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Juneau might lose its ability to say that its electricity is created entirely by renewable hydropower if the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, prevails in a lawsuit over the ownership and sale of renewable energy credits created by the Snettisham Hydroelectric Project, which currently supplies two-thirds of Juneau’s electricity.

Renewable energy credits, known as RECs, are much like carbon credits. Utilities that burn fossil fuels can buy them to say they’re powered by renewable energy, allowing them to claim carbon emissions reductions.

But, once sold, the utility that generates the renewable power — in this case Alaska Electric Light & Power, or AEL&P — could no longer claim it produces entirely renewable energy. The City & Borough of Juneau, along with businesses and nonprofits that use this power, would lose the claim too.

Randy Ruaro, the executive director at AIDEA, said selling the credits is a way for the state to make money.

“Frankly, it was an oversight, I guess, by previous AIDEA staff and employees to recognize that this opportunity was out there,” he said. “But once it came to our attention, we’re obligated to take steps to create and generate revenue for AIDEA and for the state of Alaska treasury.”

Exactly how much revenue the agency could make is unclear. On the open market, RECs are priced at anywhere from $1 to $700 per megawatt hour. Snettisham produces roughly 281,000 megawatt hours annually and AEL&P estimates the credits would sell for between $281,000 and $421,500.

Although the dispute comes down to who gets to say what — in essence, a matter of reputation — the impact of selling the credits could be financially detrimental for those who use the claim in Juneau.

Steve Behnke is a founding board member of Alaska Heat Smart, a nonprofit that installs heat pumps in homes across coastal Alaska. He also leads Renewable Juneau, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy.

“Renewable Juneau and Alaska Heat Smart have created the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, which raises money by saying that we’re using this nice clean hydroelectricity, a renewable resource, to put heat pumps in low-income Juneau homes, saving them 50% on their heating bills, and demonstrating a reduction in carbon emissions,” he said.

He says the fund relies on individuals and companies contributing to offset their carbon emissions.

Alaska Heat Smart is also rolling out a program to install 6,000 heat pumps funded by a $38.6 million dollar federal grant. Behnke said that if AIDEA is allowed to sell the credits outside of Juneau, then local nonprofits would lose their claim to renewable power, making them less competitive in seeking grants that score project applications based on clean energy.

Robert Barr, Juneau’s deputy city manager, echoed Behnke’s concern.

“I certainly understand (AIDEA) wanting to bolster their bottom line, but in this case, they’re doing that at our expense, and that is certainly frustrating,” Barr said.

Barr called the sales proposal short-sighted and said AIDEA didn’t consult with the city before starting the process.

Greens Creek Mine, the largest silver mine in the country that’s located near Juneau on Admiralty Island, runs partially on surplus hydropower supplied by Snettisham through an agreement with AEL&P. Hecla, the company that owns the mine, claimed a 38% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions between 2019 and 2024. Last week, Hecla filed a complaint against AIDEA, asking the Regulatory Commission of Alaska to determine that AIDEA doesn’t own the renewable energy credits and therefore can’t sell them.

On Thursday, AEL&P filed a lawsuit against AIDEA alleging the same thing. Although AIDEA owns the Snettisham Hydroelectric Project, it long ago sold the power generation rights to AEL&P.

In the court filing, AEL&P asserts that any renewable energy credits created at Snettisham should belong to the utility, not AIDEA.

Most states have laws governing how renewable energy credits are created, traced and transferred. The Alaska Legislature considered a bill a few years ago that would have done that, but it didn’t make it out of committee, leaving it unclear how renewable energy credits work here.

Alec Mesdag, the CEO of AEL&P, said the utility looked into the credits a while ago and decided not to pursue selling them.

“It’s been something that has just provided substantially more value than what we would obtain by selling the RECs to someone who doesn’t live here at all,” he said.

Mesdag said the credits make more sense for energy grids that have a mix of power generation. Utilities buy and sell them to meet renewable portfolio standards set by state laws — but Alaska doesn’t have one of those laws either.

Now it’s up to the Alaska Superior Court to decide whether Juneau’s only operating electric utility owns the renewable energy credits that until now, local businesses and nonprofits believed they could claim. The court issued a temporary restraining order on Friday preventing the sale of RECs until the issue can be discussed in court. A hearing will be held Sept. 18.

Correction: This story has been updated to better distinguish between two separate heat pump installation programs. 

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Lonnie Khmelev owns Affordable Auto Sales in Juneau, and until last week, he got all of his EVs shipped through Alaska Marine Lines. That’s true for all of the car dealerships in Juneau. Khmelev currently has 50 cars on the lot and nearly half are EVs.

“I would say we sell probably about 40% EV,” he said.

But AML stopped shipping electric vehicles to Alaska at the beginning of September due to the fire risk posed by lithium ion batteries. This came after two other major shipping companies Matson and Tote Maritime suspended their EV shipments to the state for the same reason.

Khmelev said he’ll probably ship EVs on the ferry, which has a limit of two at a time.

“I do think that we’re going to continue selling EVs, and we’ll find ways to get them here and ship them out if need be,” he said. “I’m staying positive on that.”

Because his operation is small, Khmelev said getting just a few cars in per week is plenty.

But down the road at the Juneau Auto Mall, the largest dealership in town, Manager Kody Richardson is less optimistic.

“Without a detailed workaround to get cars here, it will definitely affect our ability to grow EV sales in Southeast Alaska,” he said.

Richardson said EVs have made up less than 5% of the company’s sales so far this year, but even that demand may be hard to keep up with.

AML didn’t agree to an interview for this story, spokesperson Ryan Dixon wrote in an email that the company still ships hybrid vehicles that don’t plug in, and will reassess its ability to safely ship EVs and plug-in hybrids as industry standards and safety procedures improve.

The decision came after a cargo ship carrying electric, hybrid and standard vehicles caught fire and burned for days before sinking off the coast of Adak in June. All Twenty-two crewmembers evacuated on a lifeboat and were rescued by another vessel.

Steve Behnke leads Renewable Juneau, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy. He said he hears the shipping companies’ safety concerns, but “as we understand it, the circumstances are just totally different in terms of the shipping that AML is doing,” he said. “They’re using open barges. They’re not cramming a bunch of vehicles down in the hold of a cargo ship.”

Behnke said EVs make good sense for Alaska’s capital city, which runs on relatively cheap hydroelectric power, has a small network of roads and a moderate climate that isn’t rough on the car batteries.

“Juneau is a Goldilocks zone for EVs,” he said.

It’s unclear if car dealerships are facing the same problem in the rest of the state. A handful of dealerships in Anchorage didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. But anecdotally, it may be harder to buy an EV in the state’s largest city. Anchorage resident Maggie Miller ran into roadblocks when she explored buying one in August.

Miller’s teenage son totaled the family’s 2013 Toyota Highlander while learning to drive.

“We had been intending to buy an EV next fall when he turned 16,” she said. “So when this total happened, we were like, well, maybe we should go ahead and get the EV.”

The Millers called Continental Subaru to see about the Solterra. That’s when they heard that the dealership can’t get them because shipping companies won’t transport EVs to Alaska anymore.

Miller said she was surprised.

“I was really disappointed, because I just understood this was something we were trying to do as a country,” she said. “We were trying to make a change and it’s something that we totally can support.”

Miller’s often shuttling her two kids and nephews to their sports and other activities, and needed a car to replace the totaled one. So she ended up just buying another gas-powered Highlander.

“It’s just a bummer that there’s…improvements in technology, but there are all these barriers to taking the steps to do the right thing,” she said.

Miller said that she hopes dealerships can find a way to get EVs to Anchorage, either with additional charging stations on the Alcan Highway or a change in shipping policy.

The top oil-producing company in Alaska is planning significant layoffs, it announced last week.

In a series of statements, the oil giant ConocoPhillips said it will be firing between 20% and 25% of its global workforce of about 13,000 people. That would mean between 2,600 and 3,250 layoffs worldwide.

“We are always looking at how we can be more efficient with the resources we have. As part of this process, we have informed employees that a 20% to 25% reduction in our global workforce, which includes employees and contractors, is anticipated. The majority of these reductions will take place in 2025,” said Rebecca Boys, director of external affairs for ConocoPhillips Alaska, on Thursday.

Boys declined to say how many people the company employs in Alaska, but prior documents published by the company say that it has “about 1,000 people in Alaska,” and of those, about 80% live in the state.

Altogether, the oil and gas industry employed 8,800 people in Alaska as of July, according to state statistics. If ConocoPhillips were to lay off a quarter of its Alaska workforce, it likely would reverse an upward trend for the oil and gas industry here.

Since bottoming out at 6,100 people in November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, the number of people employed by the oil and gas industry rose throughout President Joe Biden’s administration.

ConocoPhillips produces the most oil of any company operating on the North Slope and holds the second-most oil and gas lease area in the state.

According to state data, ConocoPhillips leases about 490,000 acres of Alaska land and water for oil and gas drilling. That’s behind only privately owned Hilcorp, whose holdings exceed 500,000 acres.

ConocoPhillips is developing the large Willow project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, which is expected to begin producing oil in 2029.

According to the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, ConocoPhillips is also planning to drill four exploration wells in other parts of the reserve this winter.

On its production side, ConocoPhillips was planning to drill 12 new production wells this year and next from the Kuparuk oilfield west of Prudhoe Bay.

For about a decade, Scott Jackson had a system. He was the owner of Rocky Pass Tannery in the village of Kake on Kupreanof Island, where he and his team tanned sea otter pelts.

He can still recite the steps in precise detail. Pressure wash the fat off the pelts for four hours. Put the pelts in a pressurizing machine called an auto-tanner for three hours. Hang the pelts until they swell. Shave them with a circle beaver fleshing knife. Put in a citric acid bath for three days. Neutralize with baking soda. Oil. Dry.

“It takes a lot more than you realize to make a good, soft, supple, sewing hide,” Jackson said.

About a year and a half ago, he closed the tannery. Jackson said trying to keep up with the high demand was unsustainable. At one point, Jackson said they tanned 187 hides in a month with fewer than a dozen employees.

“Pretty soon it becomes stress, and pretty soon it becomes unhealthy,” he said.

When Rocky Pass Tannery shuttered, that left their customers throughout Southeast Alaska with few options to continue their traditional cultural practices of hunting and skin-sewing sea otters.

Access to tannery services is just one of many barriers facing sea otter hunters. Federal rules restrict sea otter hunting to those who are a quarter or more Alaska Native or an enrolled member of a coastal tribe. Federal regulations also say that hunted sea otters must be converted into “authentic Native handicrafts.” These barriers are making it more difficult for hunters to tackle sea otter overpopulation, which is threatening shellfish populations in Southeast Alaska.

Shipping out-of-state

Now, many sea otter craftspeople ship their pelts to the only sea otter tannery outside of Alaska — in southern Idaho.

Aanutein Deborah Head is a skin-sewing teacher from Craig on Prince of Wales Island and one of Jackson’s former customers. She’s an experienced sea otter hunter and skin-sewer. But she never learned how to tan.

“I could have said, ‘Grandma, show me how to tan it so the hide doesn’t fall off of it,’” Head said. “I didn’t, and that’s lost to me.”

It was more convenient when she could send her sea otters to Kake, Head said. In particular, it costs her a lot more in shipping to send the skins on a thousand-plus-mile journey to southern Idaho.

Kootink Heather Douville learned how to skin-sew from Head while growing up in Craig. Now, she’s an avid hunter. Like Head, she also sends her sea otter pelts to Idaho so she can make and sell handicrafts like hats, pillows and fur ball earrings.

From the time she spots a sea otter in the water and aims for its head to when she finishes the last stitch on a handicraft, just about every part of the process is either expensive or time-consuming. She hunted 200 otters last year and about 120 this year.

“For me, it’s not just an investment as far as money goes, it’s your time,” Douville said. “I think that’s why we have so few hunters out there, in addition to the blood quantum limitations through the federal agencies.”

An alternative approach

In Klawock, just six miles north of Craig, Anthony Charles has found another way to save on tanning costs — by doing the tanning himself. He’s been running a sea otter product business for about seven years with his father. He used to ship to Rocky Pass Tannery before it closed, but decided to tan himself to save on shipping. Even though Kake is significantly closer than Idaho, it’s still about 100 miles by air from Klawock.

A couple of years ago, Charles bought tanning equipment and set it up under a tent. When his setup was destroyed in a windstorm, he was faced with a difficult decision.

“I almost kind of walked away from it after that,” he said.

Instead, he decided to rebuild and keep his tanning operation going.

“I had to really bite down,” he said. “It was worth it.”

But tanning in-house doesn’t work for everyone. Douville tried tanning on her own at one point, but felt that it didn’t produce a high enough quality pelt for sewing. She also prefers to focus her time on hunting and sewing.

“If I were to hunt and tan my own pelts, I would have a big stack of pelts, but no time to convert them and sell them,” she said.

Impact on sea otter overpopulation

Jackson said that since he’s closed the tannery, it seems like sea otter hunting has slowed down in Kake.

Douville said she feels like she’s not making much of a difference in the sea otter populations.

“They’re multiplying at a much faster rate than I can hunt them,” Douville said.

Despite the barriers, Douville remains committed to hunting and sewing as a way to connect to her Lingít culture. As she learned more about sea otter overpopulation and its threat to shellfish, she says it became even more meaningful for her.

“The last bucket of clams my dad dug was in 2011 and the last sea urchins we got was when I was a little kid,” she said. “When you remove access to a traditional food, you’re removing the ability to pass on that knowledge to the next generation on how to hunt or collect the food.”

The future of tanneries

Jackson, the former tannery owner, is unsure what the fate of local tanneries will be.

“Are we going to have tanneries around forever? I don’t know,” said Jackson. “I know that we all don’t live forever, and eventually we got to tap out.”

He’s not sure if he’ll reopen the tannery in Kake, but Jackson said he’d like to go to other towns and teach people how to set up a sustainable tannery.

“I think tanning would be number one, and teaching them how to sew is number two,” he said. “We got to open up our minds a little bit and say, let’s have a tannery in every community.”

On a typical day at Bluff Point Golf Resort in Plattsburgh, N.Y., you used to be able to spot around 20 or 30 cars from Quebec or Ontario in the parking lot, according to owner Paul Dame.

But over the last several months, at the business just 25 minutes from the U.S.-Canada border, it has been more like one or two cars.

“It’s tough, because we’ve developed this relationship with the cross-border economy,” Dame said. “And now here we are, the rug getting pulled out from underneath us.”

New data confirms that far fewer Canadians are making trips south. Canadian residents made just 1.7 million return trips by motor vehicle back into their country from the U.S. in July, a nearly 37% drop from the same month in 2024, according to a report published this month by Statistics Canada.

The dip comes as relations are strained between the U.S. and Canada after President Trump vowed to make Canada a U.S. state earlier this year and imposed steep tariffs on his northern neighbor. Some worried that the tough political rhetoric — combined with a strong U.S. dollar — would damage an important source of U.S. tourism.

Data released by the U.S. government confirms a similar slide in Canadian travel. Canadians made just over 7 million visits to the U.S. between January and May, according to statistics published by the International Trade Administration. That’s a nearly 17% decrease compared with the same period in 2024, data shows.

The U.S. Travel Association said in an emailed statement to NPR that its “latest view continues to show a decline in travel from Canadian residents to the United States, consistent with the recent Canadian data released.”

Leah Mueller, vice president of sales and services at Visit Buffalo Niagara, said tourism companies in her region have been feeling the impact of a drop in Canadian travel too, from smaller tour groups to tour boats with fewer passengers.

“It’s a decline that’s not stopping things from happening, but it is affecting the revenue that people are collecting,” she said.

The U.S. saw 20.4 million visits from Canadians last year, making Canada the top source of international tourists to the United States, the U.S. Travel Association reported. The group said in February that those visits generated $20.5 billion in spending and supported 140,000 U.S. jobs.

There have been some efforts to soften the blow of the tourism slump.

In June, Maine Gov. Janet Mills made an official visit to Canada to urge Canadians to visit her border state. Maine, which saw nearly 800,000 Canadian visits in 2024, also installed new road signs welcoming travelers from the north, reading: “Bienvenue, Canadiens!”

Dame, the golf resort owner, said he has redirected some of his marketing efforts to other parts of New York and Vermont. But he said he hopes the U.S. and Canada can repair their relationship, and in the meantime he doesn’t blame his longtime Canadian customers for skipping their trips following the political attacks.

“It’s a very personal situation. They’ve been attacked personally, and it’s emotional,” he said. “It’s something that we would react [to] the same way if the opposite was happening to us.”

Haines and Skagway residents have been dealing with weak or no cell service for several days this week. At least two carriers – AT&T and Verizon – say the outage is due to Juneau’s glacial outburst flood.

The service interruptions have affected AT&T, GCI, Verizon and Visible, according to Upper Lynn Canal residents.

Among them is Garrett Shively. He lives in Haines, and as of Friday morning, hadn’t had cell service since early Wednesday. He uses Visible, which piggybacks off Verizon’s network.

“I haven’t had signal at all. I tried calling customer support,” said Shively. “I spent probably two hours on the chat with them because I thought it was my phone that was broken. And I don’t have Wi-Fi, I use my phone as a personal hotspot at my house.”

A GCI user commented on a Haines community Facebook page that they have had “horrible service.” Verizon users in Haines seem to have some service, but it’s not great.

“It’s like being in Canada,” Haines resident Nicole Horton Holm said in a Facebook message Friday afternoon. “Every group message [that] comes in has to be downloaded manually and then it pops into the chat. I’m getting emergency calls only even in downtown.”

In Skagway, AT&T users seem to be having the most issues. Skagway resident Juliene Miles says she spent hours communicating with AT&T on Friday. According to screenshots shared with KHNS, a customer service representative said the company plans to have service restored by Aug. 28.

An AT&T spokesperson said in an email exchange earlier this week that service disruptions were related to flooding in Juneau and a fiber cut caused by a third party contractor. She said the network is working to restore service as quickly as possible but did not provide a specific timeline for repairs, or clarify where the fiber cut took place.

A Verizon spokesperson also said severe flooding caused the service interruption and that the company has enabled roaming on a partner network while repairs are in progress.

Meanwhile, a GCI spokesperson said that testing indicates the company’s sites in Haines and Skagway are functioning normally. Visible could not be reached for comment.