At the end of April, the Governor’s Office of Infrastructure, the Alaska Municipal League, and the Alaska Federation of Natives co-sponsored the 2025 Alaska Infrastructure Development Symposium. With an agenda covering infrastructure priorities, updates, implementation, and compliance, the event’s goal “has always been to advance and strengthen infrastructure across Alaska through active engagement and coordination,” says the website.
In her keynote address about federal infrastructure priorities and investments on the first day of the three-day symposium, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) discussed the importance of clean energy for the state, particularly its rural communities. She noted that these communities are often not connected to larger electrical grids, and their reliance on diesel fuel has been an expensive solution, while emphasizing that clean energy generation would result in far cheaper electric bills.. Therefore, Sen. Murkowski added that she had spent over an hour on a phone call with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum the day before, discussing the importance of clean energy projects in Alaska.
The Trump administration has voiced significant support for Alaska LNG, an enormous pipeline project that would send natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope to Nikiski, 800 miles south. In a speech to Congress, President Donald Trump said, “My administration is working on a gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska, among the largest in the world, where Japan, South Korea, and other nations want to be our partner with investments of trillions of dollars each. There’s never been anything like that one.”
However, Sen. Murkowski argued that the pipeline will not benefit Native villages in rural regions, explicitly referencing the Yup’ik community of Togiak in the west and the Inupiat community of Kobuk in the northwest, which are both based on subsistence lifestyles. She recollected, “So I said, ‘Please, please don’t forget the opportunities that come to our more rural communities that are more isolated who need to be able to access those resources that are there. And those resources may be a little bit of wind, it may be a little bit of solar, it may be a little bit of the of the run of river, it may be a little bit of geothermal.’”
Photo Courtesy NPS
During her call with Secretary Burgum, Sen. Murkowski also advocated for the projects set to receive federal grants, whose funding is now uncertain in the face of federal funding freezes. In March, the Alaska Public Interest Research Group estimated over $1 billion in federal funds that would have benefited the state. June Okada, one of the group’s infrastructure funding analysts, noted, “Without this support, Alaskan communities, especially remote Native communities, will be left with failing infrastructure and unaffordable energy prices. Our government needs to uphold its commitments by fulfilling its contractual obligations.”
At the event, Sen. Murkowski described how she is pushing the federal government to do precisely that: “We’re coming to the department and saying, ‘I know that you put on pause funding for clean energy resources. If you don’t like the vernacular that we’re using, that’s fine, but look at it from the perspective of energy independence for these small communities and what independence means and looks like for them.’”
The community of Chignik on the Alaskan Peninsula has been left waiting for $7 million for a hydroelectric dam, for example, while several villages in Northwest Alaska are uncertain whether they will receive $55 million for solar and energy storage projects. Some governments, nonprofits, and developers have delayed projects due to this lack of financial clarity. According to the Alaska Beacon, “Such delays in rural Alaska can put projects at least a year behind schedule because construction work depends on delivery of heavy equipment and material by barges that can travel only in ice-free conditions.”
Tashina Duttle, chief operating officer at DeerStone Consulting, elaborated on the impact that they will feel from the lack of forward progress on these projects: “Without the planned projects, communities remain trapped in a cycle of aging and deteriorating rural electric utilities, high energy costs, and are often 100% reliant on diesel and the fragile supply chain of fuel transportation to their communities.”
Photo Courtesy Alaska Municipal League
The Alaska Beacon points to the majority-Inupiat city of Kotzebue in the northwest as an example of how clean energy can benefit Alaska. It has used wind energy since the 1990s, and by 2020, it will eliminate the use of 250,000 to 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel annually and meet one-fifth of the community’s power demand every year.
