**Title**: Energy in the North - Travis Million
**Date**: April 9 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Travis Million


00;00;00;16 - 00;00;01;05 [Travis Million] That would be about 30,000 homes that you could power with a hundred megawatt wind project.


00;00;05;16 - 00;00;14;11 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, I speak with Travis Million, president and CEO of Golden Valley Electric Association. A new large scale wind energy system would provide power to the Fairbanks area and the rail belt. The 120 megawatt Shovel Creek wind farm proposed by 91ÊÓƵ Renewables could provide an enormous amount of renewably generated energy for the community.I began the conversation by asking Travis how many homes could be powered by a 120 megawatt wind farm. 


00;00;26;10 - 00;00;42;00 [Travis Million] Essentially, for every megawatt shot of wind project that you would have within our service territory, you could power about 300 homes per megawatt. If you had a 100 megawatt project that would be about 30,000 homes that you could power with a hundred megawatt wind project.


00;00;48;28 - 00;00;53;18 [Amanda Byrd] Theoretically, a system like that could almost meet the entire load of Fairbanks


00;00;57;12 - 00;01;11;09 [Travis Million] On an annual average basis. Yes, We have of just under 50,000 meters. And so that's residential. And also small commercial and larger ones as well.


00;01;11;09 - 00;01;18;26 [Amanda Byrd] It must take a lot of coordination to think about how 150 megawatt system like that could fit into not only the Fairbanks area, but also the rail belt, which is very long and lots of different utilities.


00;01;18;27 - 00;01;27;06 [Travis Million] Yeah, and that's honestly one of the reasons why it has appeared to take so long to make a commitment or to move forward with the project is there are a ton of studies that go into this because we've got to ensure that one, the reliability stays extremely high. We've got to ensure that the cost doesn't increase cost to our membership.
But yeah, once you start looking outside of Golden Valley service territory and sending power south for that time where the wind's blowing really hard and perfect and the times it starts droping off, how do you basically regulate or meet those shortfalls, or how do you bring generation off balance out the system when the wind starts picking up or start slowing down? And as you're pushing that power cell down, the transmission line, they've got to be able to do that same thing. And so the variability of what we call a non-dispatchable resource or one that we can't really control by just turning the switch on and off and telling it to produce X amount of energy adds a lot more complexity to it. We've been going through a number of studies on how do we integrate it into the system and how much can we integrate in without causing any reliability issues.


00;02;22;20 - 00;02;34;23 [Amanda Byrd] Is Golden Valley In favor of a system like this


00;02;34;27 - 00;02;50;01 [Travis Million] In general, anything that we can bring on the system that will help stabilize or reduce the rates for our members, we're agnostic of what type of generation source. We're open to it for sure.


00;02;50;01 - 00;02;59;16 [Amanda Byrd] How does a renewable system like this wind farm or a large scale solar farm integrate with the generation and distribution that's already going on in the utility area






00;02;59;16 - 00;03;41;14 [Travis Million] From the generation, Part of it is, like I mentioned before, we have to have proper regulation to balance the system out as when picks up or slows down.Same with solar as the sun comes up or who goes down or goes behind a cloud, we have to have enough of what we call spinning reserve on the system in order to pick up the lack of generation from wind or solar. Same type of thing. As we got to be able to have enough generation that we can back off and tailor back as more wind and solar comes on.So it's a balancing act that way that we have to work through. Batteries play a big role in that because batteries can quickly respond to that, either pushing more energy into the system or absorbing energy as as these variable resources come on. So as we're looking through these systems, we're saying, okay, how do we regulate with batteries versus how do we regulate with our existing generation fleet? So it's it's a balance. It's a very complex way to evaluate how much we can bring on the system. 


00;03;41;14 - 00;03;59;26 [Amanda Byrd] Travis Million is the president and CEO of Golden Valley Electric Association. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the 91ÊÓƵ Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.