**Title**: Energy in the North - Bill Stamm
**Date**: December, 3 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Bill Stamm

00;00;00;23 - 00;00;07;10 [Bill Stamm] Life is very fragile at 40 below. The heating systems don't work. Water systems freeze up, communication systems go down.

00;00;07;10 - 00;00;41;25 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North, I speak with Bill Stamm, the CEO of Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, the utility serving 59 communities across Alaska, including every region except the North Slope. Alaska has seen an increase in catastrophic weather events, including Typhoon Merbok in 2023 and the even more devastating Typhoon Halong in 2025, and the frequent snow and ice storms and severe cold that can break equipment and infrastructure that happen every year. I began the conversation with Bill by asking him, how does AVEC find out about and react to these events and damages?

00;00;41;25 - 00;02;04;12 [Bill Stamm] Yeah, we've seen all those. It usually starts with a phone call. If there's damage or the lights go out or whatever. It could be a member of AVEC that calls up and says their house is without power. It could be plant operator or city administrators and the community’s out. And usually if it's a large weather event, we've already been tracking it and to see what's how much it's going to impact, it can be multiple communities at a time. Like, Typhoon Merbok that came in a couple of years ago, obviously went up the whole West Coast to rip things up. So you're kind of anticipating those sorts of things. The one offs, again, relying on phone calls come in. And the most important thing is to figure out what actually went wrong. Plant operators are good. They can usually troubleshoot. And sometimes it's just a phone call saying we had an outage, everything's restored, everything's good. I might need this or I might need that. Other times it's trying to work over the phone and troubleshoot and determine what the sequence of events were and try to nail down. Is it a mechanical issue? Is there a fuel issue? Is an electrical issue. There's a controls issue isn't it? The distribution is in the generation so that you can mobilize the right resources in order to get things fixed. And unfortunately, if it's a weather related event, the same thing that caused the outage, just a delayed response because planes are grounded and you can't get anybody there for a couple days,

00;02;04;12 - 00;02;19;21 [Amanda Byrd] That's going to be really scary for the both the people in the community and for you here in Anchorage. They're obviously needing power and needing things to come back up and running, and you are wanting very badly to get out there and to get things up and running.

00;02;19;21 - 00;03;32;24 [Bill Stamm] And there's a limited number of carriers, and when planes don't fly for a few days, everything gets backed up. Everybody has a need to get freight materials to a new location so things can get backed up. And you mentioned, you know, it can be 40 below outside, and life is very fragile at 40 below. The heating systems don't work. Water systems freeze up, communication systems go down. It's not uncommon that we get a call for help. And then shortly thereafter we lose communication. And we're not sure what the issue was. You have to kind of shoot from him and say, well, we need to get somebody to X community. They went out last night and we lost communication that's somewhat ameliorated with Starlink and people having battery backups and those sorts of things. But I've been here long enough where I remember where, you know, the whole AT&T system or the whole phone system could have because they had very small batteries and an hour or two outage and the whole phone system for the community would go down. And then you just don't have communication anymore. You're relying on airplane pilots to relay information when they land and they come back, and they can't fly at dusk because there's no lights at the airport. Lots of war stories.

00;03;32;24 - 00;03;41;14 [Amanda Byrd] So, it must keep you up at night. Kind wondering how if there is like an event like Merbok, that your communities are needing help.

00;03;41;14 - 00;03;58;19 [Bill Stamm] Yeah. And, and holidays, you know, people want to take a break to go somewhere. It's often a little bit of a strategic planning event and say, okay, do we have somebody in this area or somebody in this area that could respond at least regionally if not locally?

00;03;58;19 - 00;04;10;17 [Amanda Byrd] Bill Stamm is the CEO of Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/ACEP.