In Ouzinkie, one lake is water and power, so the village is building solar

Ouzinkie has broken ground on a solar array and a large battery meant to end a wrenching tradeoff: the island village's reservoir is both its hydropower source and its drinking water, and in a hard winter it can't fully serve both.

Home to 167 residents on Spruce Island, a 20-minute flight from Kodiak, Ouzinkie runs on an isolated microgrid fed by diesel generators and that hydro system. When the lake runs low, the village has to ration one essential against the other.

"Our lake is both our drinking water and our power," Mayor Elijah Jackson said. "Last winter we had to run it lower than we wanted because everything was freezing up. We needed power, but we couldn't run the community out of drinking water. We were in a world of hurt." The stakes aren't abstract: Jackson said the village lost power just after midnight one night last winter while he was coordinating an emergency medevac for an Elder. "These are just things we deal with nonstop," he said.

The new system — a 297-kilowatt solar array paired with a one-megawatt-hour battery — is meant to cut diesel use, firm up reliability, and take pressure off the lake. The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium's Rural Energy Program, working with the Native Village of Ouzinkie, says it will hold enough electricity to run critical infrastructure for more than 17 hours during an outage and trim more than $100,000 a year in diesel costs.

The Tribe will own the system and sell power as an independent producer, with the revenue steered into local water and sanitation infrastructure — an arrangement ANTHC says is meant to lower residents' household bills. "Becoming an IPP gives the Tribe additional energy sovereignty and strengthens us in the long term," Tribal Administrator Kerry Ivory said. "We have a grid that isn't connected to anything else, so we want to be sure we're able to maintain it ourselves."

The project has been years in the making, funded through a mix of federal and local sources, and built partly by the community itself: nearly a dozen residents installed panels during hands-on training in July.