Ouzinkie breaks ground on solar array to cut diesel use

Ouzinkie has broken ground on a 297-kilowatt solar array and a 1-megawatt-hour battery meant to improve power reliability, cut diesel use and ease pressure on a reservoir that serves as both the village's hydropower source and its drinking water.

The reservoir behind the community's hydroelectric plant is also the village's drinking water source. Ouzinkie, home to 167 residents on Spruce Island about a 20-minute flight from Kodiak, runs on an isolated microgrid fed by diesel generators and that hydro system. Nothing connects it to a larger grid.

"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."

Jackson said in the same announcement that just after midnight last winter, the village's power failed while he was coordinating an emergency medevac for an Elder. "These are just things we deal with nonstop," he said.

The project sits inside a longer sequence of federal and state investment. A 2023 Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project planning study recommended Ouzinkie finish hydropower repairs and control upgrades first, collect a year of wind data, then add batteries and other generation afterward. Federal and national laboratory technical experts have separately cautioned, as general guidance for rural Alaska microgrids, that Arctic and sub-Arctic solar and battery systems face winter darkness and cold-performance challenges that require careful integration. The Alaska State Legislature approved $250,000 in its fiscal 2025 budget for Ouzinkie Alternative Energy Phase 2. In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $2.3 million award for the Ouzinkie Independent Power Energy Improvement Project, described then as a 160-kilowatt array and 210-kilowatt-hour battery on the old airport runway. The system now under construction is larger. The project announcement does not explain the change in size.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium's Rural Energy Program, partnering with the Native Village of Ouzinkie, says the finished system will hold enough electricity to run critical infrastructure for more than 17 hours during an outage and cut more than $100,000 a year in diesel costs.

The Tribe will own the system and sell power as an independent power producer, with revenue directed into local water and sanitation infrastructure. ANTHC says that investment is meant to lower residents' household bills.

"We have a grid that isn't connected to anything else, so we want to be sure we're able to maintain it ourselves," Tribal Administrator Kerry Ivory said.

Nearly a dozen residents installed panels during hands-on training in July. Funding came from the Department of Energy, Tribal Energy Alternatives and the Ouzinkie Native Corporation.

The account comes from ANTHC's project announcement, which carries no assessment from any party outside the project.

More training is scheduled before the system comes online.