Aug. 28--Fifteen years after establishing its first hydroelectric facility, the city of King Cove is on a mission to bring a companion hydro facility online by 2011 in an effort to hold down power costs and sell energy to a fish processing plant critical to the local economy.

More than half of the 4 million kilowatt hours needed to power King Cove, located on the south side of the Alaska Peninsula, comes from the Delta Creek hydroelectric facility, and now the community wants another one, said city administrator Gary Hennigh.

Recently completed feasibility studies indicate that Waterfall Creek, a parallel but separate water source, has the potential to add another 1.4 million kilowatt hours a year to the city's renewable energy output, he said.

"Our mandate," Hennigh said in a written release announcing the plan, "is to be the exception to conventional wisdom, which says that power costs can only go up from here. King Cove is always interested in whatever it can do to improve the quality of life for its citizens and accumulating some carbon credits along the way."

The savings King Cove, population 750, has experienced from using hydroelectric power in place of diesel fuel have been significant, Hennigh said. The yearly fuel savings, in fact, pay the annual debt service on the remaining $1.4 million debt the city has for the $5.7 million Delta Creek facility.

In addition, the city's new diesel power plant, which came on line in 2008, financed mainly by grants, has a waste heat component has saved the Aleutians East Borough 19,439 gallons of diesel fuel in one year, a cost savings of $63,452 for operation of its King Cove school.

The city's old diesel power plant, built in the early 1980s, was upgraded once in the early 1990s, but once a decision was made to build a new power plant, city officials decided to locate the new facility near the location where the city's new school would be built.

In 2008, the first year the new school was in operation, the borough spent $107,154 on 31,439 gallons of diesel fuel to heat the building. Then the city began piping waste heat from the diesel plant into the school building, reducing the school's diesel fuel consumption.

The new King Cove health clinic, operated by the Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove, is about a football field away from the new school location, so the city is evaluating the prospect of piping over to it waste heat from a new diesel waste heat facility, should one be developed, Hennigh said.