On December 16, 1968, in the small and remote Hooper Bay, Alaska, 150 people packed into the local schoolhouse to witness the lighting of the village’s first community Christmas Tree.
The schoolhouse, built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, doubled as the local community center. Hooper Bay had only recently received central station electric service. Like so many Alaskan villages, electricity was available only to those who could afford small gas or diesel generators.
In 1967, that changed as villages joined together with help from the Alaska governor’s office to form electric cooperatives, including Alaska Village Electric Cooperative. In early 1968, AVEC started serving Hooper Bay, Nulato, and Old Harbor and would go on to serve nearly 60 separate and unique villages stretched across thousands of miles of Alaskan wilderness, the largest cooperative service territory in the nation.
On the one hand, it’s difficult to imagine that as recently as the 1960s, people in the United States still lived a subsistence-dependent lifestyle. They burned whale or seal oil for light and had no sanitation services. But what they did have was a very strong sense of community.
On the other hand, the monumental task of powering remote and disparate villages across such vast distances required a new way of thinking.
In Alabama, to get power to a community, we simply build transmission and distribution lines.
In Alaska, the challenges become much more significant. No single village can sustain its own electric utility, and located so far apart, it’s neither affordable nor sustainable to connect them with transmission lines. So, the most cost-effective way was to build generators in each village.
AVEC now operates more than 160 diesel generators and 33 wind turbines. With a service territory larger than nearly any other state in the nation, cooperative business functions unlike any other.
AVEC and local village governments operate in partnership. Governments hire plant operators and oversee the day-to-day operation of power distribution systems. AVEC purchases and installs the generators, provides financial and technical support, and ensures fuel delivery, providing more than 8 million gallons of diesel annually.
To ensure effective governance, each community elects representatives who travel in April to Anchorage for AVEC’s annual cooperative meeting. At this meeting, the board of directors, elected by mail-in ballot from all AVEC members, is sworn in.
Electric cooperatives were founded for the purpose of providing affordable electricity to rural homes and businesses. While each state poses its own unique challenges, few places can match those faced when powering Alaska. But the struggles are worth it.
Electricity provides access to sanitation services, clean lights and heats homes, provides economic opportunity, and connects communities with the outside world. Those Hooper Bay villagers who gathered that cold December night weren’t just lighting a Christmas tree. They were celebrating the strength of their community to attain affordable electricity.
Each Christmas season in our own Lincoln, AL, we gather at the end of our parade for a tree lighting ceremony. While it helps me feel a small sense of community, this year I’ll try to remember that group of villagers and imagine what they must’ve felt when their tree lit up.
We wish you and your family a safe and happy holiday season.