On a cloudy night in July, ravens croaked as waves lapped against the shores of Kachemak Bay. Port Graham, a small village at the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, recently has started to look at these waves differently – as a potential source of electricity.
"Energy through waves – it's convenient for us because that energy source is coming from our ocean," said Dannielle Malchoff, the first chief of Port Graham. "I have a lot of hope that this is going to be something great for our community."
Clean energy initiatives across Alaska and the country have been hit hard with federal funding freezes and abrupt cuts in recent months. But Chugachmiut – a consortium that serves Southcentral tribes, including Port Graham and its neighbor Nanwalek – announced in May it had partnered with an Australia-based company, Carnegie Clean Energy, to explore an ocean wave energy project for both villages.
The initiative is years away and would cost more than $100 million dollars, but it could be a new way for coastal villages to get reliable electricity at a lower cost, said Phyllis Wimberley, Chugachmiut's deputy director
Carnegie has several wave energy projects across the world, including a naval base in Australia. A waveenergy installation off Port Graham would be the company's first project of this kind in the U.S., said Louise Richardson, Carnegie's commercial analyst.
Port Graham and Nanwalek might be perfect candidates for the installment because of their location and limited space, Richardson said.
"One thing at Carnegie that we hope our technology will be able to service in the future is remote communities and isolated communities that might not have access to other forms of renewable energy options," Richardson said.
Port Graham and Nanwalek have no roads connecting them to the rest of the state. Energy costs there are high because the villages are at the edge of the grid, and diesel for a back-up generator comes on a barge. Plus, according to Chugachmiut, the electrical lines running from Homer are several decades old, don't have enough capacity and are unreliable.
Malchoff, with Port Graham, said the village loses power several times a month in winter and once every few months in summer.
"Without power, we cannot make those connections to the people outside of our village," Malchoff said. "This strains us in so many aspects, just in our normal lives."
Malchoff previously worked as a health aide and is now a community health representative for the village. She said outages also make work at the clinic harder. Health aides have to start a backup generator to make sure medications don't expire. They use flashlights while tending to patients and need to search for satellite reception outside to talk to a specialist.
"Say, we had an emergency," Malchoff said. "We have to use satellite phones if our power is out, which isn't very convenient when you're trying to relay and talk to doctors in the ER and you're dealing with a patient at that time."
Malchoff said more reliable electricity from wave energy could solve some of these issues. And ideally, the village could sell any extra energy back to the grid and use that revenue on health care and education.
The plan is to place a wave energy device called CETO unit offshore of Port Graham, by Flat and East Chugach islands. The device would be submerged and tethered to the seabed, moving with the waves and converting power from that motion into electricity. Villages on shore would receive the electricity through underwater cables.
But the first step is to ensure the location will work for the project. Wimberley said the consortium is planning to install test buoys by September.
The villages will also need to upgrade their electrical systems to increase capacity and have a way to plug into the wave energy unit. Wimberley said permitting, testing and installation might take close to five years.
Wimberley, with Chugachmiut, said the tribal consortium plans to invest $60,000 into the first stage of the project as it works to find more funding from other sources. One federal grant they applied for was terminated in May, but Wimberley said Chugachmuit will continue its search.
"Every time you go down a pathway and it's blocked, you have to go around. You have to go do something else," she said. "We're going to never give up."
