How does a remote Alaska fishing town turn wasted water into computing power? Cordova, Alaska, is home to 2,600 residents who live off the grid from larger energy systems. The town’s run-of-river Humpback Creek hydroelectric facility provides more than 83% of its electrical demand. But each year, roughly 20%–25% of that hydropower goes unused due to seasonal fluctuations. Cordova previously spilled gigawatt-hours of excess energy without any beneficial use. Now, a pilot project is putting that surplus to work.
Cordova now converts surplus hydropower into computing work, turning wasted energy into a local resource.
In November 2023, a company called Greensparc partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to place a 170-kilowatt data center directly inside the Humpback Creek facility. The servers sit just 20 feet from the generators. That proximity is key. It pushes the power usage effectiveness ratio close to 1.0, meaning almost no energy is lost between generation and use. Chilly mountain meltwater flowing through the facility also cools the servers naturally, replacing traditional cooling systems. The modular design allows the setup to scale up or spread across other locations.
This project wouldn’t be possible without Cordova’s smart microgrid. From 2017 to 2023, Cordova Electric Cooperative built the system with support from the U.S. Department of Energy. It includes roughly 1,200 smart meters, six phasor measurement units, GPS clocks, microgrid controllers, and a 1-megawatt battery energy system. These tools help balance supply and demand for the town’s fishing industry and local economy. The microgrid also features underground cabling to support its resilient infrastructure.
National laboratories have also played a role. The National Laboratory of the Rockies, Idaho National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories built a digital twin of Cordova’s microgrid. They used the ARIES platform to model how the data center and microgrid work together. The DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office funded full-fidelity hydropower modeling. This digital twin approach lets other utilities test similar ideas without taking on big financial risks.
The edge-based data center model gives Cordova localized data processing and storage. It cuts the town’s dependence on distant facilities. During winter, when river levels drop, diesel generation likely supplements hydropower. Still, energy that once went to waste now fuels real computing work. Similar to how battery storage solutions help industrial operations maintain power during non-generating periods, Cordova’s microgrid battery system ensures consistent energy availability when hydropower output dips. As AI-driven energy demands grow, the DOE OE Microgrid Program is exploring how similar setups could scale to multi-megawatt microgrid–data center solutions for larger deployments.
References
- https://cleantechnica.com/2026/03/09/in-alaska-a-data-center-inside-a-power-plant-inside-a-microgrid/
- https://canadiancor.com/breaking-news/in-alaska-a-data-center-inside-a-power-plant-inside-a-microgrid/
- https://www.greensparc.com/projects/cordova-electric-data-center
- https://www.uaf.edu/acep/news/2024/cordovas-recent-innovation-captured-in-a-white-paper.php
- https://www.nrel.gov/grid/news/program/2023/city-of-cordova-and-us-department-of-energy-push-envelope-of-microgrid-design
- https://www.nlr.gov/news/video/remote-city-in-alaska-enhances-its-microgrid-for-resilience-text
- https://digital.akbizmag.com/issue/august-2024/virtuous-circuit/
