Every year, millions of salmon return from the ocean to Alaska’s rivers to spawn. Species like Chinook and sockeye fight upriver in some of the world’s largest salmon runs, their silvery scales turning to warm shades of copper and red before they breed. After breeding, the salmon die far upriver, where their bodies feed scavengers and fertilize trees. The fish are critical to this habitat, and they sustain Native communities that have lived and fished in the region for thousands of years.
This summer, the salmon in Alaska’s Kuskokwim River will swim past something new: a spinning hydrokinetic turbine that turns the flowing water into electricity for the village of Napaimute. Local experts will watch closely to see if the fish can safely navigate around the turbine. If this test project succeeds, Napaimute is poised to become the second Alaska Native community to draw energy from a powerful local river, joining the village of Igiugig.
The village leading the way
Igiugig sits where the Kvichak River flows out of Lake Iliamna in southwest Alaska. Diesel fuel was once floated up the river in 55-gallon drums to power the village. Now, it’s often shipped in by barge.
“Fuel getting to Igiugig has been an everlasting issue since electricity was introduced,” said Jonathan Salmon, Igiugig Village Council energy director.
Shipping anything to the remote village is costly. But the price skyrockets when the river is too shallow for the barge, and fuel needs to be flown in — which is even more inefficient and dangerous than the barge. “When we fly in with fuel, that’s a very high-risk situation,” Salmon said.
Still, the village needs reliable power for everything from online education to food security. One missed fuel delivery puts essentials like the annual food supply at risk. “I have my whole winter’s worth of salmon stored in my freezer. I have my whole fall moose in my freezer,” Salmon said. “We store lots of our food throughout the year frozen.”
The community had long recognized the Kvichak River as a possible source of consistent energy. So, in a quest to create a local energy system that doesn’t depend on fuel deliveries, Igiugig applied for an Alaska state grant to develop river energy in 2007.
“River hydrokinetic energy is essentially a new way of harnessing some of the energy that’s available in rivers,” said Craig Hill, an aquatic energy technology expert who isn’t involved in the Igiugig or Napaimute projects.
Historically, that energy was captured using dams, but dams can come with environmental tradeoffs like blocking fish from migrating or changing the natural ecology and characteristics of the river. Early research suggests that turbines are a safer alternative. River turbines function similarly to wind turbines. Instead of wind, water spins the blades, and the movement is converted into electricity.
“The faster the water is flowing, the more energy is available,” Hill said.
The Kvichak River near Igiugig was an ideal place for a turbine power project: fast-flowing water, deep sections, plenty of room for boat traffic to get by, and not much plant debris. Still, given the newness of the technology, the remote location, and the permits required to put a new device in the river, launching the turbine was a slow process. After receiving the state grant in 2012, the Igiugig community hosted four companies to explain their turbine designs, then chose two of those companies to move forward and demonstrate their technology in the Kvichak River in 2015.
One company ignored local knowledge about the river’s strength, and when its turbine design failed, it left the village with the cleanup. The other company, Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), had a vastly different approach. The company started the conversation by asking the community, “What can we do to help you?” Salmon said.
“It’s really important from our perspective that it’s their project,” said Nathan Johnson, ORPC’s vice president of development. “They’re the ones that are leading the project. They’re the ones that are guiding the project.”
In 2019, after several rounds of testing and redesigning the technology, Igiugig and ORPC officially deployed the first RivGen turbine that sends power straight from the Kvichak River to the local grid. It was followed by a second one in 2023.
Since the installations, ORPC and the Igiugig community have watched for impacts to local salmon populations using underwater cameras and sonar. Research so far suggests that the turbines don’t significantly affect fish. Adult salmon migrating upriver usually don’t swim in the fast sections of the water where the turbines operate, Johnson said. Young salmon smolts migrating downriver can become disoriented after swimming through a turbine, but most smolts appear to swim above them instead.
Even the noise from the turbines churning through the water doesn’t impact fish, because the natural sound of gravel moving in the flowing water is louder, Salmon said.
The turbines also proved capable of holding up to the area’s harsh winter weather. “We’ve had ice completely form over the top of our technology, and we’ve had ice directly collide with our technology, we’ve had pieces of steel bent by ice,” Johnson said. “All that being said, we continue to operate.”
Local experts handle the turbine operation and maintenance whenever possible. “We’ve really designed our systems so that they can be shipped and then reassembled using smaller local equipment, using things like local fishing vessels to deploy the systems, and really trying to utilize the capabilities and the workforce in the communities,” Johnson said. “The folks that are there know those waters much, much better than outsiders.”
While the river turbines avoid the pollution and risk of explosion that comes with diesel, that doesn’t mean they’re completely safe. It’s important to have experienced experts handling the work. Many people in the community, like Salmon, have longstanding experience working on local waterways. They help maintain the turbines and train others.
“It’s a very high-risk situation when you’re working on a device,” Salmon said. “If you were attached to the device and the water’s flowing, you’ll go to the bottom of the river and it’s gonna be three hours before we get you back.”
Igiugig’s turbines have proven to be a valuable addition to the local energy mix, but they don’t meet all of the community’s energy needs throughout the year, and residents still rely on fuel. The Igiugig Village Tribal Council aims to cut electricity-related diesel consumption in half by 2030, Salmon said. Meeting that goal will likely require adding more solar panels, which are already another reliable source of renewable power for the community.
A second village tests a turbine
The village of Napaimute lies northwest of Igiugig on the Kuskokwim River, another important waterway for Alaska’s salmon. In summer, people from up and down the river gather in Napaimute to fish and take their catch home to sustain them through the year.
“It is a really important site for seasonal activities,” said local biologist Dan Gillikin. Gillikin isn’t a tribal member, but he’s served as the environmental director for the Native Village of Napaimute for over a decade.
The Napaimute area has no roads. As in Igiugig, fuel arrives by plane or river barge at high risk and high cost. When the village fills with visitors each summer, the need for electricity rises, and so does the expense. The community began exploring renewable energy options to help meet that need about 15 years ago, starting with solar panels and a wind turbine.
“The wind turbine unfortunately didn’t pan out very well,” Gillikin said. “It’s really hard to find equipment that can hold up to the environment that we’ve got out here.”
After five years, a storm knocked the wind turbine down, and no one put it back up. Solar panels were a much better fit for the location, but they still don’t cover all of the village’s power needs. That left Napaimute searching for another option to rely on during busy summer days or cloudy days when solar doesn’t work.
Eventually, a representative from hydropower company BladeRunner Energy reached out to Gillikin to pitch a turbine project in Napaimute’s fast-flowing river. The village agreed to give it a try.
That pilot project is officially launching this summer, with one turbine — a different, smaller design than those in Igiugig.
“We’re pretty certain that between the solar side of things and then the river turbine side of things, we can produce 100 percent renewable power,” Gillikin said.
He estimates that switching to renewable energy could save Napaimute $25,000 to $30,000 a year. “At $10.50 a gallon for diesel fuel, 10 percent of your power generation coming from a river turbine throughout the year can be a big deal,” Gillikin said.
This summer will test whether maintenance can be handled locally and whether the turbine impacts fish traversing the river. If the fish are negatively affected, the project will shut down. “Fish are so vital to all the communities out here,” Gillikin said. “We want to be sure we’re not impacting any of the fisheries or any of the species migrating either upriver or downriver.”
Local experts will trap fish smolt migrating toward the ocean and examine adults caught in a traditional fish wheel to see how they fare after passing by the turbine. “The ladies that typically process the fish that come out of that wheel, they’re very familiar with what those fish should look like,” Gillikin said.
If the turbine is still running when winter approaches and the village slows down, it will be removed before the river freezes, ready to be reinstalled next summer.
Though Gillikin doesn’t anticipate any negative impacts, his outlook is cautious. “It’s a pilot,” Gillikin said. “You never know how it’s gonna go. This could all go sideways real quickly.”
Will rivers power the future?
Napaimute will know later this year whether its turbine will stick around for the long run. But it’s not yet clear what the future looks like for river turbines in the region. The successful project in Igiugig has a 10-year pilot license that ends in 2029. With no existing model for turning pilots into long-term river turbine installations, the community will need to figure out the next steps from scratch.
Motivation to make it happen is growing as fuel prices continue to rise, pushing up the local cost of living. “It’s becoming very unaffordable for people to stay out here,” Gillikin said. “You’re starting to see people actually leave the villages and move into places like Anchorage and Fairbanks and outlying areas on the grid or on the road system, and that’s really unfortunate.”
Interest in riverine energy is slowly expanding elsewhere in the world, too. In 2018, a modern river turbine was installed at a World Heritage watermill site in Germany. It generates enough hydropower for about 300 homes, without disrupting the site’s historic look. This year, ORPC plans to install two turbine devices in Montreal’s St. Lawrence River — a much more urban location than the Alaska sites. The company is also working on a project on the Niagara River, which runs between New York and Ontario, Canada.
With these early projects as proof of concept, river power could gain the momentum to become part of the renewable energy puzzle for many communities. “There’s a tremendous amount of energy in our rivers around the world,” Hill said.
