PUBLIC UTILITIES

Ounalashka Corp./Chena Power, LLC (OCCP) will have an extra year to obtain funding for their geothermal power project at Makushin Volcano. 

The Unalaska City Council voted 4 to 1 in favor of pushing the deadline to June of next year at a special meeting Tuesday night.

"The proposed amendment shifts some of the deadlines, but really does not change the underlying agreement," said City Manager Erin Reinders.

Nearly all of Unalaska lost power for over an hour on Monday evening. 

The outage left everyone on the city's grid, except for those on Standard Oil Hill, without electricity, according to Public Utilities Director Dan Winters. 

An unplanned electrical outage on Monday left Unalaskans across the island without power.

Officials are still investigating the cause of the city-wide outage that happened around 6:20 p.m., according to Public Utilities Acting Director Steve Tompkins.

A decades-long effort to bring geothermal power to Unalaska is finally moving forward. On Thursday, the city signed a 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Ounalashka Corp./Chena Power, LLC for 30 megawatts of geothermal-produced electrical energy from nearby Makushin Volcano. Officials from the U.S. Department of Energy said that if it's successful, Unalaska would be the first community in the nation completely powered by geothermal energy. 

A number of recent unplanned power outages in Unalaska were caused by an electronic governor — located on one of the city's diesel engines — that needs retuning, according to city officials.

Public Utilities Director Dan Winters said at a City Council meeting Tuesday night that what's supposed to happen is that when the engine is shutting down it comes down automatically, at about 1000 kilowatts and then it will open the breaker. But it's currently shutting down at more than twice that amount — at about 2500 kilowatts — and kicking the breaker.