On an overcast Tuesday, July 28, a crew of 15 Ouzinkie residents and Alaska Solar employees set up brand new solar panels on a long, flat stretch of gravel that used to be the old airstrip. Two long rows, each two panels high, are filled in piece by piece. Eventually, they get to the final panel of the first row of the array.
Ouzinkie Mayor Elijah Jackson was one of several locals helping to fasten the 70-pound panels into place. He was also one of 13 locals that Alaska Solar and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium trained to maintain and troubleshoot the panels.
“KMXT: Are you feeling confident now with the people you've had do the training, and yourself, and just you know, what you've learned so far?
Jackson: Seeing how easy it is to replace the panels and all that stuff with the crew we have and knowing who they are and how they work, I’m very confident," he said.
Under ideal conditions, each panel can produce enough energy to power six 100-watt light bulbs, or 620 watts, according to Alaska Solar. When the project is complete, Ouzinkie will have 480 panels total.
The full array could generate up to 297 kilowatts during summer days. That’s more than double Ouzinkie’s peak demand of 140 kilowatts according to the city.
The new solar project, like most crucial infrastructure in the community, involves a partnership between the City of Ouzinkie, the Native Village of Ouzinkie, which is a federally recognized tribe, and the Ouzinkie Native Corporation. The city operates the community’s existing hydroelectric and diesel electric utility, but will help maintain and operate the solar array that the tribe will own. The tribe and the Native corporation contributed to it financially.
Kipp Wilkinson is a lead project manager with Alaska Solar out of Anchorage. He said once the full solar array is running and hooked up to the existing grid, then local renewable energy sources should provide more than enough power for all of the homes in Ouzinkie for long periods of time.
“Between the hydro and the solar, obviously solar doesn't produce as much in the winter. Year-round, it's nice to have a balance," Wilkinson said. "And so with this and the megawatt battery, they'll be at least on either solar or hydro for part of the year.”
The battery Wilkinson mentioned is another part of this project that will be installed in September.
The city’s hydroelectric dam, Mahoona Lake Dam, produces up to 125 kilowatts of power, but often can’t meet demand. In part because the dam’s water supply is also the community’s drinking water.
It was first built in 1987 and has been plagued by infrastructure and maintenance issues in recent years. When the hydroelectric power is offline or the dam can’t meet demand, the utility has to burn diesel fuel to generate power.
Tribal Administrator Kerry Ivory with the Native Village of Ouzinkie said the cost isn’t sustainable.
“Right now, with the cost of fuel having gone up, I'm sure that that's substantially higher, and it's substantially higher for household use as well," she said. "So, it's like a double whammy because your power is going up and your fuel is going up.”
The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, one of the partners for Ouzinkie’s solar project, estimates the new solar array will save the community more than $100,000 in annual diesel fuel costs.
Ivory said solar power will bring down energy costs and reduce the number of blackouts in the Spruce Island community.
"With the BESS, the battery storage system, that gives us roughly 17 hours of power. So if they do have to do maintenance on the generators or the hydro, we're not going to go into blackouts, which has been a major issue in our community," she explained.
Since Ivory moved to Ouzinkie for the second time, seven years ago, she said the community has experienced at least 10 power outages a year that sometimes last for days.
She said leaning into renewable energy will also open up opportunities for the community to grow.
“We'd like to bring in some economic development. We'd like to bring in more homes so that we can bring people home or have new people move in. But we can't really do all of that until we have a place that has sustainable energy," Ivory said.
The $3.6 million solar project is expected to be fully operational by October and last for two to three decades. Right now, there is no replacement plan.
Most of the funding is coming from a $2.3 million grant awarded in 2024 by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. The rest comes from the nonprofit Tribal Energy Alternatives and the Ouzinkie Native Corporation.
Once it’s online, ANTHC says the Native Village of Ouzinkie will be able to sell its solar power to the city utility, then invest that revenue into local water and sewer infrastructure. That’s part of the reason the tribal health consortium was able to partner with Ouzinkie on the solar project.
