What Happens When a Community Passes ‘Peak Water’? Cordova and Kodiak Tell Two Stories of Energy and Industry

In many of Alaska’s small, coastal communities, the same old joke has danced on residents’ tongues, and stuck in their noses, for generations: You smell our town before you see it.

The familiar mixture of chum, guts and refuse curls unmistakably through harbors, serpentining fishing boats and layering foggy quays. It rises from the floors of canneries, where freshly caught fish are processed and packaged as seafood. The odor lingers in the air above ports, where millions of pounds of exports each year — cans and pouches of salmon, pollock and cod harvested from the Gulf of Alaska — are frozen and barged to Seattle, South Korea and Japan, netting large sums of dollars, won and yen in return.

For dozens of Alaskan towns, the canning industry is their economic lifeblood; to smell fish guts is to smell money. Alaska’s commercial seafood economy generates more than $1 billion each year, and roughly 60 operating canneries across the state’s southern coasts contribute significantly to these dividends

But success comes at a cost. During the harvesting seasons, canneries’ energy needs — to operate machinery, cool freezers, and clean fish day and night — increase substantially.

Entire towns’ power grids dwindle and recharge in synchronization with these processors’ demands.

In Cordova and other remote coastal towns, that synchronization has always been more than a technical detail; it is a relationship that determines whether workers stay employed, whether processors meet contracts and whether families can depend on seasonal income.

When the energy system falters, the entire economic rhythm of summer begins to wobble, a tension that has grown more palpable in the past decade as both energy availability and fish returns have become less predictable.

Perhaps no one knows the intricate relationship between energy, canneries and the local economy better than Clay Koplin. From 2016-2025, Koplin served as Cordova’s mayor and — as is typical in a small town where everyone wears several hats — as CEO of the Cordova Electric Cooperative since 2007.

The Cordova Electric Cooperative operates the Power Creek hydroelectric dam which is perched in the Chugach Mountains above Cordova’s population of 2,400 year-round residents. A bulwark, the dam contributes between 60% and 70% of the town’s electricity annually, and during any given time of year when other sources are offline, might be relied upon as Cordova’s sole energy supplier.

During peak processing weeks, the utility sometimes sees its load nearly double, driven by compressors, blast freezers, ice machines and continuous sanitation. In years with normal water availability in the watershed, Power Creek helps shoulder this surge. But in years with sudden dry spells, the utility must rapidly pivot to backup diesel, an expensive and increasingly risky option for a town not connected to any outside grid.

Power Creek dam is named for the watershed in which it sits, an alpine area of 50 square kilometers. Roughly 18 glaciers, including three glaciers larger than 1 square kilometer, cover one-fifth of this landscape. Their meltwater discharge, coupled with rain and snowmelt, comprise the dam’s entire inflows.

For decades, Cordova’s glaciers have been shrinking. They accumulate some ice in the winter, but more melts throughout the mild summers from May through September. According to Joanna Young, a glaciologist with the International Arctic Research Center, this melt typically peaks in July and remains high through August.

“This is also right around when the fish processing plants have their highest load,” Young said. “So it’s quite convenient for them that they have high mid-summer water availability, which translates directly into power availability.”

But sometime in the mid-2010s, around when Koplin took office, he observed that this seasonal harmony began to ring discordant. Data collected by the Cordova Electric Cooperative signaled a fundamental shift in Power Creek’s hydrology. Instead of stretching across May through September, the meltwater entering Power Creek dam was dwindling.

Young’s research with the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center uncovered the processes behind this shift. Cordova had long since passed “peak water,” a distinction that signals the turning point when the flow of water derived from a shrinking glacier, having initially increased due to melting, began a permanent long-term decrease.

The city was starting to feel it. In Cordova’s case, this meant that the glacier-fed Power Creek watershed – the system the town relies on for its lifeblood – was becoming dramatically less reliable.

Young emphasized that this marks more than a hydrologic quirk; it is the hallmark of a watershed in transition. Once peak water is passed, the long-term trend is downward: less ice, less melt and fewer days when the water supply aligns with human need.

For a run-of-river system like Power Creek, this shift becomes visible immediately in the power logs, showing more diesel uptime and rising operational stress on infrastructure.

Young’s analysis of flow measurements collected by Cordova Electric Cooperative showed this summer high flow period shortening by 44 days over just a 17 year span. This dramatic shift in hydrology means that the synchronization between nature’s supply and the industry’s demand is breaking down.

This mismatch has begun to show up even outside the utility sector. Fish processors have reported occasional delays in ice production due to energy shortages, affecting seafood storage. While small on their own, such disruptions compound quickly during peak processing season, when a delayed delivery can ripple through an entire fleet’s schedule.

The core issue in the Power Creek watershed isn’t just a lack of total water, but a lack of storage. The city is unable to hold onto the energy produced during periods of high water availability to be used later. The solution for Cordova, Young suggested, is technological resilience: “energy storage solutions like batteries or flywheels” to mitigate the changing water availability. Those solutions may work in the short-term, to smooth the trickles and flows of hydropower, but larger storage solutions are also necessary.

Cordova Electric Cooperative is actively pursuing energy storage solutions such as their Humpback Creek Hydro Storage Project and Crater Lake high elevation water storage.

Cordova, which once relied on a long melt season, is now forced to adapt its energy system to weather the declining supply of meltwater from a smaller glacier. Cordova is building its resilience from a position of urgent vulnerability.

Koplin and Young both acknowledged that energy storage systems are only part of the equation. True resilience, they argued, will require a more flexible system.

Kodiak: A different story of energy independence

Less than 500 miles southwest of Cordova, on Kodiak Island, sits a community of similar size and economic reliance on the fishing industry. But where Cordova is adapting to a hydrological shift, Kodiak tells a different story – one of energy independence.

Kodiak’s watershed is dominated by rain-fed reservoirs and supplemented by strategically placed wind turbines. This means its power availability is less sensitive to short-term heat waves and more stable across the shoulder seasons.

The culture of Kodiak is proudly steeped in seafood. Public trash bins are styled like vintage salmon cans and downtown installations celebrate generations of dock workers. But just down the road from the largest canneries, a quiet success story exists in the form of a ghost building and a repurposed sushi restaurant.

Dan Menth, the CEO of Kodiak Electric Association, pointed to the site of his utilities past dependency. Gesturing to a foundation, he recalled, “This is where my office used to be… And that,” he says, pointing across the street, “was the old powerhouse.”

Where two mighty diesel generators once hummed, sushi is now served. Kodiak decided a decade ago to unhook itself entirely from the volatile price and supply of diesel fuel, divorcing its economic engine from carbon.

The Kodiak Electric Association set a goal in 2004 to achieve 95% renewable energy. By 2017, they revamped the goal to “maintain at least 98%.” Menth’s cooperative has been successful, running “over 99% every year” since. Even during peak fishing season, when the canneries drive the utility’s load to 30 megawatts, the island meets its needs with wind and hydro energy.

“Kodiak has been pretty successful, the community has embraced our wind turbines and renewable energy,” Menth said.

Kodiak’s energy success is so profound that residents are now inspired to install their own renewable systems, seeing the giant turbines behind the town as a symbol of economic stability.

Menth explained that the community support didn’t appear overnight. Early wind initiatives faced skepticism from residents who remembered the volatility of diesel markets and doubted whether turbines could withstand Kodiak’s infamous gusts. But after storms repeatedly knocked out the old powerhouse while the wind system held firm, public perception shifted. Today, renewable energy is woven into the island’s cultural identity.

Cordova and Kodiak are two halves of the same Alaska story of specialized adaptation. One community, built on the former high water flows of a shrinking glacier, is searching for a solution to a problem that ramped up faster than expected, but like Kodiak, Cordova has an opportunity to find new energy solutions that suit their unique needs. In Alaska’s coastal communities, the smell of money once belonged to fish guts; today, two towns demonstrate that the true scent of money may soon bereliable electric power and the foresight to secure it.