25 New Coastal, Remote, and Island Communities Join Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project

Galena, Alaska

Located along the Yukon River in central Alaska, Galena is a remote community accessible only by air or water. Galena's ETIPP project will focus on solving integration issues between photovoltaic and battery energy storage systems. Additionally, the project will explore the use of biomass and air-source heat pumps to improve heating efficiency, reduce dependency on diesel, and enhance overall energy resilience.

Juneau, Alaska

Juneau, the capital of Alaska, relies on renewable hydropower for its electricity and continues to look for ways to support energy efficiency and electrification. The ETIPP project in Juneau will focus on optimizing the deployment of heat pumps and enhancing infrastructure for electric vehicle charging to further reduce the city's reliance on fossil fuels for heating and transportation and improve energy resilience.

Kotlik, Alaska

Kotlik is a village near the Yukon River, situated about 5 miles inland from Alaska's Norton Sound. The community is remote and accessible only by air or water, which complicates energy supply logistics. Kotlik currently relies on diesel, which is costly and environmentally unsustainable. The ETIPP project will assist Kotlik with energy planning to support the development of renewable energy solutions, enhanced workforce training, and improved energy efficiency to reduce costs and enhance the quality of life for residents​.

Native Village of Kotzebue, Alaska

Kotzebue, located on the Chukchi Sea coast above the Arctic Circle, operates an islanded microgrid that heavily relies on diesel fuel. The ETIPP project will focus on creating a community energy plan to transition Kotzebue to 100% renewable energy by identifying challenges and actionable near-, mid-, and long-term goals. The project will include technical assistance for Tribal solar project siting and addressing challenges related to energy storage and grid formation to maximize renewable production while maintaining reliable service.

Native Village of Scammon Bay, Alaska

Scammon Bay, a coastal village on the Bering Sea, contends with extreme weather and limited infrastructure, which contribute to high energy costs and reliability issues. The ETIPP project will engage the village in strategic energy planning, aiming to improve energy resilience in Scammon Bay through the integration of renewable energy—such as wind and solar—and enhancing local energy efficiency.

Organized Village of Saxman, Alaska

Located on Revillagigedo Island in Southeast Alaska, the Organized Village of Saxman faces unique energy resilience challenges due to its geographical isolation and reliance on imported diesel fuel. The ETIPP project will focus on conducting feasibility studies for integrating tidal energy into the local grid, as well as exploring other renewable energy options such as wind and solar. The project also aims to modernize the community's electrical grid to build resilience against natural disasters, promote energy efficiency across sectors, and ensure energy equity for all residents. Workforce development and community engagement will be key components, ensuring Saxman's energy transition is both sustainable and inclusive.

La Margarita, Salinas, Puerto Rico

La Margarita, a community in Salinas, Puerto Rico, has suffered from the loss of tax incentives, hurricanes Maria and Fiona, and economic decline—leading to population loss, job scarcity, and deteriorating infrastructure. With 85% of the community in a FEMA-designated floodplain, the community also experiences frequent flooding, unreliable power, and associated burdens. Led by Abeyno Coop, a Puerto Rican electric cooperative, the Microgrid La Margarita project aims to transform the community by implementing a smart solar plus storage microgrid, along with distributed "microgrid-ready" residential solar and storage systems to enhance energy reliability, resilience, and reduce electricity costs. ETIPP technical assistance will help integrate distributed assets, ensure compliance with relevant codes and standards, and develop a sustainable business model for a community solar microgrid that will position La Margarita to transition to 100% solar energy.

Comunidad Toro Negro, Ciales, Puerto Rico

The Toro Negro Community, located about 17 miles from the coast in Puerto Rico's remote mountainous region, is highly vulnerable due to poor road infrastructure and frequent isolation from river flooding. The community has long struggled with unstable energy service, which was severely disrupted by Hurricane Maria in 2017, leaving residents without power for eight months. In response, the community built a microgrid that has provided crucial energy security, but the aging backup system now faces imminent failure. Toro Negro's ETIPP project seeks to secure the community's energy future by identifying funds to replace the microgrid's back-up batteries, analyzing its economic viability, and designing a plan to strengthen its management. The project will explore sustainable technical options, update previous studies, facilitate knowledge exchange, and host citizen education workshops to enhance community participation and informed decision-making.

Playa de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico

Playa de Ponce, located along Puerto Rico's southern Caribbean coast, is a disadvantaged community severely affected by climate change and energy resilience challenges. The population faces high poverty rates, and energy costs strain household incomes. Frequent flooding, coastal erosion, and extreme heat coupled with unreliable energy infrastructure have diminished the community's livability, particularly for residents who are elderly and frail. The Playa de Ponce Energy Resilience Project, supported by ETIPP, aims to address these issues by leveraging local expertise, fostering knowledge-sharing within regional and national coastal communities, and promoting community-driven and inclusive decision-making. By creating a strategic energy plan through ETIPP that explores community ownership of energy systems, Playa de Ponce seeks to ensure equitable access to renewable energy, reduce energy costs, and improve neighborhood livability.

Gary, Indiana

The historically industrial city of Gary, Indiana, sits on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, about 25 miles from downtown Chicago and 10 miles from Indiana Dunes National Park. To bolster its emergency power supply and address high energy burden for some 22,000 residents living below the poverty line, the city of Gary plans to build three solar farms. Supported by ETIPP technical assistance, the community coalition will collaborate with local utility NIPSCO to pursue energy planning to interconnect the new photovoltaic installations, formalize steps to fund low-income rooftop arrays using solar farm energy sales, update the city's climate and energy strategies, and educate community stakeholders about renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other sustainable practices.

Key West, Florida

Key West, the southernmost island in the Florida Keys, will work with ETIPP to enhance the island's energy resilience and efficiency. The community aims to improve energy efficiency in public buildings, integrate renewable energy, and reduce transportation emissions. ETIPP will assist with strategic energy planning, identifying opportunities for solar and wind energy, optimizing energy use, and developing a resilience plan to tackle climate-related risks.

Kahikinui, Hawaii

The Kahikinui Homestead is a Department of Hawaiian Home Lands homestead community that is entirely off-grid and not serviced by the local electric utility on Maui, Hawaii. Residents are fully responsible for providing their own power and often use unreliable and unsafe homemade power generation systems. Connecting to the grid would not necessarily address the homestead's reliability and resilience issues because Hawaii utility customers have the highest energy prices in the country; the cost of building infrastructure to connect to the Hawaiian Electric grid would be a significant strain on the community; and Maui's centralized grid experiences its own reliability and resilience problems. Kahikinui's ETIPP technical assistance will focus on microgrid analysis for the homestead community to work toward creating a renewable energy system that could operate independently from the main grid.

Upcountry Maui, Hawaii

Upcountry Maui encompasses a group of communities on the northwestern slopes of the Haleakalā Volcano in east Maui, a region known for its rural and agricultural lifestyle. In August 2023, a series of wildfires started in Upcountry the day before the devastating wildfires in Lahaina, and additional fires sparked in Upcountry Maui in July 2024. The area experiences frequent power outages and is susceptible to wildfires with risk factors including unstable and low-hanging overhead electrical lines, narrow streets, and minimal exit routes. ETIPP technical assistance will contribute to Upcountry Maui’s energy planning to address local resilience challenges and apply national laboratory expertise to help the community better understand actionable options for building a resilient energy system in the short, medium, and long term.

Waianae, Hawaii

Waianae is located on the leeward side of Oahu, Hawaii, and is vulnerable to sea-level rise, natural and human-caused disasters, and drought conditions. Waianae is an economically distressed community where many Hawaiian residents have been relocated from other areas. Waianae has been taking the first steps toward community-centered energy planning or “reimagining.” Through ETIPP, national laboratory researchers will provide support for energy planning in Waianae and expertise to help guide, demystify, and inform the community’s energy options.

Brooklin, Maine

Brooklin, Maine, is situated at the end of the Blue Hill Peninsula and surrounded by the waters of Jericho Bay and Blue Hill Bay—a location that supports its shipbuilding and fishing industries. The community is supplied by two distribution feeder lines, which are vulnerable to coastal storms, and it has limited interconnection options for burgeoning solar installations. Through ETIPP, Brooklin hopes to model future electricity loads and grid capacity, establish better communication with the local utility on solar interconnection, and right-size generation and storage plans to support participation by low-income residents.

Chebeague Island, Maine

Located 1.5 miles offshore in the Gulf of Maine, the Town of Chebeague Island is accessible only by ferry and serves as a hub for both tourism and traditional maritime activity on the outskirts of Portland. Increasingly frequent and severe storms threaten distribution infrastructure, while old homes, extensive generator use, and private cars escalate oil costs and energy burdens for year-round residents. Chebeague Island's ETIPP technical assistance will seek to address numerous resilience changes by investigating the feasibility of battery storage, locally generated power, an island-wide electric bus system, and home heat-pump and weatherization retrofits, while raising awareness about the energy transition in the community.

Cranberry Isles, Maine

Located just south of Acadia National Park, the five Cranberry Isles extend into the Gulf of Maine and are home to boat builders, home builders, and a recently solar-equipped fisherman’s cooperative. The town of Islesford, located on Little Cranberry Island, suffers from outages, faces high prices for propane and fuel oil, and is now facing challenges regarding available capacity for new interconnected solar on the island. Through ETIPP, the Cranberry Isles Community Solar Association will receive technical assistance with strategic energy planning to better understand the local utility’s interconnection policies, explore energy storage systems, assess the islands’ solar and wind generation potential, and create awareness of publicly accessible economic incentives for renewable energy.

Fishers Island, New York

An unbridged island located at the east end of Long Island Sound and 7 miles south of New London, Connecticut, Fishers Island has approximately 225 permanent residents who receive energy through two underwater cables and via diesel generation. However, power infrastructure provided by the island's for-profit utility is aging and increasingly costly for ratepayers. Fishers Island's ETIPP project will begin with energy planning focused on evaluating the local production and storage of energy, retaining low energy costs for residents, and building consensus around the community's strategic energy goals.

Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, Maine

Situated at Pleasant Point in the Downeast region of Maine, the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the fishing village of Sipayik's livelihoods are supported by the area's abundant shellfish, marine mammals, and other coastal resources. The Tribe's electrical infrastructure is susceptible to damage from coastal storms, and power outages exacerbate an already strained and historically contaminated water supply. Through ETIPP, the Tribe plans to explore the implementation of solar energy across Tribal Housing Authority units and increase water quality via added filtration systems or new wells that use clean energy.

Washington County, Maine

Washington County is a rural county at the eastern end of Maine’s coastline that depends principally on fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism along the Gulf of Maine. Frequent and extended power outages threaten lives and livelihoods and impede the spread of electrically powered heating, cooling, and transportation. Through a two-phase ETIPP project that will start with strategic energy planning, the county plans to conduct a vulnerability assessment of the region’s grid, critical infrastructure, and emergency shelters before designing and scoping energy projects that can address the identified needs.

Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon

The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is a federally recognized Tribe comprising three confederated Tribes located south of Mount Hood in Central Oregon, between the Cascade Mountains and the Deschutes River. The Tribe has access to a considerable solar energy resource, and with a strategic energy plan already underway, it is interested in technical assistance for evaluating microgrid, electric vehicle, and resilience hub technology to address Tribal resilience priorities related to economic opportunities and wildfire preparedness.

Nez Perce Tribe, Idaho

Nez Perce Tribe is a federally recognized Tribe with territory in the southeastern Columbia River Plateau. The Tribe established Nimiipuu Energy in 2022, a Tribe-to-Tribe utility cooperative that has advanced local solar and storage technologies to address Tribal energy sovereignty and economic and ecological priorities. With support from Avista Utilities and Montana Technological University, the Nez Perce Tribe and Nimiipuu Energy are interested in further addressing these resilience priorities through engaging in technical assistance and supporting plans for distribution, transmission, and siting that can enable a 500-megawatt solar development.

Port Orford, Oregon

Port Orford is a small port town on the coast of southern Oregon with a considerable workforce in commercial fishing and related industries. With support from the mayor of Port Orford and Oregon State University’s Port Orford field station manager, Port Orford will initiate its ETIPP technical assistance with a strategic energy planning effort aimed at addressing a variety of coastal resilience challenges, such as extreme weather and disaster preparedness, power outages, and decarbonization.

Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Washington

The Swinomish Tribe is a coastal, islanded, and federally recognized Tribe occupying the Swinomish Reservation in northwestern Washington State. In partnership with Puget Sound Energy, a privately owned and publicly regulated electric and natural gas utility, the Tribe aims to engage ETIPP researchers to help update its 2017 strategic energy plan with a specific focus on actionable steps. This collaboration is also supported by the Tribe’s local fire station, County Fire District 13, and involves technical assistance for a photovoltaic microgrid at the district’s fire station to improve outage resilience and emergency preparedness.

Tangier, Virginia

The Town of Tangier on Tangier Island, Virginia, is located in the Chesapeake Bay, roughly 15 miles off the eastern shore of Virginia. It has approximately 450 part-time and full-time residents and relies heavily on crabbing for jobs and local tax revenue. Dependent on fossil fuels, connected to the mainland via a single underwater distribution line, and experiencing rapid sea level rise, Tangier seeks to leverage ETIPP assistance to develop an energy transition plan that charts a pathway to a cleaner, more resilient future for the island, potentially starting with a full utility-scale microgrid.