Opportunities and challenges to further develop tidal and instream hydrokinetic technology in urban and remote Alaska

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s Alaska Region (AKR) encompasses the state of Alaska and its several ecosystems.  The AKR, along with state and federal resource management agencies, is working with developers of tidal and in-stream kinetic energy projects to determine the environmental studies that are necessary to avoid or reduce any adverse effects to fish and habitat from project deployment and operations.  The remote and isolated nature of rural communities, combined with high financial and environmental costs of energy make renewable energy from moving waters ideal in this region.  Many communities are river-side and coastal thus extracting energy from adjacent moving waters can transform dependence on costly and sometimes unpredictable shipments of diesel fuel.  Technology for these projects are currently being designed and tested, and no commercially proven devices are yet available.  Also unavailable is information on the potential direct and indirect effects of these devices on the fish and wildlife resources that most communities depend upon for subsistence.  Our goal is to work with developers, reviewing and funding agencies to generate sufficient information about project designs, operations and installation so that these new environmentally sustainable energy extraction technologies can be implemented without adverse effects to fish and wildlife.