00;00**Title**: Energy in the North - Lou Florence
**Date**: August 6, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Lou Florence


;00;19 - 00;00;01;17 [Lou Florence] So if you don't have secure and resilient electricity, if you don't have good water, it makes it difficult your job done.

00;00;07;05 - 00;00;20;16 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Lou Florence, the president and CEO of Doyon Utilities, the company that was formed for the purpose of owning and operating the utility systems on three military installations in Alaska. Currently, around 50% of the utilities on the Army installations are privatized. And I began the conversation with Lou by asking him, why would the military contract out the utilities to the private sector?

00;00;31;04 - 00;03;47;07 [Lou Florence] So back in the 1990s, there was a big push for privatization of the military infrastructure on military installations, because the government's approach to, maintenance of the infrastructure, was not in keeping with modern utility standards. There was a tendency to provide a lot of money. And then not a lot of upkeep. And then when the system start to fail, you have to provide a lot of money. Again, that doesn't really create the most reliable outcome for important utilities. And so the, ability of the, tenants on the installations who are members of the military and, it made it hard for them to, properly execute their missions because some of the infrastructure was failing. 

So if you don't have secure and resilient electricity, if you don't have good water, it makes it difficult your job done. It also makes it hard on the people who live on the installations, because all the military installations also include housing for many of the active duty members who are on the installation in their families. especially here in the interior, utilities were designed for subarctic conditions. The design of the utilities was different than you would see in the lower 48 or, and more temperate climates.

 And these were designs that were really developed in the 1940s and the 1950s basically you see the same sort of design, couple of different places in the interior. So for example, downtown Fairbanks, we have a cogeneration system that provides heat to the buildings. If you listen to the radiator right behind you, you can hear there's steam going through it. The steam comes from the Aurora Steam plant. So there are customers all throughout downtown as a byproduct. The Aurora plant also produces electricity. If you look at the university, the university has a similar system. They have a steam plant. It's cogeneration. They provide steam to heat all the buildings and provide some electricity.

Well, at Fort Wainwright and down at Fort Greely near Delta Junction, the systems were designed such that not just the steam heat were put together in underground corridors, but the water and wastewater lines were put with them so that they wouldn't freeze up during the winter. The way they say it is, the utilities are co-located. They're all together. When it came time to privatize the utilities, instead of saying, okay, we're going to privatize the water and the wastewater, we're going to privatize, the heat system. We're going to privatize the electric system. It was clear that it was really an integrated system. And when Doyon Utilities was formed, basically it was a company that has these three contracts, one for Fort Wainwright, one for Fort Greeley and one for, Fort Richardson. And what's really striking about the contracts is their length. So they're 50 year contracts, which is very unusual in the government contracting world. But the thought was that the utilities would essentially become partners on the installation and so they would become residents and they would have we would have ownership of all the utility infrastructure and provide greater reliability.

00;03;47;07 - 00;03;54;23 [Amanda Byrd] Lou Florence is the president and CEO of Doyon Utilities. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power.
 Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.