Contributed by Helen Hegener, Alaskan History Magazine, Northern Light Media
The Eklutna Hydroelectric Project has used the energy of melting glaciers to provide electricity for the Anchorage-Palmer region for almost a century, but decades before the current well-known power plant was built, Anchorage businessman Frank I. Reed founded the Anchorage Light & Power Company and harnessed the power of theEklutna River.
In 1921, Alaskan Engineering Commission (AEC) engineers John Longacre and C. D. Pollock conducted a brief survey which resulted in a highly favorable recommendation regarding future development at Eklutna Lake for hydroelectric power production, but generating electrical power for Anchorage was not a primary function of AEC’s operations. Sensing an opportunity, businessman Frank Reed and engineer John Longacre teamed up and began efforts to develop a power plant at Eklutna.
From 1922 to 1928, Frank Reed invested a significant amount of time getting the Eklutna power project off the ground. In 1924, he hired Seattle engineer Robert Howes to conduct an initial study of the project, and he secured contracts to purchase electrical power from the City of Anchorage and the Alaska Railroad and identified other potentialmarkets outside of the immediate Anchorage city limits, such as the Eklutna Industrial School and the growing population of the rural Matanuska Valley.
Several miles downriver from Eklutna Lake, Reed’s Anchorage Light & Power Co. built a concrete arch dam, 98 feet long and 61 feet high, which diverted water from the Eklutna River into an 1,800-foot tunnel through Goat Mountain to a concrete powerhouse. A concrete reinforced building 61 by 27 feet, it housed a 1,500 horsepower Pelton Wheel water turbine and a standard General Electric 1,000 kW generator. The tailrace, a reinforced concrete-lined channel extending from the back of the building, carried water away from the powerhouse and into Knik Arm.
The Eklutna power plant was finished only a month before the devastating stock market crash of 1929, which created a depression throughout the next decade. Though Alaska did not suffer as much as the rest of the country, there were immediate consequences for the Anchorage Light and Power Company. The line expansions to areas outside Anchorage, which Frank I. Reed was counting on to increase the power load, became impossible to finance. Reed was hoping that the additional supply of cheaper power would encourage more business, a hope shared by the community.
Unfortunately, the depression effectively stopped this development. Although the company got off to a rocky financial start, the wisdom of building the Eklutna Hydroelectric Project was obvious when the WWII military buildup and other factors led to the sustained population growth of Anchorage and the surrounding area. Frank Reed sold his power plant to the city in 1943 and passed away at the age of 71 only a year later. In 1950, the federal government purchased Reed’s company from the City of Anchorage when the Bureau of Reclamation, a division of the Department of the Interior, began construction of the second Eklutna Power Project.
At that time, the first Eklutna plant was shut down, and the old dam was allowed to fill with silt and gravel. The new Eklutna Power Project, funded and built by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, was built several miles up the Knik River from the old power plant. A 4.5-mile-long tunnel was bored through East Twin Peak to provide water for the new power plant, and drilling the nine-foot diameter tunnel from both the Knik River side and the Eklutna Lake side began in 1951. When it connected in October 1953, it was declared a marvelous engineering feat, but today few people know it was not the first such tunnel generating electric power for the area.
