at community spending on things that we know we need public safety, for example, electricity is probably one of those things. And not spending on things that I'll say become an expensive want that isn't really a part of basic government services.
Speaker 4:So there's the lead in and you're asking for 25% increase. You've talked about a number of very expensive projects you've undertaken $65,000,000 worth. Can you just let the community know about the process and really a little bit more detail about how the process works and why you're asking for this increase and maybe even why you think it's in JUNE's best interest to support it.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to go back just a little bit to kind of set some background for the context of this rate increase because there's one component that's particularly confusing. And Frank, you had mentioned a little bit ago that the most cost effective way to bring on a new hydro project is to ensure that it's fully loaded right out of the gate. And that's what happened when Lake Dorothy came online, when phase one came online. So Greens Creek was connected to the electric system in 2005. And at that time, there wasn't much surplus energy available to sell to Greens Creek.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't until Lake Dorothy came online in 2009 that they're really, you know, that AAMP was able to meet all of Greens Creek's requirements for electricity. And that was a huge benefit. So going into the construction of Lake Dorothy, you know, electric sales, firm electric sales in Juneau were growing pretty quickly. And it looked like, you know, the look like that our average requirements for supplemental diesel generation, the cost of that was going to equal the revenue requirement for new plant in a pretty short period of time. And that is another way to look at when is the right time to bring on new hydropower.
Speaker 3:But because of the opportunity to connect the Greens Creek Mine, which benefited from a federal grant to fund the transmission interconnection over to Admiralty Island, it was possible to fully load the Lake Dorothy project right out of the gate. And remember that that was right after the big avalanche in 2008 when people in town realized that there was a lot of money to be saved if they used less electricity. And a lot of the measures that were implemented during that six week event, were persistent beyond the duration of the event. So electricity sales dropped in Juneau by about 8% following that avalanche. And that exacerbated the impact to rates of the Lake Dorothy project.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that AOP did at the time of that rate case was going back to this statutory formula to determine a utility's revenue requirement. ALMP calculated its revenue requirement and this was in 2010 based on the 2009 test year. And they made some pro form a adjustments to include the Lake Dorothy project in their thirteen month average of net plant. And then they calculated that number and that would have been about a 40% rate increase if they'd gone in just like that. But rather than going with a 40% increase, they then said, okay, but we know that we're going to be making a certain amount of energy sales to Greens Creek every year.
Speaker 3:So we're going to subtract that off of our revenue requirement and we'll put the remainder into base rates. And so that reduced the size of the increase to base rates to 22%. And we have held on to that amount of money or it's moved a little bit but only slightly over the last couple of rate cases. And so we calculate our total revenue requirement and then we subtract an assumed amount of sales to Greens Creek and that remainder is what goes into base rates. What's happened since our most recent rate case is we have sold a bit less energy to Greens Creek on average over the last five years.
Speaker 3:And so one piece of this rate request is that we are reducing our assumption about how much money or how much revenue we're going to earn from surplus energy sales to Greens Creek. And that difference is about 5% of the increase to base rates. So where you see we have requested a 25% increase to firm customer base rate revenues. About 5% of that is really just a shift in an assumption about where or how we will receive that money. And the reason that portion does not have a net impact on customer bills is that when we collect money from Greens Creek, all of that money is used to offset firm customer electric rates.
Speaker 3:So if we made no assumption about, no kind of above the line assumption about revenues from Greens Creek, all of it would be returned through the cost of power adjustment, which is what we do with the cruise ship revenues. And if we so right now what happens is if we earn more revenue from Greens Creek than what we have assumed, we return that excess amount of money through the cost of power adjustment. And if we earn less than what is assumed, we collect that amount of money from customers in the cost of power adjustment. So if you looked on your April, May and June bills of this year, you will see that there's a 1.1 something cent charge in the cost of power adjustment because of reduced sales to Greens Creek in the first quarter of twenty twenty six. And that is one piece of that.
Speaker 3:And now I have gone so far back in history, I forgot which question I was supposed to answer.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a fascinating explanation and fascinating the economics of power generation and being a utility, especially, clear this up for me if I'm following you correctly here, you're a private utility. So if you want to build something, you have to go out and get the money, you have to build it, you have to show that it works, and then once it's up and working and you have a baseline of some data to prove, then you go to the commission and say, we'd like to recover some of that money that we spent.
Speaker 3:That's correct.
Speaker 2:But if you were a public utility, you would go directly to the rate payer and say, give us some money so we can buy a new power plant. Is that clear? Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:Well, so in Alaska, utility can be, we are considered a public utility in Alaska. And then there's different treatment under state law depending on your ownership. So all investor owned public utilities are rate regulated by the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. And that is, I'm going to refer only to, let's just use electric utilities here. Water and wastewater utilities are the same way.
Speaker 3:There's a little bit, once you start getting into telecom and waste hauling and stuff like that, there's different levels of economic regulation by the state. But for electric utilities, water wastewater utilities, if you're investor owned, then you are economically regulated by the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. If you are a co op, a cooperative utility, then if you, depending on the level of interaction you have with the interconnected utilities, you may be rate regulated or required to be rate regulated by the regulatory commission. For isolated co ops, they have the opportunity, their membership has the opportunity to vote to deregulate and then just be regulated by their co op board, their elected co op board. And for municipal utilities, municipal utilities are not regulated by the RCA typically.
Speaker 3:They are regulated by the assembly. So our water and wastewater utility here in Juneau is regulated by the assembly. They're the ones who set the rates and they are not required to fully recover their revenue requirement through rates. They may subsidize from their general funds. They're also not required to adhere to certain regulatory principles that the investor owned utilities are, like cost causers shall be cost payers.
Speaker 3:So that influences how we structure our rates and how we ensure that we recover from each customer class according to the costs that they cause in the system. And then also the principle that no one should pay for infrastructure that they do not receive benefits from. So that used and useful standard, right? So, equipment cannot be included in rates until it is used and useful. And so that's a requirement for a regulated utility, it is not a requirement for a municipal utility.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for clearing that up. It's a murky subject for sure. So to get back to the crossing and economic growth here in Juneau, which we are very, very, very concerned about, because no community can just stand still. If you stand still, you start to sink. You need to keep building.
Speaker 2:So we need to be always looking at what are we gonna do to employ young people to bring jobs in, to have economic activity and a vibrant community and culture? You guys sound like you're ready to deliver.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we are excited about the opportunity to grow and our concern is always that we understand that building utility infrastructure is not economic development on its own, right? We are here to facilitate economic development and we do that by ensuring that there are low and stable electric rates. If you look around our region, you can see the difference in the economies that have access to low cost electricity and the economies that do not. So that is definitely a primary concern of ours. One of our greatest concerns is the risk of bringing on new infrastructure before it can truly be utilized well.
Speaker 3:Because that unit cost of electricity gets levered up if the utilization in the denominator is below one. So we really want to ensure that we're bringing things online at the right time and it's a tricky dance to do that.
Speaker 2:It is indeed. We're a small enough community that we have to be really concerned about every little thing like that, but we're big enough that we're not a village. And so we have some greater freedoms, but still it's not like we're in the grid down south, you build something, some it'll burn it somewhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. With the economy of scale down there, there's a lot more predictability in the rates of growth where that's going to occur. And there's more opportunity to make market energy sales and things like that. So you have a little bit better security overall than we do here in Juno in terms of how greatly you impact rates all at once.
Speaker 2:You can't just build a great big wireless cell phone charger and charge California off our excess hydro.
Speaker 3:I cannot. And the idea like I talked about Lake Dorothy phase two would add 90 gigawatt hours to the four thirty that we generate now on average. There is no equivalent project in a large interconnected grid in the Lower 48. There is nothing that compares to that relative scale. Those projects do not exist down there.
Speaker 3:So it is a unique thing to bring something on that has that type of relative scale.
Speaker 1:No wonder why they want to talk about Juneau all the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it unique is problem that we have here and we do a lot of things that they're jealous of too, right? It is very uncommon to be able to provide nearly 100% renewable energy on an isolated grid with 100% diesel backup and to do it at a rate that's less than the national average.
Speaker 2:Well, well done. I'm always impressed to know that you guys are there keeping the lights on. Your linemen are out no matter the weather, no matter the time of year, whether it's darker or lighter, ice. It sounds like the post office when you say that come sleet or snow or rain or wind, you guys are out there and the power outages are never more than a couple of hours.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's uncommon for us to have a long duration outage. The further you get out the road, maybe it's a little more common, but a really remarkable group of folks that we have working at ALP. They're very dedicated to the company and to June. And it's something that we're all really proud of to be able to provide electricity at a rate that makes us successful in this community overall.
Speaker 1:Well, Alec, I can't thank you enough for coming in. I was literally like a little kid during story time during this podcast. I learned so much and you have so much knowledge and you could definitely hear it coming through the microphone. So Alec Mesdag, President and CEO of AEL and P, thank you so much for coming in and imparting this knowledge on us.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for having me. And I imagine there's at least a few listeners that I put to sleep when I started getting into regulatory topics, but I could go on on that all day if you want.
Speaker 1:You could feel the passion definitely coming from you. And Frank, you as well can always feel the passion coming from you and so much knowledge as well, your First Things First president. And of course, Don Habiger, your executive director. Don, we always gotta throw this to you in the end. If people want more information on First Things First, they want to get involved or even listen to the podcast.
Speaker 1:How can they do it, Don?
Speaker 4:Absolutely, thank you, Dan. The easiest way of course is our website. So it's FTF, a kthewordfoundationsspelledout.org. Certainly an email is quite easy. It's firsttfincgmail dot com.
Speaker 4:Either way, we'll respond.
Speaker 1:And of course, if you ever wanna check out any past episodes of the First Things First podcast, you can do that over at kinyradio.com or the website you just heard Don say, ftfakfoundation.org. Again, wanna thank you three. Let's enjoy our spring. Hopefully we have a good summer and we'll see you next month for another podcast.