Spirit of Alaska has been working to rebuild an old existing hydro power system that was first installed back in 1936 at our vintage cannery facility.
Construction on the Parks cannery began in 1934. In 1936 a dam was built and the pipeline was put in place. To accomplish this nearly 1,990 feet of 8” wooden pipe was connected to the canneries water system and to a hydro power pelton wheel. At this time hydro power was all the cannery had besides manpower. A wooden pipeline was replaced with a 6” aluminum pipe, but we are not sure when this transition was completed? SOA replaced the dilapidated aluminum line with a 8” PVC line.
Our goal was met in June of 2014. Our hydro power project came to life in June as we had hoped, and now is supplying all our electrical needs 24/7. Still well inside the learning curve, tweaking this and exploring that, this has been a long but well rewarded project. Expanding our penstock to increase our water volume, adding additional pipe (penstock) will give us more elevation, this will increase our water pressure, which will increase our electrical output. In hopes that we can swap out fossil fuel for heat, and go with electric. Even with the price of oil plummeting we still feel strongly about removing our dependency on fossil fuels.
