Eagle, a community of 200 far up the Yukon River and just a short snowmachine ride from the Canadian border, faces an issue that affects many remote Alaska communities: Electricity generated by burning diesel fuel, which has to be shipped in on small barges that travel during the ice-free months, is very expensive. So expensive, in fact, that across the state, high fuel costs are being blamed for outmigration to larger communities like Fairbanks and Anchorage.

A new experiment could help. With the help of federal funds, Alaska Power and Telephone is working to install a floating turbine in the silty waters of the Yukon River near Eagle, which is still recovering from last year's devastating floods. If the turbine works, it could provide power that would cut the community's fuel bills while providing a blueprint for electricity that could be used by rural river villages around the world.

"This is a true pilot project," APT chief executive Bob Grimm said. "This is to find out if it will work."

The success of Eagle's turbine, the first of its kind, is uncertain. (A similar project, though much smaller, was installed in the river at Ruby in the summer of 2008.) The Denali Commission, a federal agency created in 1998 to develop rural Alaska, has put about $3.2 million towards Eagle's turbine project. APT chipped in another $200,000. That's close to $3.4 million, most of it public money, for a project that isn't guaranteed to work, will only provide power to 20 or 25 homes, and has to be taken out of the river before it freezes in the fall. It's fair to ask whether that's a bum deal.

Those working on it, though, say the first of anything is always expensive, and if this thing is successful, it'll be big. Lessons learned in Eagle could be applied to villages all over Alaska, in the remote upper reaches of the Amazon, and across Africa, according to Grimm.

"Alaska is very much like a developing country," Grimm said, "which is also an opportunity because if we can find technology that can work here, it could also work other places."

Ruby's turbine has struggled. Its first summer, in 2008, the turbine was placed close to shore where the water wasn't flowing fast enough to produce much power. In 2009 it was moved out farther but the more powerful current abraded the power transmission cable, breaking it. The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, the organization overseeing the Ruby turbine, is hoping to put the turbine back in the water again later this summer.

Both the Ruby and Eagle turbines have to be taken out of the river before freeze-up. During the winter the villages would be powered by diesel generators, the same way they are currently powered all year long.

Jason Meyer, a research engineer at the University of Alaska's Alaska Center for Energy and Power, is studying the installation and startup of the Eagle turbine with an eye towards gathering data that would allow others to copy the project. Meyer sees the projects in Ruby and Eagle, and the ones that will follow them, as the evolution of a new technology. He offers solar and wind power as examples, explaining that early projects are expensive, assisted by government funds, and built by small companies. Now that wind looks like a safe bet you have companies like General Electric and Hyundai building wind turbines, but when those technologies were first being developed progress was more difficult.

"One of the biggest challenges day to day is the river itself," Meyer said. "It's a strong, swift river, and simple tasks are compounded by its force."

Besides being the test case for issues like anchoring and flow rate, the Eagle project is also more expensive because its budget has to include money for studies on the turbine's impact on fish and the environment.

"Anything will work if you throw enough money at it. So it really isn't about making it work -- it's about making it work in a way that's economic and environmentally sound," said ACEP director Gwen Holdmann. "The next one would be far less expensive to deploy than this one was."

Another challenge is the added complexity of building anything in rural Alaska. Transporting equipment to a place like Eagle is difficult.