In commemoration of the Nov. 15, 50th anniversary of the Whitehorse Rapids hydroelectric facility, the Star is publishing a two-part series. The second instalment will be published Friday.

More than a half century ago, there was a plan for a project to provide massive amounts of hydroelectric energy to the territory and Alaska - massive by even today's standards.

The proposal by Alcoa Inc. to power an aluminum smelter at the Port of Skagway would have generated four times the amount of electricity available in the Yukon today.

The project centred around a giant 22-km (14-mile) tunnel through the mountain of granite separating Lindeman Lake and the Taiya River near Dyea, at the foot of the Chilkoot Trail.

Draining water from Lindeman, Bennett Lake and the rest of the Southern Lakes system, then dropping it a vertical distance of almost 600 metres (2,000 feet), would create enough force to generate 350 megawatts.

Alcoa, a leading international smelting company listed on the Dow Jones, estimated the Taiya Project at $120 million in 1950.

The 200-page study suggested the power could be generated with minimal impact on the other Southern Lakes, at a relatively low cost, with an added benefit of serving as an effective tool to counter high water during flood years.

The proposal never left the drawing board, but it's not off the table altogether either.

Like his grandfather and his father once were, Willard Phelps is up to his eye balls in energy issues.

The chair of Yukon Energy recalls that as a boy growing up, talk of the family electrical business was a regular occurrence, whether it was about potential sites for hydro dams or the constant demand to expand the Whitehorse distribution network.

Phelps' grandfather, Willard "Deacon" Phelps, arrived in the Yukon as a young lawyer at the tail end of the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush.

He represented the original group of three businessmen who founded the Yukon Electrical Co. Ltd. (YECL) in 1901. Not long afterward, Deacon became a principal in the company, and eventually the sole owner and manager, while maintaining his law practice.

The early years of YECL and its wood-fired boilers to drive steam turbines are well-documented in the historical account of the company penned by Whitehorse authors Flo Whyard and the late Allen A. Wright.

Challenges facing Phelps during the early years were great, from the 1905 fire that wiped out a large section of the downtown business district through what was probably the city's first economic downturn.

In the book, Ninety Years North: The Story Of The Yukon Electrical Company, Whyard and Wright point out the once-robust Whitehorse population of 800-plus winter-time residents of 1901 had fallen to 250 by 1911.

Customers were buying electricity at one point for 90 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to today's average household cost of 10 cents a kilowatt.

Through the years of the Great War, the mixed mineral markets of the '20s, the Depression and the Second World War, Deacon Phelps continued supplying electricity to the city, and would eventually be helped by his son, John Phelps, now deceased.

"They had to be Yukoners to get through that," Whyard said in a recent interview of Deacon and company. "Nobody from anywhere else could have done it.

"It was a great family."

In the late 1940s, John Phelps, a mining engineer, was contacted by John Scott - Willard Jr.'s late uncle who was also a mining engineer - about a vision to build a hydroelectric facility on Fish Lake Creek, along what is now the Fish Lake Road.

It was to be the first hydroelectric project for the city, though not for the Yukon. Work at the time was already underway on the Mayo hydroelectric project, and hydroelectric generation to supply the Klondike mining district began in the early 1900s.

In fact, the generating equipment for the Fish Lake Road project was purchased from the Engineer Mine at the south end of Tagish Lake.

Backed by the elder Phelps, John Phelps and Scott pulled it off, and the plant began producing power in the early 1950s, just after the elder Phelps died suddenly in 1951.

"How wonderful it was that he had enough faith in us . . . to back us with his life savings so that we could go ahead with the hydro project," reads Scott's tribute to Deacon Phelps in Ninety Years North.

"It was sad that he died before we had completed the project far enough to know if it would be successful."

The Fish Lake facility continues today to supply enough energy for about 225 homes, and has probably paid for itself many times over, says the Willard Phelps of today.

But the project was not without consternation.

"I remember them talking about getting into debt to the tune of $200,000, and that was scary as hell for everybody."

Though YECL was successful, Phelps says, his father grew tired of the continuous demand for expansion and the need to find more capital financing to carry out the work.

And with pressure for more distribution on the rise as construction of the Whitehorse dam neared completion, he decided it would be best to sell to a large corporation with the expertise and money to continue the company's growth.

"The lights will go out for an old and respected family company in Whitehorse, March 31," reads a Star article published March 27, 1958.

"Yukon Electrical has been sold to Canadian Utilities Limited, an Alberta firm. The electrical producing and distribution company, its president

John Phelps and his father who founded the Company, have been close to the heart of the Yukon, its history and its present development."

John Phelps stayed on as a director with Canadian Utilities for another 30 years, his 67-year-old son points out in a recent interview from Yukon Energy's boardroom overlooking the Whitehorse Rapids Dam.

Fifty years ago this coming Saturday, the dam started generating power, almost two years to the day after the federal Northern Canada Power Commission began construction in November 1956.

Like his forefathers were, Phelps is intimately involved in the territory's business of providing electricity as chair of the board.

And just as they faced the challenges of growing demand and the complexities of new technology, he and his board face the same today.

With a diminishing surplus of the hydroelectric power on the Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro grid, there is a need now to look to at options for new energy, he says.

While the Lindeman-to-Dyea tunnel proposal isn't even on the horizon at this point, and probably won't be for years to come, it's one of those projects the Phelps family talks about, and one that Phelps has made sure hasn't been lost.

"We have talked about it to our counterparts in B.C. and Alaska."

He says it's mammoth in size, but has a relatively inexpensive cost per kilowatt, though it wouldn't likely be feasible without the Yukon's grid being tied into B.C.'s grid, to allow for the export of surplus energy.

But it could also be the project to justify such a tie-in if the B.C. grid ever got close enough to the Yukon, he says.

Phelps says the Yukon's isolation from other grids has always been a noose around the territory's neck.

There's no ability, he says, to buy surplus green energy when water resources are low in the winter. Nor is there the ability to ship power south in the summer when local energy demand is low but capacity is high, as the rest of North America is chewing up electricity with air conditioners.

"So I am always looking for potential that would give us green, and ultimately a large amount of green power," says the former territorial cabinet minister who served briefly as a Conservative government leader in 1985. "We need this to lure the power line to the Yukon.

"Then we could avoid one of the major headaches, and that is we have stranded power."

Also on the books from decades ago is a major hydroelectric project on the Upper Pelly River, involving the construction of four dams at different stages, at a total cost of $1 billion.

Among the mid-size and more immediate projects is the $100-million-plus proposal to double capacity at the Mayo generating facility, Phelps says.

Currently, the priority is squeezing more juice from the existing system, with initiatives like the $8-million project to add a third turbine to the Aishihik power facility by 2011.

Very much alive is the discussion to increase water flows into the Aishihik watershed with a partial diversion of the Gladstone Creek, thereby creating more volume and generating capacity.

Yukon Energy is also looking at the possibility of geothermal heat as a renewable and clean source of steam power to drive turbines.

Pacific Rim countries all around the volcanic region known as The Ring of Fire are using geothermal technology for reliable and affordable energy, says Phelps, who returned recently from an international conference focused on the source of renewable energy.

"We are looking at geothermal very seriously," he says. "First of all, geothermal heat is an excellent source of power when you have a source of hot water .... And we are in The Ring of Fire."

Yukon Energy spent about $100,000 this year exploring its potential here. There's no question the corporation will move forward with the concept if the findings from the research look positive, says the chair of the board.

The trick, he emphasizes, is to find a hot spot close to the existing grid, to minimize the need for costly transmission lines.

And they've looked at several areas.

"I feel enthusiastic about our prospects, but there are no guarantees," he says.

"We feel as a board we would like to have something there on the shelf ready to go; get your environmental impacts and assessments, and it's ready to go. The Mayo B is almost at that point."

Wind generation in the North, says Phelps, has its challenges, particularly with hoar frost in the frigid winter months, as the two turbines on Haeckel Hill have borne out.

Solar? Winter daylight hours. The potential speaks for itself.

The cost of biofuels as a source of energy, even with the availability of beetle-killed wood, has its own challenges, on top of the issue around air emission standards, he says.

Phelps doesn't shirk nor dismiss the possibility when asked about the potential of nuclear energy for the Yukon, as one might expect.

Instead, he points out how the Yukon River community of Galena, Alaska is entertaining the idea of importing a 10 megawatt nuclear-powered generator from the Toshiba company of Japan.

Toshiba manufactures smaller nuclear generators, with capacities ranging from 10 to 50 megawatts, at reasonable cost. (The four hydrolectric turbines at the Whitehorse dam produce a total of 40 megawatts.)

The company, Phelps explained, will install them, and after their 30-year life, Toshiba will come and replace them.

The reactors are buried under the ground, and are safe and clean, he says.

"The issue is political, not practical."

But Phelps says it might be worth while to at least have the discussion about nuclear energy.

There are a couple of proposals on the books for large mining operations in remote locations with significant energy requirements, he points out.

Western Copper's Casino project, for instance, is predicting energy needs of 100 megawatts, says Phelps, suggesting that two of Toshiba's 50-megawatt generators would do the job.

"But right now, our green power is hydro, and we are looking at geothermal," says the grandson of the father of electricity for Whitehorse.