Indigenous Energy Independence Beaming From Above

By Jakob O'Donnell

Background

14% of Indigenous households in the United States don’t have access to electricity (Cintron-Rodriquez, 2021).  

The Navajo (Dinè) Nation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah is one of the most extreme examples of this inequality, with some 15,000 families lacking electricity in their homes (Native Renewables, 2022).  

Native communities in the United States have endured centuries of colonialism, and many of the inequalities that persist today, such as lack of electricity, can be tied back to a long legacy of violence, displacement and discrimination (Thomas, 2022, p. 103-107). In the case of the Dinè, delivering power to homes is both difficult and abnormally expensive because the reservation is the size of West Virginia (Cintron-Rodriquez, 2021). To make matters worse, most households collectively earn only $11,000 or less each year, which means that it is almost impossible for individual houses to pay for transmission lines over miles of desert (Cintron-Rodriquez, 2021).  

Enter Wahleah Johns and engineer Suzanne Singer, PhD. They co-founded Native Renewables in 2016 (Thomas, 2022, p. 12). Native Renewables aims to educate people throughout the Dinè and Hopi Nations about solar options and help them obtain, install, and maintain solar arrays for their homes, (Native Renewables, 2022).  

Solar is ideal for situations like the Dinè and Hopi Nations where distances are too vast and the population too sparse for transmission lines to be feasible. Solar power from small on-site arrays like Native Renewables provides a decentralized form of producing power. A big part of solar’s advantage comes from the fact that solar panels can produce electricity with nothing but the sun. The electricity can then be used right away and then be hooked up to batteries to store any excess electricity for later use, (Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (1), 2022). They can also last for up to 30 years (U.S. Energy Information Administration (1), 2022). This compares with other forms of electricity production, like the now decommissioned coal-fired Navajo Generating Station, which requires constant transportation of fuels to the plant and transmission using expensive power lines to places where it’s going to be used, oftentimes far away (Bureau of Reclamation, 2018).   

Renewable energy sources other than solar have issues that make them difficult for the area. For instance, large-scale wind power plants have to be built where wind speeds are ideal (Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (2), 2022). The Dinè and Hopi Nations lie in an area of the Southwest (Northeast Arizona, Southern Utah, and Northwestern New Mexico) with very little wind to generate electricity from (U.S. Energy Information Administration (2), 2022), so they’d have to transmit power from areas off their reservations, which causes problems both in cost and energy sovereignty. Energy sovereignty is “the right of conscious individuals, communities and peoples to make their own decisions on energy generation, distribution and consumption in a way that is appropriate within their ecological, social, economic and cultural circumstances, provided that these do not affect others negatively,” according to Xarxa per la Sobirania Energètica, (Xarxa per la Sobirania Energètica, 2014). 

Therefore, Native Renewable’s approach of helping individual Dinè and Hopi households get their own solar panels takes full advantage of the landscape’s most easily and abundantly available renewable energy source – sunlight – in a way that achieves energy independence for the households that have the solar arrays installed by either Native Renewables, themselves, or through another avenue.  

This independence comes from the fact that solar panels hooked up to individual homes or communities give the power users agency over how electricity is produced and how it’s consumed or sold.  

Systems of producing electricity that rely on fossil fuels require a steady supply of inputs like coal, oil, and natural gas to function. Hence, it makes more sense to have one big plant to transport those materials to and transmit the resulting power to consumers far and wide. The energy sovereignty issue this poses to marginalized communities is so acute that the recently-closed Navajo Generating Station, which was on the Dinè reservation and whose electricity production was made possible with coal mined from Dinè and Hopi lands (Begaye, Cultural Survival, 2010), left thousands of households behind in its majority-Indigenous backyard, even as it provided electricity all the way to California (Bureau of Reclamation, 2018).  

Unlike coal and other fossil fuels, solar is carbon-neutral, which gives it an advantage in addressing climate change. Energy sovereignty efforts that were not climate-conscious have been tried in the past, such as kerosene, a fossil fuel derivative, for lighting and heat in Malawi communities (Harper & Campbell, 2022, 12:00). Not only can non-Indigenous fuel suppliers price gouge for inputs, it also turns a low-climate footprint community into a higher-climate footprint community. Native Renewable’s solution addresses the energy sovereignty issue while bypassing the negative climate effects of past efforts to do the same thing.  

Reasons for Hope

• So far, 46 solar arrays have been installed by Native Renewables in the Dinè and Hopi Nations (Native Renewables, 2022). That’s with a global pandemic and its associated financial downturn smack in the middle of the organization’s 6-year history.  

• Programs like Native Renewables that help with financing, logistics, and education about renewable energy options make these technologies more accessible to Indigenous people who are too poor or remote to afford or install them on their own. 

• Individual photovoltaic systems for homes in the Dinè and Hopi Nations prevent these people from being taken advantage of like they have been in the past by putting them in charge of power production and use.  

• Native Renewables utilizes a zero carbon-emission resource already abundant for free in the Dinè and Hopi Nations that can reach even the remotest of households.  

• Renewable energy for under-electrified, under-served Indigenous communities has a high potential for scalability. Most places throughout the lower 48 U.S. and Hawaii receive enough energy from the sun to be viable for the kind of approach Native Renewables is taking (Note, the area circled in white is the Dinè-Hopi region): 

• Other Indigenous communities, such as the ones in the Great Plains and those with coastal territories, may have access to enough wind power for individual or small wind turbines to provide electricity to homes that currently lack it:

Compare the above maps to the locations of Indigenous reservation lands throughout the U.S. (Note, Hawaii and Alaska have Indigenous peoples but do not have a reservation system):

Insights and Applications

Dinè and Hopi Nations aren’t the only Indigenous communities in the U.S. and elsewhere that lack access to electricity. Decentralized carbon-neutral options like solar are ideal for such communities, even if they lie outside the sunny desert Southwest.  

Communities that have questions about Native Renewable’s approach, or who want to get involved by becoming a partner, can contact them here:  

https://www.nativerenewables.org/who-we-are/contact-us/  

To contribute financially to Native Renewables’ work, you can donate here: https://www.nativerenewables.org/donate/  

If you have skills that may be applicable to this kind of work, such as organizing, fundraising, engineering, or construction, they periodically have job openings that you can keep track of and apply to here: https://www.nativerenewables.org/who-we-are/careers/  

Tags: Energy Sovereignty, Technological Solutions, Resilience.  

Location: Navajo (Dinè) in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and the Hopi Nation in Northeastern Arizona:   

http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=nrf_navajoreservation  

Date: Fall 2022

Location: Navajo Nation, Arizona

Tags: Community Action

References

Bashnet, Neetish. (Nov. 19, 2021). 15,000 Native American families live without electricity. How can solar power help? Arizona Republic. Retrieved from: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2021/11/19/solar- 

         power-hopi-navajo-families-without-electricity/6332631001/   

John, St., Jeff. (Oct. 10, 2022). With renewables, Native communities chart a path forward to energy sovereignty. Canary Media. Retrieved from https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-equity/power-by-the-people- 

        Native-energy-sovereignty  

Peart, N. (Sept. 6, 2021). How Indigenous Communities Build Energy Sovereignty. Greenbiz. Retrieved from https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-indigenous-communities-build-energy-sovereignty  

Works cited:  

Begaye, E. (May 7, 2010). The Black Mesa controversy. Cultural Survival. Retrieved from https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/black-mesa-controversy  

Bureau of Reclamation. (2018). Navajo generating station: Update. Bureau of Reclamation. Retrieved from https://www.usbr.gov/ngs/  

Cintron-Rodriquez, I.M. (Oct. 8, 2021). Energy transition on Tribal Nations: From energy insecurity to energy sovereignty. Outrider. Retrieved from https://outrider.org/climate-change/articles/energy-transition-tribal-nations-energy-insecurity-energy-sovereignty#:~:text=Despite%20the%20ample%20resource%20potential,households%20lack%20access%20to%20electricity. 

Harper, M.J. and Campbell, F.H.. (2022, June 22). The energy to transform communities [audio podcast episode]. In Decolonizing Power. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-energy-to-transform-communities/id1568793236?i=1000567385602 

Native Renewables. (2022). Native renewables website. NativeRenewables.Org. Retrieved from https://www.nativerenewables.org/who-we-are/  

Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (1). (2022). Solar Integration: Solar Energy and Storage Basics. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Retrieved from https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-integration-solar-energy-and-storage-basics  

Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (2). (2022). Advantages and challenges of wind energy. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Retrieved from https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/advantages-and-challenges-wind-energy  

Thomas, Leah. (2022). The intersectional environmentalist (Kindle Edition). Little, Brown and Company, p. 12, 103-107.  

U.S. Energy Information Administration (1). (2022). Solar explained: Where solar is found and used. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Retrieved from https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-found.php  

U.S. Energy Information Administration (2). (2022). Wind explained: Where wind power is harnessed. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Retrieved from  https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is-harnessed.php  

Xarxa per la Sobirania Energètica. (Summer 2014). Defining energy sovereignty. El Ecologista, Ecologistas en Acción Magazine. Retrieved from https://odg.cat/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/energy_sovereignty_0.pdf