Drawing on the Sacred Winds

Through utility-scale projects, the Great Plains tribes are creating healthier lands along with new local economies.

By Pat Spears and Bob Gough

The Rosebud Sioux turbine paved the way for the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota to commission a 65-kilowatt turbine in 2005. Photo by Bob Gough

For many tribal peoples, the winds are holy, bringing renewal, warmth and strength. And tribal lands are rich in wind. The wind energy potential on reservations nationwide exceeds 535 billion kilowatt-hours annually — enough to power more than 50 million homes annually.

Much of that resource is found on the northern Great Plains reservations. Indeed, the prairie winds and the Missouri River are inextricably tied to the culture and history of the Great Plains’ two-dozen tribes. Despite these gifts, the reservations never had the size or the moisture needed to sustain agricultural economies. Their richest bottomlands were flooded behind federal dams on the Missouri to generate electricity for everyone in the region except the tribes. But today, tribal leaders are drawing on the winds to forge a renewable energy economy — and the next chapter in a tradition promoting self-reliance and harmony between humankind and nature.

Since 1995, a coalition of Great Plains tribes known as the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy (COUP) has worked to generate jobs and new revenue streams through tribal-owned wind energy projects. These utility-scale turbines are arrayed along federal transmission lines that carry hydroelectric power from the mainstem Missouri River dams. That allows the tribes to sell surplus power to the Western Area Power Administration where it’s especially needed. (WAPA markets and transmits electricity from federal hydroelectric power plants.) As persistent drought throughout the West has reduced federal hydropower production nearly 50 percent, WAPA has filled the shortfall with lignite coal-fired electricity — significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions near tribal lands.

Nationally, reservation households are 10 times less likely to be electrified than other U.S. households. Those households that are electrified pay a higher portion of their incomes to power energy-inefficient structures. The COUP intertribal energy vision
begins with making tribal housing more affordable and efficient through better design and retrofitting. The tribes can use energy audits, weatherization projects and local natural materials like straw bale and earthen plasters to create local jobs, save energy and money, and enhance the quality of life. But even with greater energy efficiency, small wind and solar projects are expensive, especially for tribal communities, where unemployment may be 50 percent.

In large-scale projects, however, the tribes have the opportunity to invest as a community in vibrant renewable energy-based economies. Through the Intertribal COUP’s phased wind-development plan, tribal communities will help meet America's growing energy demands, while becoming locally self-sufficient and generating revenues to help fund smaller community projects. Such projects include installing solar or wind systems at tribal schools facing increased utility costs and at tribal residences located too far from the local power lines to be able to afford expensive interconnection costs on top of monthly utility bills.

Overcoming the Obstacles
The Rosebud Sioux tribe of south-central South Dakota initiated the phased wind-development plan. Dedicated in 2003, Rosebud’s initial utility-scale, 750-kilowatt (kW) turbine, “Little Soldier,” is installed at the Rosebud Hotel and Casino, the tribe’s largest commercial development center.

But to achieve the installation, the tribe had to overcome countless challenges, starting with financing. In 1999, Rosebud became the first tribe to receive a grant — covering half the turbine’s cost, about $500,000 — under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Tribal Renewable Energy Grants. Three years later, the tribe secured a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service to finance the balance.

This project was originally conceived as a community wind project, designed to supply power to the tribe’s largest single energy-consuming facility. However, because the tribal development site, as an energy load, is controlled by a nontribal utility, the tribe faced the imposition of a $7 per kilowatt-month demand charge for using the 750-kW wind turbine. This $5,250-permonth demand charge, for the utility to “stand by” to provide power when the wind doesn't blow, is on top of the cost for any needed “supplemental” energy, to be purchased by the utility on the open market. Because these demand charges and unknown supplemental energy costs eviscerate the economics of tribal renewable projects, the tribe decided instead to sell the bulk of the turbine's output as bundled “green power” to a local Air Force Base on a short-term contract. That established the precedent for tribes to be green power vendors to the U.S. government. The tribe sold off the remaining generation and environmental attributes of the turbine’s output into separate markets, as “energy” to the local utility and as “green tags,” or carbon offsets, to marketer NativeEnergy (nativeenergy.com, of which COUP has a majority equity stake on behalf of its member tribes).

The 195-foot turbine produces 2.4 million kilowatt-hours per year — keeping 25 million tons of lignite coal in the ground over its lifetime. The Rosebud single-turbine project also demonstrated to Indian Country that wind energy was a good opportunity and direction for tribal energy self-sufficiency, global warming mitigation and sustainable tribal economic development.

The second phase of the Rosebud project is the 30-megawatt St. Francis wind farm, scheduled for construction this year. Together, the Rosebud turbines will comprise the nation’s first large-scale Native American-owned and -operated wind farm.

Integrating Tribal Wind with the Grid
The Rosebud tribe’s wind project was a landmark for tribal wind development, overcoming legal and business barriers that had discouraged utility-scale renewable energy development interconnected to the integrated regional grid system of federal and private operators. It paved the way for other Intertribal COUP tribes to install utility-scale turbines. These include 65-kW turbines commissioned on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota in 2005 and at the KILI Radio Station on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in May, along with the multimegawatt project planned at Rosebud.

Yet these turbine installations are but the first stage of the Intertribal COUP’s wind-development plan. The Council vision is to tap the immense wind power potential on tribal lands, integrating two-dozen projects in six states with the federal hydroelectric generation and transmission grid. Tens of thousands of tribal members on 20 reservations would benefit directly from new, sustainable jobs and from the power and health benefits of local clean energy. Our initial goal is for eight to 12 distributed projects totaling several hundred megawatts.

Tribal ownership in large-scale projects will require a sharable production tax credit (PTC), so that tribes can maintain equity in reservation-based wind projects without losing the federal PTC incentives that help to lower the cost of power from wind projects. Under present law, in a project where a tribe is an equity partner, the tribe gets the tax credits in proportion to its ownership interest but cannot use them as a government without a federal income tax liability. This situation penalizes private capital seeking to partner with tribes on reservation projects and raises the cost of power into markets that assume the supplier’s capture of the full PTC. Two bills before Congress (HR 1954 and S2520) provide such a remedy for tribal joint ventures, where the goal is not only to build wind turbines on reservations, but also to position tribes as full business partners.

Large tribal wind projects distributed across six northern Great Plains states could relieve some of the Missouri River’s hydropower burden. By displacing a portion of polluting coal on the grid with clean wind power, we’ll conserve water that would be consumed for steam and cooling and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. For the tribes, the renewing winds will sustain both the people and their lands with local jobs, clean electricity, community-building revenues and healthy air and water.

About the author: Pat Spears is president and Bob Gough is secretary of the Intertribal COUP (intertribalcoup.org), a nonprofit council of federally recognized Indian tribes in the northern Great Plains. In 2007, the COUP’s phased wind energy-development plan won the inaugural World Clean Energy Award for Courage.

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