Aired Sep 8, 2026 · 23 min

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What can a remote Alaskan town teach the rest of the power industry about building the grid of the future?

In this episode, book editor Peter Asmus takes us inside Cordova, Alaska—a community with no road connecting it to the outside world that has turned its isolation into a testing ground for grid innovation.

We explore how Cordova gets roughly 75% of its electricity from hydropower, uses battery storage and underground power lines to strengthen its system, and even built a small data center designed to take advantage of excess renewable energy.

Asmus explains why Alaska’s unique challenges have forced its utilities to innovate and what much larger utilities across the country can learn from them.

Matt Chester: The power grid of the future is in a rural town in Alaska, at least according to our guest Peter Asmus. In his new book, Alaska's Microgrid Innovators, he talks about an isolated community in Cordova that has overcome disasters, baked in a data center, and enhanced their use of renewables, all while keeping rates on par or even lower than utilities in denser continental grids. How did they do it? Let's find out.

So, Peter, this is your fifth book on energy, and I'm curious to hear from you. What compelled you to dive back in? What makes this one stand out in your mind? You know, what was the story you wanted to tell?

Peter Asmus: After my last energy book before this one, which was back in 2009, I said, I'm never going to write another energy book again. But part of that was because so many of them were about California, different aspects of California. One was the history of wind. The last one was actually an academic press, just sort of the history of energy, all about California. And, you know, I learned some new things, more about the hydro and the oil industry history of California, which doesn't get that much.

But in this case, I actually had a job as an adjunct faculty in Alaska. It was more like they came... to me and because of my skills as a book author, approached me. So in this case, I was actually writing a book sort of as my job. The other books, you write a proposal, you get an advance, and then usually you stress out because the money runs out before you're done with the book. And, you know, it's kind of a stressful exercise. So this one was not that.

So it was also because it was about Alaska. I wasn't as familiar with Alaska. And, you know, Alaska is off of sort of the map of a lot of people when they think about energy. It's, you know, way up there at the top of the world. So all of those things kind of... made it attractive to me.

I also, when I was an analyst, did a lot of research on microgrids, and that's, I was introduced to a woman up there, and they didn't even know what they had were necessarily microgrids. It was sort of interesting. And when I looked in, I said, do you realize that your entire state, every single person is basically getting power from a microgrid? And so that's what also attracted me to the story.

Matt Chester: Yeah, it's fascinating that the story kind of came to you. And so give us a little bit more of the of the big picture there. You know, you're in Cordova, Alaska. What's that environment like and what was the big story beyond just, hey, they're on a microgrid?

Peter Asmus: This book, I should also explain, is more I was more like the catalyst, the organizer, the I should say ghostwriter, but not in all cases. The story of Cordova was actually written by the CEO there. And that's kind of one of the most amazing stories, especially for a utility audience. So this book is more first-person accounts, except the beginning is a historian kind of lays out the land, and then I write the concluding chapter, which sort of ties all of these stories together and sort of looks into the future.

So Cordova, and I have been to Cordova, it's one of the places I have been to, you know, it's like a utility that's gone through all these changes. So the utility started in 1907 due to copper mining. There's a river called the Copper River, and then the copper ran out and then it became a big clam processing facility. Then there was an earthquake and the ocean floor dropped like eight feet or something and wiped out all the clams. So that industry... was gone, and then eventually what happened was salmon. So if you go to a Costco and you see Copper River salmon, that's coming from Cordova.

But what makes Cordova interesting in a lot of these, what we call off-grid microgrids, is that there is no other grid. There's not even a road to Cordova. When I went to Cordova, I had to go by plane. I had to rent a car. The rent-a-car place was in a bar, and it was, the worst car I've ever driven in my life. I laughed when I returned it because it almost died. It smelled like beer and cigarettes. You know, it was just like the guy said, yeah, maybe we should retire that car after I return it.

But really, the story of Cordova is sort of one of... Innovation, going against the odds. It started out as a private utility, became a rural cooperative. It started out 100% hydro, then went 100% diesel, and then there were issues with the diesel plants kind of becoming outdated. You know, one of the issues in Alaska is just getting diesel fuel to remote sites. And then, you know, they went back to hydro and now it's sort of a wind diesel battery. The key addition was a battery. So it's a hybrid system, but gets about 75 percent of its electricity from hydro. So it's a pretty inspirational story.

Matt Chester: Yes, it's really cool to hear. But at the same time, you know, my mind goes to it. So it's it's hard to run the grid there because it's so remote. It's so rural. It, you know, I'm assuming harsh weather conditions, all these factors that make it particularly challenging. But for a utility, maybe in an urban environment in the continental United States who doesn't have those challenges, why should they be paying attention? Why should they care about how Cordova is doing it?

Peter Asmus: Well, the other thing about Cordova is it's also extreme weather like a lot of Alaska. In fact, when I was there, they all talked about when it rains, it comes in horizontally. So it's like and so they had all these outages. So Cordova decided to put all their power lines underlying underground. way back in 2011. And what they discovered is that by doing that, they increased the capacity.

I guess if you put the power lines underground, and this is more the engineer and the author of the chapter, his name is Clay Koplin. He's this brilliant guy who's just constantly innovating, constantly being more efficient with all of his operations. They discovered that, that even though a power generation facility was rated at like 6 megawatts, they actually got 7.2 megawatts out of it because they put the power lines underground. And it's something about electromagnetic fields and stuff like that. They also learned how to do frequency regulation with run-of-the-river hydro. I have never heard, you know, people doing things like that.

But that's sort of the story of a lot of Alaska because a lot of stuff... doesn't work up there because of the cold climate. Batteries fail often because of the cold climate. And so, you know, what Cordova has done is it's just constantly innovated, constantly become more energy efficient and use their renewable energy in new and innovative ways.

So, you know, the other thing that I would say is what's interesting is there's a lot of hype about data centers now. In fact, that's probably the... The hottest topic in the energy industry right now, you know, can utilities supply the data centers or will they go on site microgrids? That's when I went to my last microgrid conference a few years ago, everyone was talking about data centers. But in Cordova, they actually installed a data center inside the microgrid, a micro data center. It was only 150 kilowatts. And it just runs on excess run-of-the-river hydro.

They had this excess hydro that was basically being wasted. So they said, well, if we put the data center in the microgrid and just has sort of seasonal processing, it wasn't having to process like every day. So it was certain kinds of applications. They just run it off 100 percent. renewable energy. And that's sort of a model that could apply to more rural regions, probably more relevant to the rest of the world, places like Africa, off-grid microgrids, where, you know, they're never going to site a gigawatt data center. But, you know, there's also the opposite end, which are these sort of micro data centers.

Matt Chester: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm picturing, you know, in my head, a stereotype of like a fishing village. It's all this small. And then, you know, the data center problem is even coming there. So, you know, it's fascinating to hear how, you know, the unique challenges, but then opportunities that the Cordova grid took for that and how that could apply. You know, maybe that's not going to help us in data center alley in northern Virginia, but it could be less resistance for some of those smaller data center applications.

Peter Asmus: Yeah, and I think, you know, the hype is all these gigawatt scale. I saw one was supposed to get 17 gigawatt data center. It's kind of mind-boggling. I don't know if that's... even possible. But yeah, I mean, data centers come in all, it's sort of like if you think about the electricity industry, the data center industry probably eventually will evolve where you will have large, like in the energy, large centralized power plants, but now the trend is also more decentralized power, also utilities innovating with new business models.

So in Cordova, they did become a rural cooperative. They used renewable energy credits for a while to help finance upgrades. You know, they kept figuring out financial innovation tools to keep squeezing out. And what's interesting is most rates in Alaska are among the highest in the nation, partially because they've been a lot of those utilities are still heavily dependent on diesel fuel. So there there's no RPS. There's no mandate to do renewables. People are just doing it to save energy or just to diversify risk. And that's what Cordova has done, you know.

And the battery really helped out. But then they continue using the hydro in any of ways. Like I said, frequency regulation. I had never heard of anyone using – and this is run-of-the-river hydro, so it's not like a big dam, you know. Right.

And hydro has also been forgotten as a renewable. You know, everyone talks about wind and solar. So I think the other interesting thing about Cordova for utilities, you know, that might have hydro or have run of the river hydro or even, you know, there's still a role for hydro for utilities in the future. We're not building big dams. Probably what will happen with hydro will be smaller facilities like the kind of facilities in Cordova.

Matt Chester: Another one of the themes that you took away from your time studying all this was Cordova as almost as a comeback kid. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you meant by that?

Peter Asmus: Well, I think, you know, I sort of alluded to it a little bit earlier. You know, first of all, you have copper. The copper runs out. Then you have clams. The clams disappear. You have earthquakes. And then, you know, now the salmon.

But, of course, salmon, I mean, I live in a fishing village in northern California called Bodega Bay. This was the first year they had a salmon season in three years. You know, so those salmon stocks were... are also at risk.

And I think they are trying to diversify the economy. I think one idea of the data center was to bring some sort of high-tech, you know, sort of industry there. Because, you know, people work remotely now. You know, it's sort of like those remote communities now can participate in sort of the digital economy. And I did do a white paper about the data center with the Linux Foundation, which also promotes sort of open source software platforms. So that's kind of, it's sort of like the case study. And apparently there might be several other data centers that roll out, but it is sort of the comeback kid, you know, like I said,

First hydro, then they had problems with hydro, then they went diesel. The diesel needed to be upgraded. They do a lot of innovation with diesel plants in Alaska. As you can imagine, they capture the heat from those engines. Of course, in Alaska, it's not just electricity. It's thermal energy, those cold, long, dark winters. You know, other utilities will capture excess wind power, and rather than dumping it, they will convert it to thermal energy.

The other thing to keep in mind is communities like Cordova, there's no road, but there's no surrounding grid. So if there's excess energy, they cannot export it anywhere. So that's where the innovation is.

And sort of the comeback kid is, you know, they did install a battery. It was an ABB battery. They're now giving away free EV charging also to their customers. And so they're doing kind of programs. They did all retrofits of all lighting, super efficient. So they're just squeezing more value. So the comeback part is partially changing just the big industries.

Now, you know, if the fishing industry declines up there now, climate change, actually, they're feeling it in Alaska at like two to three times the rate that we're feeling it in the continental U.S. because they're at the top of the world. And so, you know, glaciers are melting. So a lot of change and who knows what, you know, what kind of... Come back, they'll have to come. If the salmon declines, that's going to be another challenge.

But that is probably the main industry in Alaska and a lot of those utilities dealing with also the seasonal nature. So once the salmon season picked up, I think the peak load jumped from 4 to 11 megawatts. But that gives you a scale of that grid, peak of 11 megawatts.

Matt Chester: It also speaks to the the more the smaller population. You mentioned the remote working. How does that, you know, the demographics almost of the community affect how they think about their electricity use, how they think about their grid?

Peter Asmus: Well, you know, part of it is, of course, if something goes wrong, you know, you want to train locals to fix. Like, I know that's more of an issue like with wind turbines. You know, if you have if you're dependent on a wind turbine and it fails, you know, you know, you don't want to have to wait for some guy in New York, you know, to fly up and go up there and try to fix it. So part of it is relying on local knowledge, training locals. There's a lot of indigenous people in a lot of these communities. And so these are actually good paying jobs. So part of the idea of these utilities is really, really a tight relationship with the community.

I'll give you one quick example about another utility. I won't, it's a utility that serves only 70 people. Talk about a small, an Igiugig it's called. And they are working with Schneider Electric on using hydrokinetic turbines, putting them in the stream where the native people have lived off the salmon all these years. Now that's pretty risky. You know, you're putting a machine in the water, but they use their own indigenous knowledge because they know that the salmon swim at one level in the river a certain time of the year as they go out. They swim at a different level when they come back in.

And so that hydrokinetic turbine will go up and down, you know, depending on the time of the year. And, you know, because it's a variable resource, they then also added a battery and stuff like that. So that's just another example of another utility at the super small scale. You know, 70 people, everybody does everything in that community. Water, electricity, you know, you name it, all the services. Basically, everyone is part of the utility working for the utility.

Matt Chester: Yeah, and I love the idea of leaning into the local community knowledge of the areas. You hear so much about what portions of the world are still non-energized, rural villages, communities in Africa or in Asia, wherever it might be. And too often, I think we come in and say, well, let's let's think about how to build the grid. We know how to build. But maybe in a lot of ways, the lesson is, well, what does this local community need? What do they know? What resources do they have? And Cordova sounds like a good example of that.

Peter Asmus: Yeah, I always say Alaska looks more like the rest of the world than it looks like the lower 48. I mean, if you look at off-grid like Latin America, Asia Pacific, places like that, Africa, as you mentioned. But, you know, the other thing is, is that, like I said earlier, every person in Alaska gets their power from a microgrid, but every one of those microgrids is run by a utility. So that's also unique. And there's 100 utilities in Alaska serving like 750,000 people in the lower 48. One utility might serve all those people. So that's kind of where Alaska, it's very localized.

Like I said, there's no renewable portfolio standard. It's kind of a... free market state, although ironically, where there is a grid, it's called the Railbelt grid, which are a series of micro grids. They actually are way behind the rest of the of the U.S. You know, there's no independent system operator. You know, there's not a lot of dynamic pricing, although that's what Alaska has to really challenge to really kind of take it to the next step. But, you know, there's a lot of opportunity there with oil and gas.

I mean, my book talks about when people hear Alaska, you think oil and gas. But those guys, you know, getting into hydrogen and repurposing geothermal. I have a report coming out for DOE looking at geothermal. Lots of geothermal Alaska. The challenge is where the people live, you know, there's not the transmission. You know, geothermal is generally a large-scale resource. So, yeah. That's going to be challenging, but it is another resource. There's more, you know, there is a geothermal microgrid in Alaska. It also powers up a hot spring. So when I go up there in October, I'm hoping to check out that hot spring. So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Alaska is a fascinating place. You know, the story hasn't been told. So I think really this book is, and it has each author, you know, the one Cordova is probably the most technical. So it's probably the chapter that a utility leader would find the most interesting because he gets into the weeds. Not all of the utility guys are like that, but, you know, it's their personal story.

The guy, there's Kodiak Island. It basically is 100% renewable. It's a 28-megawatt, second largest island in the U.S. It's got wind, hydro, three kinds of storage, the hydro, lithium-ion batteries, and then flywheels. And so... That guy was from Texas. He had his honeymoon in Texas, almost died in the middle of the wilderness. But for some reason, that inspired him to go back and get a job because, you know, they were just taken in by, I guess they ended up at some bar with a bluegrass band and going, you know. I could live here. And they just moved up there and he ran the utility. You know, those are the kinds of stories in the book.

Matt Chester: Again, going to the idea that, you know, we have utility executives, decision makers who love listening into this podcast, but they're probably coming from bigger, more urban utilities. So what do you think is, you know, if you could impart one message, one lesson from this tiny community, what would be the biggest lesson you want them to take away?

Peter Asmus: Yeah. Well, I would say incremental innovation, both on technology and financial innovation. And, you know, I'm not a finance expert, so just when you read the chapter by Clay Koplin and... They have been called like the grid modernization, one of the most modernized grids in the world. So that's amazing. You know, here's this community off grid.

But I think it was the undergrounding of the power lines. Like I mentioned earlier, they found out they could squeeze more capacity out of the power plants because the power lines were underground. I had never heard of that. Never heard about frequency regulation from run of the river hydro. You know, those are all just kind of it just shows that if you're really focused on that.

And I guess I never finished my one sentence. Their rates are lower than some of the utilities in the lower 48, which is unusual for Alaska, too. A lot of the Alaska rates are extremely high, which is understandable because of the remoteness and no surrounding grid to sort of like optimize your excess generation.

So I would say what the takeaway is, you know, the mother of necessity forces invention, you know, so when there are, and we've all had, you know, we've had major power outages in the lower 48. Obviously there are hurricanes on the West Coast. We have wildfires on the West Coast. We've got all kinds of, now we have data center loads, I think the inspiration for the book are these people maybe not dealing with the same circumstances, but just how they tackled their problems because they had to. Because, you know, if the grid fails in Alaska, people literally can freeze to death in wintertime. So it forces people to just really be innovative. And I think that's the primary message.

Matt Chester: Innovation can just, like you said, come from necessity. It doesn't require necessarily the fanciest technology, this or that. It's just doing what needs to be done.

Peter Asmus: Exactly.

Matt Chester: Wonderful. This has been a great conversation, Peter, and we'll definitely throw a link to the upcoming book for our listeners to check out. But I wanted to thank you for joining us today and sharing the story.

Peter Asmus: Thanks for having me on, Matt.

Matt Chester: Thank you to all the listeners for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time on The Power Perspectives.