CEA Candidate Questions—Sam Cason
Voting in the Chugach Electric Association’s 2024 board election will start on April 17 and run through the CEA Annual Meeting on May 17. Members will elect two directors (CEA directors are at-large and represent the entire membership). There are also two bylaw changes on the ballot.
Members can vote three ways: electronically, by mail, or in person at the Annual Meeting.
--Members should receive an email with instructions for on-line voting on April 17—electronic voting will close at 3 p.m. on May 17. Election-related emails will come from the address noreply@directvote.net
--Those wishing to vote by mail need to contact the Election Administrator at 866-909-3549 to request a ballot. Mail-in ballots must be received by noon on May 16. Please note that the Election Administrator is located in Minnesota, not Anchorage.
--In person voting will be at the Annual Meeting on May 17 (registration starts at 5 p.m.)
For more information, see the CEA Election page.
Here are the responses to the AETP questionnaire from Sam Cason, who is running for one of the two seats on the CEA Board. Cason was elected to the CEA Board in 2020 and currently serves as its Chair. He previously served on the CEA Board from 2002 to 2005. Cason is an attorney who has worked for the Alaska Department of Law where he served as Assistant Attorney General and as a Public Advocate before the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA, which regulates utilities). He has been a CEA member for 31 years. His biography, candidate statement, and candidate video can be accessed on the CEA Election page.
Sam Cason, from his CEA candidate profile
1. Why do you want to serve on the CEA Board?
Basically, I’m a utility nerd. I enjoy the work of governance and policy making that the Board engages in. As the Public Advocate in various utility cases before the RCA, I learned to do forensic analysis of utility decision making. That was unsatisfying to the extent that my job was to second guess decisions that had already been implemented and suggest ways to improve the outcome; on the other hand being on the Board is all about actually making the decisions in the first place, based on the best data and evidence available, which I find is a more interesting and rewarding process.
2. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing CEA over the next 5-10 years? What can be done to prepare to meet them?
Safety, Reliabilitiy, Affordability, and Sustainability. Every policy decision made by the Board must be examined for their effects on these priorities. While physical safety amounts to identifying and implementing “best practices” and so is a fairly reductive topic, the other three are quite dynamic. Reliability, not worrying whether the lights will be on no matter what the weather, is our biggest challenge. With our local natural gas fuel sources becoming depleted and less available, we must transition. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that this transition will not be free; whether we look at importing LNG, installing wind and solar, buying tidal, geothermal, or building a new dam, we must consider how our decisions will affect our reliability, affordability, and sustainability. It took almost ten years for us to fully integrate the variable power fromjust a 17 MW project, Fire Island. We now integrate all it can produce without curtailment – that is paying for power we can’t actually use. It will not take as long last time, but there will be a learning curve integrating more projects many multiples of that size. The NREL study suggests that affordability points toward integration of renewables. Over the time period in question, if we are to take this least cost approach, the study suggests that we should also strengthen our transmission infrastructure so that we can move power along the Railbelt without constraint.
We should also look twenty to twenty five years out, and see where our decisions today will leave us then, at the end of another generational cycle. We should strive to position ourselves so that investments we make today can still be useful and may be re-developed, much as we do with our hydro resources. For example, we are installing new rotating equipment at Cooper Lake, built over 50 years ago, that will help us better use that resource for the next twenty five years. At a fraction of the cost of building a new dam, we are able to use the old dam more effectively and efficiently. We should look for that kind of useful life analysis in all of our capital projects.
3. Although CEA is a member-owned cooperative, levels of member engagement and involvement are low—only 15.7 percent of members voted in the last election (and that was a significant increase from previous years) and few members attend board meetings. What can the board do to encourage greater member engagement and involvement in helping to guide the cooperative’s policies? For example, would you support moving board meetings to a time when more members could attend? Is there anything you would do as an individual board member to facilitate member engagement?
Thank you for starting with an acknowledgment that member participation continues to grow. We actually were below ten percent participation at one point, and last year’s 15.7% was a sign of healthy growth. Which is to say, the Board can begin by doing more of the same. Member testimony has become much more common, and it has affected public position taken by the Board – hopefully the positive feedback loop will encourage even more attention and participation. The Board has been very active in prompting better electronic communication and access to information. A new website design was discussed and demonstrated in the April 10 Operations Committee meeting, that we hope will increase the transparency of not only Board activities, but of the Company in general.
As for moving the time of meetings, I am certainly willing to consider it. My sense is that no meeting time is going to be perfect for everyone, and I have not seen data or metrics to suggest others have found a meeting time that attracts the most or best participation. When I ran for the Board four years ago, I knew and pledged that my Wednesday evenings were presumptively reserved for Chugach meetings; the fact is that we deal with lots of issues in being a vertically integrated monopoly provider that takes molecules of gas out of the ground and turns them into electricity which is instantaneously available to a hundred thousand meters. Two hundred thousand if you count the whole railbelt. The issues are complex and varied, and understanding them well enough to evaluate how each may affect our system’s Safety, Reliability, Affordability, and Sustainability takes time.
At an individual level I find that being responsive to member concerns and understanding when to listen, when to explain, and when to refer someone to the person in the organization that can help them, is the best way to facilitate member engagement. By being responsive when a member reaches out, I hope to do one of two things; help the member solve a problem, or reassure the member that their input matters. Whether someone wants to know about what we are doing to prevent forest fires, if we have plans to build a Community Solar project, or how we calculate the bill of members who have their own rooftop solar array, to be listened to, referred to responsive sources, or having a substantive discussion of the policy considerations that underly Chugach’s practices, is the best way to encourage that member to continue engaging.
4. One practice that contributes to member disengagement is the extensive use of executive session in board meetings. In 2023 CEA’s board spent about a third of its regular board meetings (31.1 percent of meeting time) in executive session. This was a substantial decrease from 2022, when the board spent over 65 percent of its regular meetings in executive session, but still a considerable portion of meetings. Recognizing that the use of executive session is necessary at times, do you believe that cooperative boards have an obligation to their member-owners to maximize the openness and transparency of their decision making? Should CEA’s Board continue to work to minimize its use of executive session? If so, what steps could betaken to achieve this goal?
[Ed. note—statistics on executive session come from AETP’s Transparency Scorecard]
This is an interesting statistic and I would be interested in the source and work that produced it. At a recent meeting a perspicacious member observed that “what gets measured, gets changed.” I am very proud to hear that we spend less than half the time we used to in executive session. I believe that we do have a duty to maximize the openness and transparency of our decision making. We do continue to strive to minimize the use of executive sessions. Our efforts to improve transparency are ongoing; it used to be that when staff was going to make a presentation, if it had one confidential slide the whole presentation was made in executive session. Now we see only the confidential portion of the material in Executive Session. We have also been striving to give executive summaries upon exiting Executive Session that outline the substance of our conversations without compromising confidentiality. It is now not uncommon for a Board Member to request clarification of why executive session is necessary; as mentioned this is a work in progress – this is something that will continue to need vigilance into the future.
5. In recent years there have been attempts to foster greater collaboration among the Railbelt utilities. Do cooperative boards have a role in facilitating greater cooperation, engaging directly with other boards, or should they defer to staff around collaborative efforts?
Boards absolutely should engage directly with other Boards. This is not universally accepted, and not all Boards, and not all CEOs agree. Some of us have taken steps to stay in touch informally, and that has been somewhat effective in prompting coordinated action. We have also tried to arrange Board to Board meetings, but outside of meeting at the Alaska Power Association gatherings, those efforts have not born fruit. As the RRC begins performing its statutory duties to engage in Integrated Resource Planning and promulgating reliability standards, it will be essential for Boards to know what is being said in sister utility Board rooms to ensure this process of becoming more closely integrated is done in the most beneficial way possible, both for the group and for individual utilities.
6. The increased collaboration among Railbelt cooperatives has included participation in several Railbelt-wide organizations. These have operated with varying levels of transparency. Some, like the Railbelt Reliability Council (the Electric Reliability Organization, or ERO, whose creation was mandated by the Legislature) have made an effort to be as transparent as possible. Others, such as the Utility Working Group looking at future gas supplies or the Bradley Project Management Committee (in its discussions of transmission planning and applications for federal grants), have conducted their work largely behind closed doors without consultation of other stakeholders, announcing their decisions to the public only after they have been made. (CEA’s board has been much more transparent about CEA’s independent gas supply study, including periodic updates during the public portions of their meetings).
Allowing that some aspects of these discussions need to be confidential, should boards be working to help make as much information as possible about them public before the final decisions are made? Or should these deliberations continue to be conducted in private?
There should be as much daylight and fresh air as possible in this process. The broader the participation, the better the decisions will be. As the question recognizes Chugach has been leading by example and trying to get as much information as possible “on the table” not only to make the best possible decisions, but also to engender the broadest possible “buy in” to the conclusions that form the basis of the decision. Reliability, Affordability, and Sustainability, are independently fairly simple concepts, but when they are placed in competition with each other, or weighed differently in different contexts, the process of resolving the tension between them deserves to be explicit. That is the only way to ensure that decision making is not driven by perverse incentives or private, as opposed to public, interests.
7. According to the report prepared by Black and Veatch, CEA could be facing shortfalls of Cook Inlet natural gas as soon as 2029. Given that CEA currently relies on Cook Inlet natural gas for 82 percent of its power generation (2022 figures), what should it be doing to plan for its generation needs over the next 10 years? Is this an area where the cooperatives should be collaborating on solutions? Should the state be playing a role?
The State could be very helpful by funding the GRIP initiative to build out our transmission infrastructure. Having unconstrained transmission will help create an energy market from Homer to Fairbanks that should help lure Independent Power Providers to examine what most cost effective generation can be built to serve our native load. It may also be helpful in navigating permitting and land use issues. Having transmission available should facilitate cooperation among the utilities in integrating renewables into the generation mix.
No investment advisor I have trusted has ever told me that the best investment strategy is to put 80% of my assets into a single sector. It seems obvious that we should diversify our portfolio. With our current generation fleet, bought but not yet paid for, as long as we have gas, we should have reliable power, so the questions become what alternative sources are most affordable, both to construct and operate; what can we do to stretch our available fuel supply; what is the least cost source for additional natural gas; how long will it take to implement and integrate alternatives?
We seem on the verge of reaching an understanding on a hundred MW wind project, and it will be very interesting to see how that procurement and construction process plays out. Closer to home, we have a Community Solar project and small solar projects underway that should provide information and experience in integrating Solar power, just as Fire Island has given us experience integrating wind. At this point, just as predicted by the NREL study, it looks as though an “all of the above” approach is going to be the best, most cost effective way to keep the lights on.
8. Beyond the issues already discussed in this questionnaire, are there any particular policies or issues you think the board needs to address?
Chugach’s collective bargaining agreements expire in 2025; our labor contracts must be re-negotiated. We are in the middle of consolidating our operations into a single facility (the “one campus plan”), which requires considerable new construction, as well as disposal of redundant facilities. Implementation of whatever wildlife mitigation plan for the Eklutna project is approved by the Governor. Continuing integration of the two legacy (pre-acquisition) systems into a single operational unit. Switching to a new Enterprise software system is on schedule for next winter. All of these will require Board engagement, participation, and oversight in the coming months and years.
