The Alaska Energy Transparency Project seeks to fill a need for reporting on the democratic processes that drive Alaska’s member-owned electrical cooperatives. The Transparency Project is an editorially independent initiative of the nonprofit Alaska Public Interest Research Group — although AKPIRG started it and is presently its sole funder, the Transparency Project’s publications do not represent AKPIRG’s stances on energy policy.
Though there’s no dearth of quality energy journalism from other Alaskan publications, the Transparency Project approaches the subject in a different way. The state’s electric co-ops are most often covered as economic actors by journalists who focus on their interactions with natural gas suppliers, state regulators, businesses, and governments. It’s much rarer to find inside-looking coverage that treats electric co-ops as the democratic enterprises they are. The co-ops that supply electricity to roughly 70 percent of Alaskans are all headed by elected directors who deliberate in public meetings, yet very few stories record their votes, cover their discussions, or feature their quotes. This is the need the Alaska Energy Transparency Project seeks to fill.
Though we frame electric co-ops in their economic and legal context, the Transparency Project’s goal is to look within them for information that voting member-owners can use to learn how utility decisions are made, who makes them, and why. We are bringing the aims and methods of local government reporting to the boards of our energy cooperatives by recording votes, conducting interviews, featuring quotes, contextualizing decisions, and covering electric co-ops as what they are — opportunities for widespread democratic participation in the system that underlies all other aspects of modern life.
Write for us
We want co-op members to be participants rather than spectators in the local energy system — not only by reading our pieces, but by writing them.
To become a volunteer reporter for the Alaska Energy Project:
Find out when your electric co-op board of directors have their next meeting.
Attend and write about any important issues, actions, or information you discover.
Submit your piece to project editor Brian Kassof at brian@akpirg.org.
If you’d like to be published in the “NEWS” section of our website, the editor will work with you to be sure it meets our news standards for accuracy, specificity, and attribution. If you prefer to be more casual, your writing can be published in the “COMMUNITY” section of our site. It will be fact-checked, but won’t be held to news standards of specificity and attribution.