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amount of investment in Indian Country just to
meet those goals and to get to where we need to
be for climate change,” says Tim Willink, director
of the tribal solar program at GRID Alternatives,
a nonprofit that offers solar-energy-systems train-
ing and installation to underserved communities.
Instead, many tribes are turning to philanthropy
and corporate investors.
Renewable eneRgy is appealing to tribal
communities: it offers self-sufficiency, lower en-
ergy costs, economic development, and the chance
to adapt to climate change. Since 2010, the DOE
has doled out 214 grants for tribal green-energy
projects, totaling over $85 million. No matter the
size of the project, though, competing for and se-
curing funding has long been a challenge.
GRID Alternatives has worked with around 50
tribal nations to provide technical support, and the
organization knows all too well the strain of search-
ing for outside funding, according to Willink. “It
is time-consuming, but it is doable,” he says. This
is where private funding can help. A major boost
came in 2018, when GRID Alternatives’ tribal solar
program got $5 million from Wells Fargo to launch
a new Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund to support
technical assistance and job training. Then, at the
end of last year, an additional $12 million was do-
nated by the Bezos Earth Fund. On average, just
one of these corporate donations is roughly equal
to all of the grants allocated by the DOE’s Office of
Indian Energy this year—$9 million worth—most
of which went to solar projects.
“As we’ve been able to carry out a number of
projects, we’ve seen an increase in tribes’ approach-
ing us, to enlist us as partners,” says Willink, who
is indifferent to where the money comes from for
projects; he’s for “diversified funding,” as he puts it.
Once the groundwork is laid with local level
installations and trained workers, communities
are able to start thinking about scaling up fur-
ther where the payoff could be even greater. “In
the context of solar, the main difference is that the
large utility-scale projects are selling power,” says
Jake Glavin, founder of Woven Energy and execu-
tive director of Midwest Tribal Energy Resources
Association, “whereas with these community-scale
and smaller-scale projects, they’re actually offset-
ting [electricity] purchases.”
So far the Southwest is leading the way. But
even there, where, according to a 2019 report by
the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial
Analysis, a “paradigm shift is at work... develop-
ment of these resources has moved at an almost
glacial pace.” Last year, potentially signaling an up-
tick of interest, the DOE hosted a webinar on de-
veloping utility-scale solar on tribal land.
One tribe looking to enter this space is the Ute
Mountain Ute Tribe, which has land in southeast-
ern Colorado, northern New Mexico, and south-
eastern Utah. After years of falling oil and gas reve-
nue, the tribe a decade ago started looking to boost
their economy—and turned toward solar energy.
Bernadette Cuthair, tribal citizen and director of
planning and development for the Ute Mountain
Ute Tribe, has been leading the charge. Thanks in
part to her work, the tribe received a series of DOE
grants for two small solar projects. “We’re done
considering how to adapt,” says Scott Clow, envi-
ronmental director for the tribe. “We’re all about
action.” The tribe now wants to scale up. They are
searching for investors to break ground on a utility-
scale solar project. It’s a massive jump, but the am-
bition is there. The goal is to develop a 200- to
300-megawatt solar project, says Cuthair. “That
is our appetite.”
△
A GRID Alternatives
tribal job trainee
installs solar for the
Picuris Pueblo tribe
of New Mexico
