This March 12 webinar detailed the specific energy project challenges encountered and the innovative solutions implemented in two remote Alaskan villages–Kawerak and Igiugig. The experiences in these remote environments, offering valuable insights into project execution and critical lessons learned. The webinar covered technical approaches, community engagement strategies, and the broader impacts of enhanced energy efficiency within these unique settings.
STEVEN LYELL: Welcome, everyone. Next slide, please. Before we dive into today's webinar, a few housekeeping items.
First, to turn on live captions, click on the “show captions” button in the control panel at the bottom of your screen. Second, to submit a question for the presenters, click on Q&A in the control panel at the bottom of your screen. Third, today's webinar is being recorded. That recording, transcript, and slides will be available on the Office of Indian Energy Webinar’s website in the next one to two weeks.
Finally, all registrants for today's webinar will receive a copy of the slides via email in advance of them being posted on the webinar page. Next slide, please. Next slide, please.
Today's webinar, we have an opportunity to hear from two remote Alaskan villages today, and appreciated your advanced questions, many of which we have incorporated into this brief. Kawerak will update us on their geothermal project and Igiugig will update us on their hydroelectric project. We will also briefly cover how the Office of Indian Energy supports these innovative and critical projects.
Next slide, please.
My name is Steven Lyell. I live in Anchorage, Alaska. I work for the Office of Indian Energy, and I'll be your host today for this tour of some of the projects in the Tribal Energy Program and how the Office of Indian Energy supports innovative and critical projects such as these. Next slide, please.
Our director is Mr. Eric Mahroum. He was named as the director of Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy on January 12, 2026, reflecting his commitment to Indian country. This follows an appointment by President Donald Trump in January 2025 to serve as the director of the DOE's Office of State and Community Energy Programs. Eric proudly served in the Trump administration in 2017, also at DOE. Eric has a track record of forging partnerships, promoting innovation, and connecting entrepreneurs with America's dynamic energy sector.
Our deputy director is Mr. David Conrad, and he serves as the deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Indian Policy and Programs. He recently served as the director of the Office of Public Affairs for the assistant secretary of Indian Affairs and the Department of Interior, managing press relations, digital media, and communications in close coordination with the Secretary's Office of Communication and other DOI bureaus.
In the past, Mr. Conrad also worked as the department's director for Tribal and Intergovernmental Affairs in the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs, where he was responsible for intergovernmental affairs with Tribal, city, and county governments. Next slide, please.
20 years ago, the Indian Tribal Energy Development and Self-Determination Act of 2005, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, authorized the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Indian Energy. The vision for our office was established in law and charges us to promote Tribal energy development, efficiency, and use, reduce and stabilize energy costs, enhance and strengthen Tribal energy and economic infrastructure, and electrify Indian lands and homes.
I'm happy to share this vision continues to be carried out. We have a successful track record working with Tribal Nations. We're excited that in 2025, we celebrated the 20-year anniversary of our office. We're here and ready to continue to support Tribal Nations as they pursue their energy vision. We are continuing to find ways to be more efficient and effective as we rise to meet our congressional mandate and achieve our mission. Next slide, please.
Next slide, please. Alrighty, the Office of Indian Energy offers three main areas of support to Tribes.
First, financial assistance on a competitive basis to develop and deploy energy infrastructure and technology. Second, no-cost technical assistance to advance Tribal energy projects and energy commerce. And third, capacity-building activities through webinars, workshops, and workforce development opportunities with the goal of supporting Tribes to fully participate in unleashing American energy. Next slide, please.
I would like to introduce Kelsey Galleher, the general manager for Unaatuq Pilgrim Hot Springs. She'll be sharing about the scope of this geothermal project. Please hold all questions until the end of her brief. Next slide, please.
KELSEY GALLEHER: Hi, everybody. My name is Kelsey Galleher. I'm the Pilgrim Hot Springs’ general manager. I've been in this position for a little over a year, but I've been with Kawerak for 10 years. And prior to this, I worked in the health nutrition field with our Head Start program.
And I grew up in Nome. I grew up going to the hot springs, so I feel really lucky that I get to call this work now. And this is the Unaatuq Energy Geothermal Technology for Pilgrim Hot Springs, a Program Review project update. Next slide, please.
So Pilgrim Hot Springs is located 60 miles north of Nome on the Seward Peninsula in the Bering Strait region of Alaska. Nome is not connected to the road system, so access is either by plane or by boat. The communities on this map all make up the Bering Strait region. And the owner communities that make up Unaatuq LLC are starred. They are Mary's Igloo, Nome, Council, and White Mountain. Next slide, please.
So Pilgrim Hot Springs has been used by the Kauweramiut people of Mary's Igloo since time immemorial. It's been seen as a sacred place of healing, and has been used for subsistence as well as a resting place while traveling through communities. In 1905, the site was claimed under the Homestead Act, and ownership was transferred to A.E. Boyd in 1907 when he created the Kruzamapa Hot Springs Company, named after the Kruzamapa River or the Pilgrim River, which is less than a half mile away from the site.
The site was deeded to the Catholic Church in 1917, which coincided with the Spanish flu. And that prompted an orphanage and a boarding school to open in 1918 and operated until 1941. In 1977, Pilgrim Hot Springs was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2010, 320 acres were purchased by seven Native corporations and nonprofits that came together and formed Unaatuq LLC. The geothermal power potential at Pilgrim Hot Springs was first recognized as early as 1915, and was categorized for the first time in 1980 when a series of test wells were drilled. Next slide, please.
So in 2010, these organizations came together and informed Unaatuq LLC. They are Bering Straits Native Corporation, Kawerak, NSEDC, Mary's Igloo Native Corporation, White Mountain Native Corporation, Sitnasuak Native Corporation. And the original owner was Teller Native Corporation, but they later sold their share to Council Native Corporation, who's still an owner today.
Unaatuq's vision is a protected arctic oasis that provides for our people. And our mission is to promote the well-being of our people through sharing, protecting, and responsibly developing the resources of Pilgrim Hot Springs. Next slide, please.
Kawerak is one of two co-managers of Unaatuq. The other co-manager is Bering Straits Native Corporation. Kawerak is a nonprofit Tribal consortium representing 20 Alaska Native Tribes in the Bering Strait region. Our mission is to advance the capacity of our people and Tribes for the benefit of the Bering Strait region of Alaska, which is the homeland and waters of the Yup'ik, Inupiaq, and St. Lawrence Island Yup'ik peoples.
And this is the Pilgrim Hot Springs team. There's me, the general manager, our seasonal site caretaker and sustainability coordinator, our farm assistant and agricultural manager, our program assistant, and our plant conservation specialist. Next slide, please.
So Unaatuq has four pillars. They are ecotourism, culture and history, clean energy, and food security. And our goal is to revive and transform an important historical site, develop a sustainable business model, incorporate cultural values into planning, support regional economic development, and all doing this powered by renewable energy. Next slide, please.
So this project participants, Unaatuq LLC, is acting as the TEDO, Tribal Energy Development Organization and the landowner, and Kawerak as the grantee. All Pilgrim Hot Springs staff are employed by Kawerak, and we're working with these four partners.
So CRW Engineering is our design and engineering firm. Alaska Center for Energy and Power is our University of Alaska Fairbanks partner. Deerstone Consulting is providing project management services. And Stampede Ventures is our construction contractor. Next slide, please.
Unaatuq [AUDIO OUT] 16 years ago, and since then, lots of exploration has happened. ACEP has compiled data on the production and injection wells, as well as the wells that are not currently in use anymore, in a comprehensive report. We've worked with Calypso Farms out of Fairbanks to develop a farm plan. And in 2018, Unaatuq had a strategic planning that focused on identifying and prioritizing those four pillars I referenced earlier. And this is also where our vision and mission statements were born.
We've developed reports detailing the historic district and how those should be maintained in accordance with the State Historical Preservation Office, SHPO, a strategic energy plan with DOE. We've created a new business plan that includes a market industry analysis and our site master plan that ties in near-, middle-, and long-term goals.
Sustainable and renewable energy is an underlying when it comes to site planning in every aspect, and this is what has led the board to pursue building a power plant on-site. Next slide, please.
So project evolution―the grant agreement was signed in November 2022. And the kickoff meeting happened in Anchorage in February of 2023. In July 2020, CRW Engineering sent out ground crew to find property markers, estimate a power plant size, and mapped out the location of where that power plant will go. They took soil samples and just got a feel for the property.
And August 2023 is when we met with NEPA to address any environmental impacts, scoping and defining of the project, reviewing baseline resource studies such as wetlands and archeology, and presented draft findings.
September 2023 is when well reinjection testing took place. In October 2023, CRW Engineering mapped out the energy loads by capturing data of what the site currently uses, and estimated what it might use in the future, and what the power plant could handle. This is also when the BESS, the battery energy storage system, became a piece of the project to tie in the grid instead of having a massive diesel generator on-site. October is also when we determined that DOE was the lead on the NEPA review and USDA was the lead on the Section 106 review, and we reviewed those plans.
November 2023 to October 2024. It took almost a year to go from 65% to 95% design, and most of this time was figuring out how to tie in the BESS to the system. And in October 2025, we got our final NEPA and Section 106 review determinations. And we're currently in the procurement and permitting phase. So we are hoping that this summer we can have equipment delivered and staged on-site, and then construction can begin in summer 2027. Next slide, please.
So how it works in very basic terms―hot water, ours is about 190 degrees Fahrenheit, is pumped from a geothermal production well and passed through a heat exchanger that transfers the heat to the power plant to generate electricity. The system is cooled using a nearby cooling pond. And electricity is stabilized with the BESS, the battery energy storage system, before being sent to local facilities through buried transmission lines.
Pictured here is our guest cabins available for rent in the bottom right-hand corner. And they currently use solar power and propane right now. We also have multiple staff cabins, shower, staff shower house, and we'll be utilizing electricity on the farm as well. After the heat is used, the remaining warm water, or waste hot water, will supply the main soaking hot springs pool and is then re-injected to recharge the reservoir. Next slide, please.
So site mapping loads. You can see here the power plant is near 12 and 11 on this map, just behind the main soaking pool and the three above-ground soaking tubs. The cooling pond is in the bottom left. Across from the guest cabins on this map is 8, 9, and 10. The re-injection well is located near location 20 on the map, which is north of the power plant, and the waste hot water that will be used to re-inject back into the reservoir in the main soaking pond. The soaking pond is number 19 on the map.
And the electrical lines show plans to distribute power to staff lodging and the shower house, as well as a visitor welcome center, which are number 5, 6, and 7 on this map. They'll also go to the historic buildings, like the church and the nuns’ quarters, which are also staff housing, and the farm facilities, which are over near 15, 16, and 18 on this map, as well as guest cabins, which again are 8, 9, and 10.
Next slide, please.
So we just wanted to show some pictures of what we've been up to. Most of these were taken last summer. That first picture shows the church and the dorm, and the old washateria, and the cannery in the background.
Next to that is a Kawerak staff member holding some of our massive turnips. I think one of those was our 4 pounds turnip last year. The next picture is the ANSEP Academy students. They came out last fall and helped harvest carrots and potatoes.
The next picture is―I believe it's a short-eared owl. They were all over the property this year, and you don't see them close to town. So it's really cool to see them flying around. But that also means we had an abundance of voles. The voles really terrorized the farm last year, but it's still cool to see the owls swooping in.
The bottom-left picture is a bundle of cilantro. We had a really nice herb garden last year that had cilantro, parsley, dill, basil. And that's one of the two fields that we use for farming.
The picture next to that is the St. Lawrence Island dance groups. We had our first opening minifestival last summer that had King Island and St. Lawrence Island dance groups come out, as well as two other local performers. We had board members, we have cultural advisory committee members, and about 150 people came out. So that was really cool.
And then the last picture is one of three workshops we held on-site. This was the mushroom workshop, where we actually discovered that there is an abundance of lion's mane mushroom growing on the property, which was extremely popular at our farmer's markets. Next slide, please.
So technical assistance―we worked with NLR, National Laboratory of the Rockies, and DOE's Geothermal Technologies Office on design review with their electrical engineers and microgrid experts to provide technical assistance to review our 95% design plans. Next slide, please.
So the original project period was October 1, 2022, through November 30, 2024. And we realized that we need a little bit more time to complete this project. So we were granted a no-cost extension with DOE Office of Indian Energy.
They extended the project through December 31, 2027. And actually, if you look at this aerial picture of Pilgrim, and you think back to the site load maps I showed earlier, the upper picture, right before the frame cuts off, that's the cooling pond that we'll be utilizing with the power plant. And right across from it is the staff cabins.
And then if you follow that trail, there's a little red building there. That's the main soaking pool. And that's the changing shack, is the red building.
And then through the trees is a clearing. And that's actually where the power plant will be staged. And so it's pretty hidden from view when the trees are in full bloom.
And then if you go back to the staff cabins and take the trail, that's where the caretaker cabin, and the staff shower room, and the visitor center are located. If you follow the trail across the slough, you go into the historic district, which is where the church is.
The cannery, maintenance shop, old washeteria. And then that long building is the dorm. And across from the dorm with the multicolored roof is the nuns' quarters, and that's where staff housing is. And then if you follow the trail that goes out of frame, that's where the farm is. So this is just a nice aerial view of the property. Next slide, please.
So 320 acres of the Pilgrim Hot Springs property are on the National Register of Historic Places. This includes historic cemetery, nine historic buildings, cultural resources, including an important subsistence resource, wetlands. The Pilgrim River is a half mile away, and is the main fishing source in the area. It's a bird migration route.
Due to our proximity to Siberia, birds sometimes get lost and wander over. So you might see birds in this part of the world that you won't see anywhere else in the U.S. So Section 106, our determination was no adverse effects. They recommended the development of an inadvertent discovery plan, which we've started drafting through another grant through the state of Alaska. And our NEPA review determined a categorical exclusion as well. Next slide, please.
So this is the power plant unit itself. It's manufactured by ElectraTherm, which is a company based in Georgia. It's an organic Rankine cycle unit rated with a capacity of 75 kilowatts. It's just a little guy.
It's actually the only geothermal power plant of this size that you can buy in the United States to comply with the Build America, Buy America requirements. Next slide, please.So our project funders―we have a $1.7 million grant through Department of Energy, Office of Indian Energy. And that's funding the purchase of the power plant and on-site installation, including creating design drawings with CRW Engineering. Unaatuq and Denali Commission are contributing $500,000. USDA Rural Utilities Service's High Energy Cost Grant of $600,000 is funding the purchase of the BESS unit. And Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Climate Resilience is providing a $1.8 million grant, and that's funding the remaining components of the BESS, such as the grid-forming inverter and microgrid converter, and the installation and integration of the unit. Next slide, please.
So a big motivator to build this power plant is cost savings. The cost of gas in Nome is $6.29 a gallon, and the cost of diesel is $6.49 a gallon. And this is what nearly everyone heats their homes with, unless you're supplementing with a wood stove. And even, then can't supplement 100% of the heating costs. A 100-pounds propane tank is $240, which may last the average cabin out in the country a whole summer, and that's with inconsistent use.
At Pilgrim Hot Springs, each guest cabin goes through at least one 100-pounds propane tank per season, as well as each staff building. Nome residents pay $0.55 per kilowatt for electricity, and it's much higher in the surrounding villages.
Currently, staff and guest facilities on-site utilize solar energy. But as we know with solar, it can be unreliable during consistently cloudy periods, of which Nome has many. And when daylight hours get shorter around September, the solar batteries on-site are not as reliable. So being able to utilize geothermal power will not only provide reliability but offset the cost associated with maintaining guests' and staff's cabins. Next slide, please.
So the current production well reads between 180–190 degrees Fahrenheit, which is actually on the lower end of power production. Core samples indicate temperatures at 302 degrees, which means much greater power potential.
Data shows that there is a deeper and hotter reservoir, either on Unaatuq land or on the surrounding Mary's Igloo land. And by monitoring this resource performance over time, this small geothermal power plant will be able to gather data to inform further exploration of larger resource. Right now, we're going to use this electricity to improve the irrigation system on the farm. But in the future, when we can produce more power, we'll be able to take care of all on-site needs, including recreating and modernizing the historic greenhouse that was previously located on the property. The potential to transmit to surrounding communities is a driving force of further exploration as well.
Mary's Igloo is prioritizing relocating to their traditional village site just 10 or so miles away from Pilgrim Hot Springs. And we hope to be a resource to other communities that have access to a geothermal resource and have yet to develop it. We'd love to be able to share our success stories and mistakes that they can learn from, and just share knowledge. Next slide, please.
Community benefits that can come from developing this geothermal resource include a wellness retreat center on-site that can be used for corporate retreats, more workshops and educational classes, even potentially become a trauma healing center. Recreational activities that already take place on-site are biking. It's been very popular in the last couple of years, with people flying to Nome with their bikes and then biking out to the hot springs.
And when they get there, they usually have some basic maintenance needs. So setting up a bike maintenance station would be beneficial to our guests. Hiking, fishing, and camping are already really popular nearby activities.
Cultural revitalization and historic preservation. The historic buildings―having consistent and renewable power source would allow us to restore those buildings and use them for community gathering places, meeting areas, cold storage for produce, and even extra lodging spaces for staff, guests, and contractors. Providing power to the farm equipment building, making it much easier for staff to work on equipment in an enclosed space protected from the elements with power.
And then, employment opportunities. With the power plant comes a power plant operator and maintenance staff. So the community benefits are endless. Next slide, please.
And we shall say a huge thank you to supporting organizations. And we're really lucky to have so many partners and make the work possible. Next slide, please.
So Quyana, thank you. That's all I have today. And if you want to visit us at Pilgrim Hot Springs, all you have to do is fly Anchorage to Nome and then drive 2 hours north. So thank you.
STEVEN LYELL: Thank you very much, Kelsey. We appreciate that brief. We'd like to address some of the questions that we had received in advance, and then, perhaps if we have time, some of those additional ones as well.
KELSEY GALLEHER: Oops. Yeah, so there were a lot of questions received, and we couldn't answer all of them, but we've picked out a few. The first one was, I'm most interested in how community buy-in was gained. How were the hard choices and questions navigated?
I have had very positive feedback from community members. Community meetings have been held. We've been very transparent with plans for development, and I think that's a key piece of it.
Keeping the community informed goes a long way in gaining trust. The geothermal resource has been very well known for decades and decades, and the community has been very supportive of developing it for on-site power production and potentially transmitting to surrounding communities. We have a strong partnership with the surrounding landowner, Mary's Igloo Native Corporation, who's prioritizing relocation to their traditional sites. So that creates a personal connection and investment in the project for them as well. So we're lucky to have a good partnership.
Another question was, “How are logistics and supply chain issues handled, given transport and seasonal constraints?” So since Nome is not connected to the road system, we're dependent on the barge schedule, which is June through October. And access to the site is usually late May to late October, maybe November if we're lucky. This does put stress on production timelines, making sure that we can make the last barge.
It takes excellent communication, flexibility, strategy among the team, and planning for worst-case scenarios. For example, if production runs late and you've missed the last barge, you might have added costs for staging equipment at the manufacturer's or somewhere else. So being able to shift gears and be flexible and move forward with other aspects of the project is important. It also gets tricky juggling construction with the tourist season since they run at the same time.
And another question was, “What financing or partnership models have proven most effective for implementing community-owned energy systems in isolated area?” So for a project in remote, rural Alaska, usually grant awards are necessary to pay for the upfront capital costs. However, community support and good partnerships are key to making the project successful. A good contractor and technical expert will make sure that your project is done right, and strong community support will make sure that your project is supported and has positive buy-in moving forward.
But beyond the initial grant for construction, the project needs to be supported by a sustainable income source in order to pay for continued maintenance of the project. For example, this could be through one of your Tribal programs, land leasing agreements, energy sales, or income generated by other activities. For Unaatuq, the business generates income through agriculture operations and ecotourism, such as our cabin and campsite rentals. Having a sustainable power source on-site will allow us to expand these activities and earn additional revenue to support long-term operations and maintenance of the property and of the infrastructure, including the power plant itself.
STEVEN LYELL: Thank you, Kelsey. I noticed we've had a few questions in the chat. Are you able to address any of those at this time?
KELSEY GALLEHER: Yeah, let's see. So repeat the energy conversion process from pumping hot water to electricity. So the hot water is pumped up through a production well.
Let me find my notes so I don't misspeak. So the hot water is pumped from a production well and is passed through a heat exchanger in working with the cooling pond that we have on-site, and that generates electricity. It's then stabilized with the BESS, the battery energy storage system, before being sent out through transmission lines to buildings on-site.
And then back to system specs, “To produce electricity, what does the temperature need to be at to actually reach critical threshold? 190 seems low.” 190 is on the lower end. I know that Amanda is on, and she might be able to speak to the different―how we got to this point, how we figured out that 190 was―it's not going to produce a lot of power, but it is on the lower end to meet that lower threshold, just enough to produce power.
AMANDA: Yeah, hi, this is Amanda with Kawerak. Thanks for the question. So not a super technical expert, but the ElectraTherm, I believe, can go down to 175 degrees Fahrenheit as the lowest temperature.
But it also depends on your cooling source and how cold your water or air temperature is that you're cooling the system with. Again, not a technical expert or a physics expert, but it has to do with the delta T of power, something. You could Google and learn more about how organic Rankine cycle power generators work. It's very interesting.
You have this hot source, but you also need a cool source in order to create that power. So why our unit is going to be rated for 75 kilowatts max, the output that we're actually going to get is probably more along the 30 to 40 kilowatt-hours of power. Hopefully, that helps out.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
KELSEY GALLEHER: Yeah, there is one more. “What is the operating cost of the ElectraTherm? Assuming you are not paying for diesel or displacing a lot of fuel, is it cheaper to operate the geothermal system compared to traditional diesel generators?” Yes, it is. Again, Amanda, you know more about the cost of operating over time.
AMANDA: Yes, so since we're not installed, and commissioned, and running yet―I hope I'm not frozen. Can you hear me still?
KELSEY GALLEHER: We can hear you.
AMANDA: OK, I'm going to turn my camera off. It's a little bad connection. But we don't know the answer to that yet.
However, when we initially applied for this grant and ran the financials, it was penciling out, and it did make sense to use the ElectraTherm style organic Rankine cycle unit over time, just because the cost of diesel is so high in our communities. Thanks.
KELSEY GALLEHER: And then curious about lessons learned on the project. “What was an unexpected learning that you wish you knew at the beginning?” I have just been on this project for a little over a year. I feel like I just waltzed right in when it was hit the ground running.
So there have been some hang-ups, just part of life. But I don't know. Amanda, does anything stand out to you since you've been there from the beginning to now? Things you wish you knew before we got started?
AMANDA: It would have been really nice if we knew we needed a grid stabilizer as large as what we're going to use from the beginning. So the battery energy storage system that we're installing is a much larger capacity than what the power plant itself has a capacity for. And that's really because of the specs, the technical specs of those units.
They're usually made to connect to some larger grid. Normally, when you have these systems, you're maybe in the lower 48, you've got a grid system all around you. But here in Alaska, we're remote. We're removed, and we're isolated.
So we have to make our own grid. So it would have been good to a little bit more of those details when we first got started. So hopefully that helps.
KELSEY GALLEHER: And another question, “What are your current heating systems for the buildings, and will this project support those systems?” So currently, our buildings are either heated by a wood stove or a propane stove. So yes, we could still continue using the wood stove if we wanted to, but we can use the hot water to plumb through those buildings and take care of heating as well.
STEVEN LYELL: Alrighty, Kelsey and Amanda, thank you so much for answering those questions. Barring any other questions, I think we're going to get ready for our next presenter. Kelsey? All right.
OK, our next presenters will be Mr. Karl Hill and Jon Salmon. Karl's the operations manager of the Igiugig hydroelectric project. I would ask that you please hold all questions until the end of the brief. The briefs are fairly extensive, and we're happy to answer questions at the end. Next slide, please.
KARL HILL: Good morning. Thanks, Steven. Karl Hill here. I've been with this project from its inception easily, 12 or 13 years ago, maybe longer, when we started with surveys of the river, doing bathymetric surveys and flow studies to determine if we did have a resource for hydrokinetic power.
This cover slide is a picture of one of our devices on the surface. The two pontoons are ballasted with water to submerge the device to the bottom of the river. You'll see the foils, the helical blades on the foils in the center of the device, and the generator on the close part. The cylindrical yellow piece is the generator.
If you look at the back-left-hand side of the photo there, you'll see an acoustic release device to release taglines for us to hook up to the umbilicals if we can't retrieve the umbilicals for pumping air back into these devices, into the pontoons, sorry, to raise it back to the surface.
I'm originally from the Iliamna Lake area and have been back in the Igiugig for about 15 years. We have a really strong local team here. We're all commercial fishermen, so we rely on the salmon and do whatever we need to do to keep the village running. I'll let Jon do a little introduction of himself, please.
JON SALMON: Hi. Good morning, Alaska time. Jon Salmon here. We appreciate your time and longevity on these projects, Karl, because it provides continuity.
I moved back to Igiugig in 2019. I left and went to school for finance and continued around the states to pick up some work experience before returning home. I began on this project in the summer of 2019, which is interesting to note. It was one of the higher recorded summer temperatures on record here.
I do think it's important to log that information when we're working on these types of projects, so that we can have data on river depth to ambient air temperature, so that both as the hottest summer I've experienced in Igiugig, as well as the beginning of my work on this project, to help ensure our continued operations through temperature variations.
KARL HILL: Thanks, Jon. Next slide, please. Here's an overall location. We're in southwest Alaska. We're about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage.
We consider ourselves in the Bristol Bay Area. We are at the headwaters of the Kvichak River, and Iliamna Lake is the largest freshwater lake in Alaska. It's around 90 miles long by 25 miles wide. Next slide, please.
Igiugig is governed by the Igiugig village council. We provide the services shown on the chart there. We believe in consensus-based decision-making. So, if we are faced as a community with decisions, decisions and challenges to make, we involve the community input as best we can. And if we aren't all aligned on specific causes or projects, then they don't go forward until we can all come to an understanding.
We value our local businesses. Our local Native corp is Igiugig Native Corp. They're the major landowner in the area, and we operate a few different subsidiaries as well, a construction company, and environmental company, and our newest 8A company that Jon is in charge of, Nuna Remediation. And we are a self-governing community and cover all the services needed for a major city at a microscopic level. Next slide, please.
This is how we get the majority of our fuel and freight in. The airplane that you see in the front of that picture has a fuel truck backed up to it. So we fly our diesel, and our unleaded, and our avgas in most of the time in the summer. In some winters, we have the right runway conditions to get additional fuel in. But it takes a lot of planning, and as you can imagine, fuel is very expensive. Next slide, please.
So here's our power plant operating costs for 2025, totaled $303,000. We are a village of 70 people. To put that in perspective, if you look at our fuel prices, we feel like Nome is getting a pretty good deal.
[LAUGHS] But our fuel prices are extremely high.
We have to fly ours in 2,400- to 3,400-gallon batches presently. We used to bring it up the river, the Kvichak River, but it's been so unpredictable, the levels in the river and the channels that we can't rely on getting all of our fuel up the river on barges. So it's been flown in for several years now.
Our electricity costs are $0.91 a kilowatt. We have a power cost equalization program in the state of Alaska that subsidizes our power for residents up to 750 kilowatts per month. On top of that, if you go above that, you're paying $0.91 a kilowatt. We really like the photo in the upper right. It's a fuel plane flying in over our hydrokinetic device that's on the beach, getting ready to be deployed. Next slide, please.
Here's another depiction of the project site. As the previous presenter noted, most villages in Igiugig have no connection to any other villages or infrastructure. There's no road system. So the only way into Igiugig, you can get there by boat in the summer from other communities, or you can fly in with an airplane throughout the year. Next slide, please.
So here's a project summary. We have very high energy costs, which you can imagine based on our fuel prices. Like most of the other 200 communities in Alaska, we're not connected to any central power grids, or fuel pipelines, or road systems to bring materials, and freight, and fuel in on a consistent basis. We have a power plant that consists of three diesel generators. They are 65 kilowatts each and produce about 325 megawatts per year with around 25,000 gallons of diesel. They're old-school generators to keep them, I guess, in the technical realm that we're comfortable with for now. And so it does cost a lot to produce electricity for a small village.
Project objective was to acquire and install a small microgrid and energy storage system. This microgrid and energy storage system is designed to take inputs from other renewable sources, not just our hydrokinetic device. Jon is heading up a solar photovoltaic project this summer, and we've also had ongoing studies with wind power generation that will all theoretically plug into our microgrid and battery energy storage system and help to keep from having to fly diesel in so much. Next slide, please.
So we've had a couple of different phases in our projects go through the first and second phases here. Next slide, please. The first phase of our project was technology selection and I know there was a question on how you get community buy-in to these projects.
So in Igiugig's case, we did something similar to the Kawerak example, where we had a lot of community meetings. We engaged our local elders, our youth, anyone that had any input in what they thought we should do for a power system. We invited six different power hydrokinetic device companies. We invited them all to the village to present their ideas to the village as a whole and then made a selection based on a couple of the items shown in the lower left. We wanted a simple design.
When you're out in a isolated village, a rural village, we need something that's simple to design and simple to maintain. So we're not dealing with highly technical parts and pieces and needing a lot of outside resources to keep things working and to maintain things. We needed to have local involvement.
Our model includes having, in order to have a sustainable energy system, we need local operators.
We need to grow local expertise. We want to be able to produce power with these renewable energy sources on our own, with understanding that some technical experts that we need, that we'll have to rely on occasionally, but we want to be able to do most of it ourselves.
We wanted local ownership. We wanted reduced operating expenses, so a fairly reliable system that didn't need a lot of maintenance. We needed long-term viability and scalability.
One of our focuses also is to demonstrate that these programs can-- these energy programs can be implemented in rural villages in Alaska, not just Igiugig. So we wanted to demonstrate that they could be done in any rural village in Alaska with limited equipment resources, heavy equipment resources.
Next slide, please.
So phase I or phase I funding was through the Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office. We selected ORPC for the design that they had for a hydrokinetic device. It seemed viable for our river conditions. It seemed like something that we could maintain and operate.
One of the other design considerations is that we have to truck everything. We have to―sorry, I'll back up here.
Our logistics to get large freight items into the village is difficult. We're able to do it during ice-free months for about 5 months of the season. They have to―you have to put everything on a barge over in the Homer area. It comes across the water there.
It gets dropped off at the base of a portage road, and then it's portaged 13 miles through the mountains on nothing longer than a 40-foot trailer. And then it has to go on to another barge and then barged 90 miles down the lake to Igiugig. So in those 5 months, there's only about 3 or 4 days of tide that make that doable on the portage side of things, where the tide influence is really heavy. So this is one of our pieces of heavy equipment installing the foils for one of the hydrokinetic devices. Next slide, please.
This is the layout of our project area. We have the assembly area there at the barge landing. That's the outlet of Iliamna Lake. The village of Igiugig, majority of it, is shown there in the picture in the middle of it. The project site is down below the village. And then that is where the Kvichak River empties or empties Iliamna Lake. It's also home to one of the largest sockeye salmon runs that's still wild and sustainable in the world. So that's very important to us.
On the right is drone shot of the deployed hydrokinetic device. So it's sitting on the bottom there moored to an anchor. Next slide, please.
So phase 1 highlights, we're the first Tribal entity that we of to hold a FERC hydrokinetic pilot license. That was a very difficult thing to do. We were lucky to have a good project partner like ORPC to help us along that process, and so we were able to get that pilot license in order to make this project possible.
We've deployed the RivGen now. Well, this slide says over two Alaskan winters, but we're going through several more now. And one of the things that happened that I'll show later is some frazil ice events.
We've had tens of millions of adult sockeye transiting up and down the river, with so far no observed injuries or mortalities. We've had the devices deployed during spring ice breakup. And I think this is going to be probably one of the more challenging breakups this year. I think we have about 3 feet of ice in front of 3 feet thick in front of Igiugig.
We have 4 feet thick further up the lake. And it's going to be an interesting breakup depending on wind conditions and how fast it all happens. Next slide, please.
One of our focuses is trying to monitor salmon smolt outmigration. We can have tens of millions of sockeye smolt, and not just sockeye but other species of salmon, outmigrating in the spring in a very concentrated time frame. So one of our big focuses is to make sure that we're not harming our salmon population. A lot of us do commercial salmon fishing down at where the Kvichak River empties into Bristol Bay. We're all subsistence users of the salmon, and they're one of our most important sources of protein.
So we fill our freezers with salmon every summer and rely on them. So anything that's going to harm them, we have a difficult time justifying.
We monitor smolt outmigration through underwater cameras. We've tried a bunch of different techniques. We've used side-scan sonar. We're still working on this part of the project, and it has been one of the more challenging parts of this project.
We've had help from ADF&G, University of Alaska Fairbanks, PNNL, and AquaAcoustics, among other folks. So next slide, please.
Phase 2 of the hydrokinetic project. I'll ask for the next slide. This is a neat picture. It's got two of our hydrokinetic devices, similar design a little bit different.
We've gone through and done lessons learned, testing on these things, and knocked out some parts of the design that were made it problematic to deploy them and retrieve them. But those are the two devices that are deployed right now. This second part of the project was funded by DOE in the Energy Department.
We have Schneider Electric, Alaska Energy Authority, and NREL all involved, as well as ORPC, to get the battery energy storage system part of this involved and integrated. And it's been a very complicated project, but we've had a really strong team and definitely appreciate the funding to get this done.
We have had to extend our project deadline. That's been very, very much appreciated as we continue to try to do smolt outmigration monitoring and integration of our battery energy storage system. Next slide, please.
This is an overall layout of how the flow of energy will go or is going in some respects. We have our RivGen-powered smart microgrid. We plan to power that also with wind energy and solar energy in the future and have some predictable sources of baseload power.
The energy storage system is a 250-kilowatt battery energy storage system that will eventually be able to turn diesel generators on and off. When RivGen power isn't enough or other renewables aren't enough to keep our battery energy system charged enough, the diesel should be able to come on and kick in when we need them. The thing about the diesel energy system is we know how to operate that. We know how to rebuild our diesels. We know everything there is to about running a diesel power plant.
So going into this, our one request was to be able to shut the renewables off and turn the diesels back on so we could still operate our community if something didn't go correctly. Next slide, please. I'll turn things over here to Jon to go over some work completed to date and some of the lessons learned.
JON SALMON: Thank you, Karl, for all the back information, and thank you for going to the next slide. Some of the work completed to date―well, the work completed to date, as well as lessons learned. We are continually learning lessons.
I don't think we can clarify enough how much engineering and forethought went into creating these devices. You can see from the drone images that they are seemingly shallow in that location in the river. It's called the thalweg, the deepest, fastest flowing portion of the river. It's 23 deep.
The devices themselves are just over 15 feet tall. It's 23 deep in the fall. The river is taller, deeper in the fall and shallower in the spring when all the water is still frozen. But typically, we maintain about 6 feet of clearance over the top of the devices. When aerial shots and when you're traversing over the top of them, going downriver, they seem like they're very close. Our water can be really clear.
Here, again, you'll see some of the equipment that is on-site in order to unload and beach these devices. You can see our modular flexi-float barge that is 80 feet long. And you'll see that with our equipment on there here shortly, and the two devices brought on to shore.
The biggest devices―the biggest equipment we needed to do was to lift the pontoon portions of the RivGen. And all together, after the device is assembled, it weighs about 75,000 pounds.
On the photo on the right side, you'll see the two shore stations where the interconnection to the Igiugig Electric Company happens. Next slide, please.
Here's an overhead view of what the infrastructure installed looks like. On the right side of the photo is the shore stations, and then the electrical line is directly buried to a junction box on the island. The junction box had to be heavy-duty enough to withstand the weather and waterproof. But also we found that it had to be bear-proof.
The silver stainless steel junction box tends to attract wildlife, and they're curious animals. So they'll come and they'll come and take a look at it and potentially lean on it, try to scratch it, et cetera.
From the junction box, the power and data cables are underwater. They're in an armored cabling. And they have additional ice armor where the ice has potential to scrape against the cable.
It weighs about 15 pounds a foot from there. 2.0 is upstream in yellow and 2.1 is downstream in blue.
Next slide, please.
So here is the modular flexi-float barge with the Caterpillar 320 excavator. Currently, we're deploying the anchor for 2.1. You can see the mooring flaked out on deck there.
These are carefully worked situations. They're dangerous. We're working in the current.
Once the anchor is deployed, we do the operation as slow and safely as possible. We exercise these on the beach.
And then you'll see two buoys on the stern of the boat there, on the stern of the barge. And those are going to be how we retrieve back to these mooring locations to attach the device. Next slide, please.
After the device is moored on to the anchoring system, we return to the beach and load on the power and data cable. So there you see the shielded cable as well as the ice armor. Again, flaked out along the barge deck, we are currently on starboard of the RivGen device, port of the barge there, where connecting the power and data cable as well as shackling it so that we don't actually pull on the plugins. It is really similar to just plugging in your computer there. It's a plug-and-play waterproof connection.
And then we back downriver to ensure we're not pulling device to one side of the river or not. And then we start flaking the cable off in segments and making our way to shore. Next slide, please.
Here's the battery energy storage system that was installed in 2021. Commissioning began in 2022.
We are still working on on-site commissioning. We'll work more on lessons learned in a bit, but it's rated for 250 kilowatts.
It's controlled by Schneider's EMO structure, eco-microstructure is what it stands for. And it has the ability to be grid-forming or grid-following.
The grid-forming is a very important factor in this process. And the grid-forming allows the generators to be off and the RivGen to be powering the community with the batteries providing baseload. Next slide, please.
In conjunction, working with Alaska Energy Authority, we also upgraded our control systems for the generators, which is important for us to allow to integrate the eco-microstructure of the battery. It also brought our generators to EasyGen 3000s.
And the control structure that you're seeing here is it's an ignition interface. And this allowed us to remotely operate, as well as remotely monitor the generator status, as well as the RivGens and the battery. And this has been huge. It allowed all of our engineering team through various companies to be able to port in and work on the solutions together. Next slide, please.
Yeah, so as I had mentioned, we're continually learning lessons. The weather has been a larger factor than we had initially identified. It is found that even though we don't actively see continued erosion, small amounts of erosion on a lake as large as ours ends up introducing a large amount of debris into the flow. We'll see photos of that in a bit.
We found that communication between the project teams is still a lesson learned. We were meeting weekly, but we found that through language barriers and time zones that there would be small mistakes, such as mainly set points that other engineers are looking for to be able to communicate between the battery and the devices.
We definitely found supply chain issues was an ordeal. Transformers had become an extremely long lead item. I can't remember. I think it was 52 weeks was a lead time on a transformer.
We found issues getting fiber. And we also found frazil ice is a much more common condition that we've come across than previously known. And we'll see some photos of that as well. Next slide, please.
So in order to make the project viable, the devices needed to remain in the river over the winter, and that way they can continue into winter, and we don't have to wait for ice out in the spring to be able to install them again. Here, you'll see Lake Iliamna in the background there. It's 90 miles long and 30 miles wide. Of the winter years, trying to think―we had 1 year where the lake did not freeze over. Other than that, we were able to travel on the lake ice each winter.
And here is a more uncommon condition where the river ended up freezing as well. We had some extremely cold winters, and we are having another one this year, as Karl mentioned that the ice is really thick. We're still at 17 below this morning Fahrenheit, and it was -22 yesterday. So we've had months of negative temperatures here to deal with. Next slide, please.
As I mentioned, the frazil ice event, this was the very first frazil event, and it caught us off guard, where I was traveling to work in the morning. And, of course, I always look over at the river as I pass by, and there's ice chunks in the river not moving. We didn't think that was great.
We put up a drone to go and take a closer inspection of the device. And there wasn't actually―there's not actually enough ice on the device to float it to the surface, but as the ice is forming, it's adhering to the device under the water.
The water is supercooled, and it dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And it needs a nucleus. So typically, it forms when the lake is open, turbulent, and debris in the water becomes the nucleus for frazil ice to begin adhering and freezing underwater.
The mooring system and the device are excellent nucleuses for the ice crystals to form on. And it begins forming a wing under the water, and that's how the device floated to the surface. It remained on the surface for 6 days.
We ended up with a very sunny, nice day. It warmed up the dark surface enough that it melted some of the frazil ice off. The rest of it shed away with the current, and it went back to the bottom unharmed.
Next slide, please.
The photo on the left, the gelatinous, semi-clear structure there, is the frazil ice forming on the device. It ends up breaking up the laminar flow on the foils and disrupting operability. And the photo on the right is an overhead view of the device with the frazil.
You could see faintly the ice on the mooring lines. The mooring lines are yellow. They're 1-inch Dyneema, and you can see how the mass continued to grow off of those and move back onto the device. Next slide.
Yeah, we had a short fire event. I was gone fishing, or I was out of town doing my summer fishing.
And the operator called me to notify me that there was a severe blackout. And while we were vetting the community for potential locations, it came out to be that there was an issue with the VFD here, which ended up overheating. It didn't exactly blaze, but everything became very warm in there, and you could see some of the plastics melting the insulation from the roof there.
And it was important. It was important to note because even though our controls were upgraded, we have a 1-second logging data rate on our SCADA, and the anomalies ended up happening in the milliseconds. So we weren't able to capture all of it. So that was one of the lessons learned, is that we need high-resolution logging capabilities. Next slide, please.
As I had mentioned, the debris down the river can become an issue. And here we see after a fall storm, it blew in excess of 86 miles per hour and eroded the western shore of Lake Iliamna. This is grass roots. They get stuck on the device, and it ended up adhering to the foils, which again disrupts the laminar flow and was enough to prevent startup. Next slide, please.
This is the power and data cable. We ended up damaging the power data cable trying to remove the debris. This was a large 40,000-pounds rat's nest of grass and roots that had gone down the river.
Next slide, please.
This is us working diligently. It was not an easy task getting all of this debris off in the current. We are pulled off to the island on river left, and I believe it took us 2 days to remove this mess. Next slide, please.
We do need―we are still working on continued resolutions for when we have generators off. Our diesel generators provide heat to a waste heat loop, which keeps our water treatment plant, our water storage, which is 50,000 gallons, as well as other community buildings heated. So when we have testing in the diesel generators are off, that heat loop currently cools down.
In the future, as we're looking at a continued diesels off, we'll need a way to heat the loop back up. And for clarity, our generators are John Deere 4045s. They're marine engines, so they have a water jacket on them.
We still have yet to complete the power purchase agreement. We're very close to doing that, as well as an interconnection agreement. We also have plans to finish the commissioning of the battery energy storage system this summer, and as well as continued smolt outmigration plans. Next slide, please.
This is a nice shot. A lot of work went into this project here. And you can see the flow of the river there.
There was a lot of calculations that I did not have to do for this. But the RivGens are slightly offset.
There was calculations on whether they should be directly in line of each other in the thalweg, or if the upstream one should be slightly to river right and reduce available energy in order to produce more for 2.1, which is downstream. And that's what we chose, was to prevent disrupting the flow to 2.1 and slightly offsetting the 2.0 upstream, and we'll take some loss of electricity.
Currently, as of this morning, 2.1 downstream is producing 4.9 to 6.3 kilowatts. Our flows are really low, and it will continue to remain low through about April. Our river during low flow periods―it's moving about 80,000 gallons per second. In higher flow periods, we're looking at excess of 120,000 gallons per second of fresh water that flows into Bristol Bay. Next slide, please.
In our energy vision, I think it's very important to come back and visit our timeline. Igiugig, working on its consensus-based ideas and visioning, works on typically a 20-year visioning plan. The idea that hydrokinetic energy would be available in the river was commonly known, but nobody had an idea of exactly what it was going to look like in the future.
There was an option to provide a transformer and access to the current location where the shore stations are located. Those were installed in 2002 with the future plan that there would be a hydro project located at that location. And through continued efforts of working towards that goal, as well as things just falling into place and being aware of opportunities that presented themselves, Igiugig was able to pursue this timeline. And then with the assistance of departments such as Department of Energy, we were able to bring these projects to testing and hopefully profitability for rural communities, rural electric utilities, and reliability, and reduce our reliance on flown-in fuels. And with that, thank you and Quyana.
STEVEN LYELL: Thank you, Jon. Thank you, Karl. Greatly appreciate this presentation.
We'd like to ask you to take a few questions, if you would please. We have the advanced questions, if there are any there that you're able to cover. And then also we have questions in the chat. And the Q&A for you to take a look at, please.
KARL HILL: Sure. I've looked at a couple of the advanced questions. One of the things that I wanted to discuss a little bit was there was a question about the challenges remote villages have in getting power, and what we learn from remote energy projects was another one. But we can, I think, tie them into the same answer.
As far as getting power in rural villages in Alaska, the fuel costs and logistics to get the fuel there, the equipment there are big hurdles. One of the other hurdles that we see is local expertise to be able to operate these systems. We don't want to have to try to fly someone in every time we have a problem with a device.
So we are intent on educating ourselves, training our local workforce, and learning these systems rather than relying on outside sources to run these for us. And so I think one of the challenges for power and remote villages, renewable energy or diesel power generation, we need to have our locals be able to run these systems.
We don't want to rely on outside sources because if your energy generation systems go down and you don't how to fix them, you don't how to troubleshoot them, and the weather is bad, you're not going to get anybody in to help you. So I think that one of the things that we need to keep in mind for rural power systems on all fronts, rural, renewable or not, is that these systems have to be operated and maintained by local folks with local expertise. Jon, I'm not sure if you picked out any prequestions for answer.
JON SALMON: Yeah, I did want to present. One of the questions was what would we have done differently. And while I don't think that we can go back and think of every situation that we would have come across or that we've ended up seeing in the field, I do think that it would have been most beneficial to go back and provide an outlet for the energy storage system. I'm sorry―an outlet for the excess energy produced.
It does feel wasteful during testing when we were dumping to a heat load because we didn't have a grid to put it to, and nor did we want to right off the bat. We wanted to ensure that we were getting clean energy. We maintain a 60-Hertz grid.
And so we wanted to maintain clean energy. We dumped a bunch to a heat load. And then we also, as I mentioned earlier, we have the 4045 John Deere generators. They're 65-kilowatt rated.
In certain times in the summertime, when all the locals are out of their home, the weather's nice, they're putting away fish. There's not much need for energy on the grid. The main offices will close. The school is closed. And those are our two largest electrical consumers.
And so we found that in order to conserve our generators, reserve our generators, and prevent wet stacking, we had to limit the production of the RivGens. And that, again, felt like a wasteful opportunity in order to store energy away for use later on. In wintertime, when production is lower, it would be nice to have more storage so that we can make it through the night. In early morning, such as this, I had mentioned it was negative 17 Fahrenheit this morning, we have lots of electric heat loads coming on, vehicle plug-ins, and we end up having a greater need for electrical generation.
KARL HILL: Thanks, Jon. I see a couple of other questions here that I can probably at least provide some answer on. I see there's a question, “Can we discuss the ownership structure of the RivGen device and the power generated? Is there an IPP or PPA?”
The answer to that is one of the deliverables for our grant, is to come up with a power production agreement. We're currently working on that. It does get extremely complicated to see how to try to figure out how to set that up correctly.
We have a DOE device in the water. That's part of our grant system. When the grant is completed, we would like to keep generating power with it. One of the struggles or considerations that we have to take in mind is that this is an emerging technology.
We've been testing it for quite a few years now, but there are always things that come up that we did not intend to have to deal with. So currently, we're proceeding with a power purchase agreement draft that would have ORPC or whoever owns the device sell power back to the village so that the village isn't stuck with the liability of operating this system that hasn't seen all of the challenges it's going to see.
So that's how we're setting it up right now. Without going into too much detail, we expect that ORPC would own the device in some respect, and then we would purchase power from them at a reduced price from what we're paying for diesel. So that's our idea right now, but nothing is nothing has been approved or set in stone yet.
JON SALMON: Yeah, thank you Karl. And I'll address some of these in the questions chat here. “If the state is measured on the per-second scale, how did y'all determine the occurrences at the millisecond scale cause a short?” That one is interesting because a lot of this is extrapolation.
Just because we didn't exactly measure it, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. We saw the results afterwards. But we also have four different shark meters on our grid. Two are at the shore stations. Each one has its own shark station.
There's one at the power plant that measures the grid, and then there's one at the battery energy storage system. There's actually five. One other just does the generators, though.
And between those four shark meters we saw the―since they're not all at the same second logging data, we were able to capture short portions of it. And then we extrapolated from there. And that's how we determined that there was millisecond anomalies. “Are the RivGens producing a DC current or three-phase AC current?” They are producing DC current, and the inverter and the shore stations transforms it to three-phase AC.
KARL HILL: I wanted to jump in real quick here, Jon. I saw Amy. Thanks for the comment on the photo. That's one of the things I had forgot to mention, was the size of this device. I meant to say that after I discussed logistics of getting large pieces of equipment to our community.
These devices are 40-plus feet long for the pontoons, and once assembled, are a little over 50 feet wide if I remember correctly. But somewhere in that range.
So all of these components have to be shipped over on 40-foot semitrailers. And so they need to make it the road width and be able to turn tight corners in the mountains. And so this whole assembly comes on trailers.
And so once it's in the village, then it all gets bolted or welded together in some instances, but all of the components have to be broken down in to be able to fit onto a 40-foot trailer at the maximum. So thanks for that comment. I had forgotten to mention that.
JON SALMON: Yeah, the scale of the devices is interesting. And it's also―you don't exactly need extremely large equipment to deal with them, even though they are large. We lifted the pontoons with two pieces of equipment. They are both smaller. We did have a crane on hand, so we also utilized a crane, but they were designed to go to rural areas with smaller equipment available.
KARL HILL: Jon, there's another question on here about grid forming and grid following. You're probably better to answer that than me, but there's a question on when the BESS is operating in parallel with the generators, how that works.
JON SALMON: So we can get the―yeah, we can get the batteries to do grid following. I think we have that sequence down. The grid forming―it is interesting, still.
We did have a large team of engineers. There was small oversights, including a way to keep the feeder breaker closed when we switch to the batteries. Because in order to switch the batteries we're going to a blackout. And now we're at a 2-minute blackout period in order de-electify everything, and then the battery energy storage system controller takes over and brings the BESS online.
Some of the issues that we ended up occurring is that as we have gone to a longer blackout period to move into grid forming, is that now the inverter has a very large inrush in order to handle. So the inverter, which is rated at 125 kilowatts, it can handle―I can't get quoted on a percentage of imbalance―about 20% imbalance between phases.
Each phase, while we do our best to balance them, is not exactly balanced to come from a blackout. And so some locations have a larger need for more electricity upon return. And some loads aren't there anymore because they have their own backup generators. So their backup generator loads start, and that load isn't going to be online when we return from a blackout.
And so we have a lot of tweaks that we're doing with the inverter. We found that working in conjunction with the diesel generators, the mass of generators keeps their responsiveness down slower at a slower rate. And so it's fine-tuning the response rate and the time-out period of inverters to look for reactions from the generators.
So the grid-forming fine-tuning has been lengthy. And I think there's some parts that we are going to have to realize that the equipment that's there isn't going to be able to do all that we ask of it. And one of them that I just now mentioned is the imbalance on the inverter.
We have found during grid tests, our most successful of which was 14 days, and we did conserve like 70% on fuel during that 2-week period, is that we're not going to be able to overcome the grid, the grid imbalance settings, just because our loads are relatively―are very small relative to other locations.
So we have to be very wary of equipment that comes online.
For example, we were doing a test. Somebody brought a 30-amp compressor online, and it will send our phases to out of balance and trip that inverter.
KARL HILL: Hey, I'll just jump in here real quick. I think we're running up close to the deadline on time here, but I did want to say that Igiugig is really lucky to have technical folks like Jon in our power plant operator, Levi Tinney, involved, that are getting down into the weeds of this stuff. I'm managing it from a little bit higher view now. I'm not down into the weeds anymore. But I don't think it's typical for every village in Alaska to have the local expertise that we have. So there has been a huge driver in any successes we've had in this project.
So I'll just throw that out there. And not sure how we're looking on time, we can take more questions, but I'll ask Steven how he sees that going.
STEVEN LYELL: Let's go ahead and start winding down here. I'd like to thank you, Karl, Jon, Amanda, Kelsey, and the webinar team for putting this all together. Your persistence, your ingenuity, your ability to function and provide energy in remote Alaska―that's something that we celebrate, and we're lucky to be able to partner with you on these projects. That's a big deal for us.
I'd like to ask for the next slide, please. For everybody who took their time today, thank you for joining us. We invite you to stay connected with us after this presentation.
We're on the web. We have email. We'll send out this links to this presentation via email to everybody who registered, and we'll also have it posted to the web.
You can follow us on social media. We're there on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Next slide, please.
Thank you, everybody, for your time. This was a great opportunity to visit. Take care.