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OneWorld.net note: South Dakota's Rosebud Sioux are among the many Native American tribes harnessing wind energy to help ensure their community's economic self-sufficiency.

• Wind power. © Auntie K (Flickr)Wind power projects are not the only environmentally friendly initiatives springing up on Native American lands around the United States. Members of the Lakota tribe in South Dakota are turning to natural materials, such as straw for insulation, and solar energy to build more economical and environmentally friendly homes. The effort also hopes to help solve the community's housing crisis.

• While renewable energy may help Native American communities become self-sufficient, increased economic investment in clean energy sources could also help revive the U.S. economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs across the nation, according to a new study released last week.

Windfall

From: Cultural Survival

By Megan Gray

August 1, 2008 | Cultural Survival Quarterly | Issue 32.2

Around the world indigenous peoples are suffering enormous hardship from climate change, but in the western United States, some Native American tribes are seeing climate change as an opportunity for economic self-sufficiency. Consider the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Reservation in south-central South Dakota, where in 2003 the tribe erected the first Native American owned and operated commercial-utility-scale 750-kilowatt wind turbine project on reservation lands. Producing 2.4 million kilowatt hours per year of renewable, clean electricity (enough to power 240 typical American households), the Rosebud turbine is also connected to the national power grid, offering the tribe the opportunity to sell green power to the federal government at the Ellsworth Air Force Base, and any remaining surplus energy to utility companies.

Although Rosebud was the first reservation to install a commercial wind turbine, it is far from the only one to pursue harnessing the wind. There are wind turbines on the reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation in North Dakota and on land owned by the nonprofit Alaska Village Electric Cooperative in Kasigluk, Alaska. The Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (COUP), a consortium of northern Plains tribes, is promoting tribal wind across some twenty Great Plains reservations which are all connected to the federal hydropower grid. Intertribal COUP was founded to help navigate the complex issues that arise in the emerging native renewable energy markets. With persistent drought conditions in the western United States over the past decade, wind can provide reliable electricity without consuming precious water.

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, a founding member of Intertribal COUP, now plans to install a new 30-megawatt wind plant this year on their reservation, which has an abundance of class 5 and 6 winds (wind power is assigned a class ranging from 1 to 6, with 6 being the windiest). Neighboring Sioux tribes on the Pine Ridge, Yankton and the Flandreau Santee Sioux Reservations are also looking to wind development to provide clean electricity and local employment.

The ultimate goal for renewable energy projects on reservations is "to provide tribes with the opportunity to build sustainable homeland economies based upon renewable energy generation with the sale of clean energy into both federal and private markets," says Bob Gough, secretary of the Intertribal COUP.

"Fossil-fuel extraction costs are heavily subsidized by the taxpayers," says Gough, explaining the importance of wind energy, "and the price of pollution, legislated caps on insurance liability, unproven long-term nuclear-waste storage proposals, and impacts on public health and environmental quality are put on society's collective tab." In addition, federally funded hydroelectric dams built in the mid-20th century rely on rivers that are now running dry. The Western Area Power Administration markets and transmits electricity from federal hydroelectric power plants throughout the United States. It has been coping with a drought-induced 50-percent decrease in hydroelectric power by increasing coal-fired electricity production.

"For our own survival," Gough says, "we need to begin to think about windsheds, not just watersheds. There are abundant untapped resources on American Indian reservations across the Great Plains that can benefit not only the American Indian people but also everyone living downwind along the Great Lakes to New England. Looking just at the northern Great Plains, there is a potential contribution for the equivalent of about one-half the total installed electric capacity for the entire United States. Reservation-based renewable energy is a no-regrets strategy for tribal energy self-sufficiency and for addressing global warming."

In addition to environmental and economic benefits, there is a cultural component to wind power. "For many tribal peoples, the winds are holy, bringing renewal, warmth and strength," writes Intertribal COUP President Pat Spears, a Lower Brule Sioux. "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." The installation of commercial utility-scale wind turbines will also create changes in the traditional landscape of the western tribes. Wind turbines can be as tall as a 25-story office building, and in the flat prairie they can be seen 10 to 20 miles away "in parts of the landscape that might rarely see something taller than a cottonwood or a Ponderosa pine," as Gough describes it.

The initial Rosebud project represented a steep learning curve for tribal energy planners. "We were very conscious," Gough says, "of using the single turbine project to learn as much as we could about the energy industry and regional electrical utility grid system to pave the way for larger projects following this one." Funding was a major factor in the development scheme. The total cost of the project was supported by three major sources: a Department of Energy grant, a loan from the Rural Utility Service, and funding from NativeEnergy, a for-profit company with a majority share owned by the nonprofit Intertribal COUP on behalf of its member tribes.

NativeEnergy brokers renewable energy credits, also known as green tags, to companies that want to offset their carbon emissions. The idea behind green tags is to make the environmental benefits of clean energy a tradable commodity. Fossil-fuel-dependent companies and individuals can purchase the clean energy created by wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal projects to offset their own carbon production. Clients of NativeEnergy who purchase green tags include Ben & Jerry's, Green Mountain Coffee, Aveda, Stoneyfield Farm, and the Dave Matthews Band. Initially capital intensive, projects like the Rosebud wind farm have already proven that they are more than worth the investment: NativeEnergy's portfolio of renewable energy carbon offset programs is outperforming its projections by 115 percent.

Whereas most green-tag brokers sell credits from existing renewable energy projects, NativeEnergy sells credits from the construction of new projects, like the one on the Rosebud Reservation. NativeEnergy's business model matches investors' dollars with start-up, small-scale renewable energy initiatives that would rarely get off the ground without significant initial financial support from outside sources. NativeEnergy pools their investors' money into a lump-sum payment to buy the carbon offsets created by a renewable energy project. "The promise of additional revenue for the renewable energy credits, to be paid up front to the project once it achieved commercial operation, was a valuable component of the overall project financing and helped the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to make the final decision to move ahead," Gough says. "As the project approached completion, it became clear that the payment from NativeEnergy was critical to both the coverage of costs associated with this first turbine and the work that the tribe began for the expansion of wind development on the Rosebud Reservation."

NativeEnergy partners with Native Americans, family farms, and other rural American communities to create local economic growth. The idea is that a sustainable new economy emerges from the installation of renewable energy projects. Portions of the energy produced can be diverted to homes and businesses, and local workers are needed to build and maintain new infrastructure.

The success of the Rosebud project attracted the attention of a local utility company, which made a bid for the surplus energy it produces. The utility is also buying the green tags that will be produced by a new project, the Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm. This is the fulfillment of the dream the Intertribal COUP had at the inception of the Rosebud project: to create a new economic and energy option for native peoples, and to share the model, creating a new market for clean energy.

The Intertribal COUP envisions a lot of growth for reservation communities from the proceeds of carbon trading. Too many people on plains reservations are living in unhealthy and energy-inefficient housing, including FEMA trailers delivered in the wake of a tornado a decade ago. Gough would like to see the construction of ecologically sound structures such as greenhouses for growing produce locally, powered by clean wind energy and providing local jobs. Pat Spears has the same orientation: "The tribes can also 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." He envisions projects such as, "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." As it stands, reservation households are 10 times less likely to be electrified than other U.S. households. A reservation-owned utility running on clean wind power would make a major difference in this statistic. Along the way it could provide an economic boost to isolated communities and help the global environment—and all of it a Native American initiative.

To read more about indigenous peoples' responses to climate change and other pressing issues, visit the Cultural Survival Web site.