  **Title**: Energy in the North - Phil Wight
**Date**: September 10, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Phil Wight


00;00;00;00 - 00;00;12;14 [Phil Wight] If you have a project like the Susitna dam that's very capital intensive or damming the Yukon with the Rampart Dam. These are projects that have not penciled out. They don't they don't necessarily work.

00;00;12;14 - 00;00;15;11 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Phil Wight, a 蜜桃影像 Assistant Professor of History and Arctic Northern Studies and an energy and environmental historian. 蜜桃影像 is known as a great land and a last frontier, and it's also known for enormous energy projects or mega-projects. I begin the conversation with Phil by asking him, what exactly is a mega-project, and how successful has 蜜桃影像 been in developing them?

00;00;36;29 - 00;04;00;03 [Phil Wight] So typically, a mega-project is defined as a project larger than a billion dollars, that is sprawling and complex and often is quite unique. Because of 蜜桃影像's history, I think we have developed this mega-project mentality. Part of this has to do with federal funding, The fact that the federal government was willing to come in here and build the 蜜桃影像 Railroad or the 蜜桃影像 Canada Highway. Some of this has to do with the scale of the state and the scale of the resources that are available here and the fact that you want to achieve these economies of scale in order to do that, you have to build a big project. So great example of this is the Trans-蜜桃影像 Pipeline system. 1968 we discover an underground ocean of oil. You know, the largest conventional oil reservoir in North American history. And, In order to move that oil to market and to monetize that resource, private companies had to come together and construct the largest private industrial project in human history. Again, this is an example of where a mega-project has actually worked. some people have also argued, well, 蜜桃影像ns are just big, big dreamers, big thinkers. That's why we come up with these projects. When we look at this history, though, what we see is most of the time these projects are failures. And they're failures because the scale and complexity of the project overwhelms the actual market or the demand for the project. Another way to think about this is that 蜜桃影像 is a large state, but we've always been a small market. So, if you have a project like the Susitna dam that's very capital intensive or damming the Yukon with the Rampart Dam. These are projects that have not penciled out. They don't they don't necessarily work. And, so I think 蜜桃影像 still has this mega-project mentality. But what we see when we actually look at 蜜桃影像's history, what has worked for 蜜桃影像 tend to be what I would call the is right sized projects. They're projects that are actually befitting of the number of people that are in 蜜桃影像 rather than the size of our landmass. So these tend to be small to medium sized projects. Take Bradley Lake, for instance. After the state became wealthy with oil revenue in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had a Republican conservationist governor by the name of Jay Hammond. And he was very interested in turning nonrenewable resource revenue into a renewable resource. So he helped to invest in hydropower projects throughout the state. Small to medium size facilities tended to be very salmon friendly projects. These were not dams across major rivers. And one of these was Bradley Lake, the biggest source of renewable power on the Railbelt - 120 megawatts. And, we at the same time also constructed the intertie connecting Anchorage and Fairbanks and enabling that low cost hydropower to come to Fairbanks. And, at the time, there were a lot of critics of that project that said this is really expensive. But one of the lessons that we can learn from this history is that many of these renewable energy projects have capital intensive upfront costs. But with the perspective of time, these are actually really low cost and highly diversified projects that return really strong benefits for 蜜桃影像ns.

00;04;00;03 - 00;04;13;12 [Amanda Byrd] Phil Wight is an Assistant Professor of History and Arctic Northern Studies at 蜜桃影像, and I'm Amanda Byrd, Chief Storyteller for the 蜜桃影像 Center for Energy and Power.Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.