Metlakatla wins federal money to protect the hydro plant its island runs on

The Metlakatla Indian Community is getting $166,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to help protect the hydroelectric plant its remote island runs on — a nearly 70-year-old facility that has become harder to rely on as the climate changes.

The money will pay for the design and engineering of a fix to shield Purple Lake Hydro, on Annette Island in Southeast Alaska, from environmental threats to the plant. It covers the planning — site studies, ground testing, cost estimates, conceptual design — but not the construction itself. The tribe is adding about $18,000, and the work runs through 2028.

Why it matters comes down to where Metlakatla sits and how it keeps the lights on. The community is Alaska's only Native reserve, founded in 1887 by Tsimshian people who crossed from Canada to hold onto their self-governance, and it's reachable only by boat or plane, cut off from any larger power grid. That isolation makes its own hydroelectric plants — Purple Lake among them — enormously valuable. Purple Lake came online in 1956 and generates about 3.9 megawatts, the larger of the community's two hydro plants.

The trouble is water. Over the past decade, changing precipitation has left the island's mountain lakes lower than they used to be. Around 2014, Metlakatla found the lakes no longer filling the way they once did, and the community had to lean on diesel as its main power source and ask residents to conserve. Diesel on an island has to be barged in and runs around 35 cents a kilowatt-hour — expensive enough that the tribe has separately won a $4.5 million federal award to build a wind turbine and cut its fuel bill.

That backdrop is what makes safeguarding the aging hydro plant worth the investment. The money is congressionally directed spending — designated by lawmakers rather than won through open competition — and it's a small piece of a larger, yearslong push by Metlakatla to keep reliable, affordable power flowing to the island for the long haul.