[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll learn about energy for Native Americans.

- Renewables alone in Indian country have the potential for almost $5 billion a year in revenues for tribes.

- Yeah, interesting.

- Non-renewables, you've got, you know, 1.5 trillion dollars worth of assets.

And there's this exponential demand from, you know, data center companies, specifically, that the existing utility companies are not prepared to serve.

Tribes can help be a solution to the energy crisis and bring rates down not just for the tribes, but for neighboring communities, entire regions.

- Right.

- Diversification is essential, especially in places like Alaska.

You don't have a choice to be 100% any kind of energy.

You've got to have options.

Several Alaska Native villages are bringing in renewables because the cost of diesel is outrageous.

They're having to fly diesel in, and diesel is over $18 a gallon.

[Scott] Coming up, the benefits, challenges, and surprises of supplying tribal energy.

[Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

There are 548 federally recognized tribes in the U.S.

comprising over 10 million people.

Those on reservations depend mostly on outside utilities for their energy.

Because they're often the last customer on the line without any competitive options, they often get the worst service at the highest prices, but many tribes are working to fix this, building diverse energy projects on tribal lands that could change their future.

I'll talk to two people making it happen.

Cheri Smith is founder and CEO of the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, an energy development nonprofit who comes from Mi'kmaq tribal heritage and a background in the tech industry.

Ken Amman is the chief operating Officer of Colusa Indian Energy.

He's worked for the Colusa tribe for 20 years and now drives their energy development projects for other tribes.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll explore tribal energy.

We're gonna start with a quick lightning round.

What's the Native population in the US today?

- It's almost 10 million.

- Ten million?

- Total.

- Okay, so that's more than the population of some states.

[Ken] Right.

[Scott] Where are they?

- Most concentrated on the Navajo Nation, Arizona, New Mexico-- - Oklahoma.

[Ken] Oklahoma, the Dakotas.

- Dakotas.

- Alaska.

- How many don't have electricity today?

- Fourteen percent of Native families living in the U.S.

don't have electricity today.

A large percentage of them on the Navajo Nation, many in Alaska.

- And this is 10 times the national average.

- Are there other challenges energy-related for tribes?

- Outage rates more than six times higher than the rest of the country.

- Six times higher?

- Right.

- Than the rest of the U.S.

Similar things you've seen, Cheri?

- Energy poverty... - Yeah.

- which can mean lack of access to energy, but also poverty induced by the high costs of energy due to discriminatory practices of utilities and co-ops.

- Yeah.

- Tribes are paying a higher price for poorer quality power, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

- Nope.

- The energy infrastructure in our country was literally built on tribal lands without their consent, and there are 500 kV lines that traverse reservations that don't have access to them.

- What's your ideal end state for tribal nations with energy?

- That every tribe achieves their vision in a self-determined way of what energy sovereignty looks like.

- I like that you said, "their vision."

Well, let's dive in.

Ken, you're not Native.

How'd you get involved with this?

- I was a private developer and helped build over 50 different co-generation microgrids across the country.

- Oh, interesting.

- And so the last one that I helped build was for a small tribe, the Cachil Dehe Band of Wintun Indians, and shortly after commissioning that power plant, the tribe asked if I would consider working for them directly.

The tribe, at that time, was at the mercy of an IOU called PG&E, some of the most expensive electricity in the country.

PG&E was averaging over 50 power interruptions per year to this little reservation.

- Wow, once a week?

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Which isn't uncommon, unfortunately, in Indian country.

Oftentimes tribes are, you know, being served by the last mile of distribution, which is the case here.

This is just an hour north of the capital of California, and suffering this type of outage rate.

And so instead of handing over tens of millions of dollars of the tribe's money to PG&E, the tribe decided to invest in their own energy future and hired me at the time to help build a new co-gen power plant so that the tribe could expand their casino and build a new hotel, and since then, we've expanded this microgrid across the entire reservation.

- Interesting.

- So we've completely evicted PG&E from the tribe's land, and we power completely off grid for 20 years this little Native community, and we've done so with no outages now in over 13 years.

- Co-gen, burning gas, making electricity and heat or steam?

Or what was the-- - Yeah, we're capturing waste heat from generating electricity, and then putting that heat to work.

So if you're just generating electricity from burning gas, it's about 40% efficient.

And so by capturing that waste heat and putting it to work, you can get up over 90% efficiency.

[Scott] Right.

What's the source of gas?

- That is the only outside utility that is still maintained on the entire reservation.

So the gas, it's pipeline gas today.

The tribe purchased all the seismic data in the county, hired a team of geologists, and found that they're actually sitting on their own gas reserves.

So we've got a pending grant application with the DOE to start exploring our own natural gas reserves.

[Scott] That would be awesome.

- Truly sovereign power at that point.

- Very cool.

Cheri, you have some Native heritage, correct?

- My tribe is 29 bands, so they're spread all throughout what was called Mi'kma'ki, which extends from Northern Maine all the way up through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland.

- Oh boy.

- Prince Edward Island, yeah.

- What kind of power generation is used there?

[Cheri] Electricity and propane.

Very expensive, and even with subsidies, it's energy poverty there.

They make $700 a month in government income, and they're spending 75% of it on energy.

- Sure, yeah.

So propane for, they have it for cooking and for heating?

[Cheri] Cooking and heating, and dryers.

- And electricity is off the grid?

- It is.

Outages very common, as Ken said.

They're the first to go out and the last to be turned back on.

Sometimes in the winter, it's several days, if not a week, if there's bad storms before they get power back on, which poses all kinds of problems.

- Why are they last?

- That's the way it is in this country, Dr.

Tinker, unfortunately.

- You have a non-profit you're involved with.

What does it do?

- My organization is the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, and we offer at no cost to tribes, technical assistance, financial assistance, access to capital.

We offer workforce and professional training and development, and we convene events.

We run 100% on philanthropy.

- And you're getting support from foundations?

individuals?

- Foundations.

Both.

- Governments, some or--?

- No government, we don't take any public funding.

- Oh, you don't?

- By design.

We have 37 million in committed funds right now.

And we deploy grants and loans, no interest loans, but grants between 50 and 500,000 to tribes for critical clean energy infrastructural projects and loans for up to a million, and those are recoverable.

If the tribe gets into a situation where they can't repay it, we forgive them.

- Interesting.

You're encouraging, in some ways, kind of a path to commercialization in a sense, or them becoming independent of aid.

- With the savings that is earned through the production of clean energy and the avoided cost to keep those energy dollars circulating in the community instead of going off-res.

- Right, how many different tribes do you support this way or invest in?

- We've worked with well over 100 tribes.

Well, we don't take federal funding.

We have a whole grants team that supports tribes in accessing federal funding.

- Right.

- So last year, we applied for over 800 million in funding for tribes, and we had 480-ish million in successful applications.

- Incredible.

- And so things are different now in this administration.

Our policy team is very active, and our policy team is fighting to preserve those dollars.

- Are you limited in kinds of energy?

You have natural gas, for example, or is it-- - So we're the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy.

- Okay.

- And natural gas doesn't qualify as a clean energy in our donors' eyes.

- Ah.

- And so if the tribe wants to pursue natural gas, that's their sovereign right to do so, and we will connect them with entities that can help them do that, but our donors fund us to help tribes access clean energy technologies.

- So, low emissions?

- Solar and wind, geothermal, run-of-river hydro.

Certain biomass.

And it's what the tribe wants, and we advise, we don't prescribe, we only avast.

- Okay.

Ken, you're working now, Colusa, with other tribes.

You kind of expanded beyond.

Talk about that a bit.

- Yeah, so just a couple of years ago, the tribe started a for-profit enterprise, Colusa Indian Energy.

It's a Section 17, 100% tribally-owned corporation formed as a means of exporting this expertise specifically to any other tribes who might be able to benefit from it, and ultimately act as a firewall between tribes and non-tribal entities interest space.

- What's the source of the funds that helped start all that?

- It was 100% self-funded by the tribe.

- Organic.

- Right.

I pitched the idea to the tribal leadership, and I asked for $20,000 to start this company.

[Cheri laughing] [Scott chuckling] And I had, you know, some business cards made up.

When I went to the Economic Development Board, they gave me a half of a million dollars and said, "I think this is a good idea.

Let's give it a shot, a real shot."

- Okay.

- We've got a few hundred million under contract today.

Our total pipeline of projects has a potential of over 12 billion.

- What all is involved in terms of energy types?

- Any type, yeah.

- Okay.

- So microgrid is really, I mean, depends on who you ask, but our definition is you have onsite generation, onsite distribution to more than one load, right?

And so reservations are really ideal candidates, typically, for microgrid application, because, you know, you've got a lot of loads in a small area, typically.

[Scott] Is it mostly solar, or is it-- - So at our home microgrid at Colusa, we have a natural gas-fired combined heat power plant, but that accounts for about two thirds of the electricity consumption annually on the reservation.

The other third comes from solar PV.

We have battery energy storage, we have a central battery UPS system that has kept the reservation online with no interruptions in over 13 years.

- Really?

- Diesel backup, all underground distribution to casino resort, admin, campus, water treatment plants, all the tribal members' housing, agricultural loads, all electrical loads in the entire reservation are covered by this microgrid.

- Interesting, so a portfolio?

- Right.

- A mix.

- I recommend that tribes' energy portfolios are as diverse as their financial portfolios.

You don't wanna put all your eggs in one basket, obviously.

- That diversification is essential, especially in places like Alaska.

You don't have a choice to be 100% any kind of energy.

You've got to have options.

And so we're working with several Alaska Native villages that are bringing in renewables, because the cost of diesel is outrageous.

They're having to fly diesel in, and I was just there two weeks ago, diesel is over $18 a gallon.

- We've started to talk about 'em, but wind farms, oil and gas, nuclear, are people starting to look at small modular reactors?

What's happening?

- We get the question about nuclear and hydrogen, and we can support green hydrogen, but we refer out the questions about nuclear.

- And this is just 'cause funders have a certain - It's not, yeah, right.

- Perspective on what they wanna see?

- We have to serve our donors' intent.

There are the considerations of the waste.

- Ken, any other kinds of projects, oil and gas, nuclear, that you've seen?

Wind farms, other things?

- Just our company, we're in development with almost 60 different tribes across the country today from Alaska to Long Island, Southern California, and everywhere in between.

And the scale and the types of these projects, it varies drastically, right?

So as small as, you know, a 100 kilowatt, you know, standalone solar PV system up to, you know, multiple gigawatts of gas-fired generation for data centers on reservation, but other than our own projects, there are tribes that are actively exploring bringing SMRs to the reservations.

- Small modular nuclear?

- Right, yeah, not just, obviously, to power themselves-- - Right.

- But to be able to generate some new revenues, right?

- Sure.

So it sounds like a lot of progress is being made, to me, from where you were maybe 20 years ago-- - Oh, absolutely.

- To today, a lot more to go.

How much are tribes dependent on the federal grant funding today?

- Tribes depend on the federal construct by design.

- By federal design?

- By federal design, by colonization design.

- Okay.

- Federal money is essential to building utility-scale projects.

In the Biden administration, through the Investing in America compendium of legislation, there were, you know, 20+ billion dollars made available to tribes for clean energy development.

Now that the federal funding is in jeopardy, we're looking to build the capital stack in different ways.

And combining conventional investment with impact investment with philanthropy, state funding.

- A bit more diverse portfolio?

- Yeah.

- Financial portfolio.

- Yeah.

- So maybe not bad in terms of long-term health, but tough while you're going through-- - It just means, for most tribes, those utility-scale projects that really could allow participation in wholesale energy markets and to bring in consistent streams of revenue, those are further out of reach.

- Yeah, gotcha.

Anything to add to the federal grant side?

And then let me kind of piggyback on that with casino revenues you mentioned before.

- Yeah, sure.

No, federal grant funding is a major pillar of revenues for tribes, like Cheri said, by design.

Most tribes that I've interacted with would like to have to depend less on the feds, but today, yeah, it's still a major source.

Casino revenues, a lot of gaming revenue is concentrated in a small pool of tribes hands.

So less than 5% of all tribes account for over 50% of all gaming revenues-- - Exactly.

- Across the country.

And so oftentimes people will see, you know, these large, you know, skyscraper resorts near a major urban area owned by a tribe and assume that, you know, Native America is doing just fine.

This is the exception in Indian country, not the rule.

- Right.

- And the tribes that have casinos, it's only 20% of them that actually make enough to sustain their tribal operations with that money.

- Interesting.

Could tribal energy projects, like you've described, Ken, help make tribes more financially independent?

Cheri, have you seen some of that happening?

- Absolutely.

Even at small scale, the money that the tribe itself is not spending on energy gets invested in the community for better services, better infrastructure, and so more of that is good.

- Where are we seeing that start to happen?

- All over.

We're working with the tribe in Alaska who is taking their microgrid and connecting it to a city across a strait with a power purchase agreement.

And, you know, so they've dramatically reduced their costs of energy, and their reliability and their resilience, and they're increasing their revenues by selling power.

And that's, you know, it's not for every tribe, but for the tribes that want it, you know, we cheer them on.

That is exactly what we hope to see.

- Add to that?

- Yeah, savings is a big part of it, but that's not the sexy part, right?

We also talk about how to help tribes utilize these new utility backbones to create a new source of revenue.

One is, you know, just sell excess power back to the grid.

Utility companies, you know, they like the monopolies that they've got.

They don't wanna buy your power, but the states will, you know, force them to, in most cases, but they're not gonna pay a lot for that electricity.

So in those cases, we'll go find or try to find a third-party offtaker to pay a little bit higher premium on the power, but really, what we found is, you know, the best way to really capitalize on these energy assets is to bring an energy user to the reservation and sell that power directly.

The biggest case of this would be data center companies, right?

Really trying to piggyback off of this AI revolution, and, you know, gradually have a moment in time here to capture billions of dollars in revenues, you know, before SMRs take over and all these data centers are powered, you know, by the utility company.

- We've been talking about a lot of different things.

What government policies can encourage some of this action?

- Well, we have a whole policy team that works almost around the clock, and at its core, what we look for is equitable policies that support sovereignty.

Tribes are not municipalities, we're sovereign nations, and there are trust and treaty responsibilities that the United States has to uphold.

And so we are here to amplify the voices of the tribes and stand up for policies that are supportive of that self-determined decision making, and a lot of the policies that are coming down in the current administration are especially harmful to that sovereignty equation.

So a recent one, the BIA issued a memo that says that the secretary of the BIA has to review personally every single clean energy application.

That's ridiculous.

[laughs] And it's designed to gunk up the works, and make clean energy projects slower to come to fruition.

So policies hinder the exercise of sovereign control.

- Right.

Could energy projects bring other business opportunities to some of the tribal nations?

- There are lots of other high-energy users that you could attract, manufacturing, for instance.

So another big part of our mission here is to, you know, encourage tribal member workforce development, right?

- Exactly.

- I've stood on reservations where the unemployment rate's over 50%, and nationwide in Native America, the unemployment is more than triple what it is everywhere else.

- Why is that?

- This isn't the lack of will, this is a lack of opportunity, right?

- Right.

- Just aren't any jobs?

- Well, yeah.

I mean, tribes got stuck in the most rural, remote areas, right?

- God-forsaken places.

- Yeah, and so skilled labor, you know, oftentimes has to leave the reservation.

- Right.

- Whether they want to or not.

And so our goal is to try to bring those jobs back.

- The workforce issue is real, and as Ken said, we encourage every project to be built as much as possible by Natives for Natives, but it's complicated.

There are some very large solar farms out there that were built on tribal lands, and during the construction, a hundred or so tribal members were employed.

Afterwards, there's none, and that's just not the way we wanna see things happen.

So we're encouraging other businesses to come and co-locate, and helping to connect tribes with workforce skills providers.

We have a program at ASU called the Tribal Energy Leaders Fellowship Program that's designed to train tribal leaders to be energy leaders.

So professional development, but working with organizations that are tribally led, like Red Cloud Renewables, to train tribal members from around the country to be solar installers, electricians.

- Right.

As you look to the future, what gives you hope, Cheri?

- The tribes, they inspire us every day.

Their resilience, innovation, that spirit where, yep, this is bad, but we don't quit.

We're still here.

We've been here since time immemorial.

That's what inspires us.

[Scott] What gives you hope, Ken?

- Collaboration.

Tribes are learning from one another, how to, you know, go get these resources for their own people, and like you said, I mean, 20 years ago, nobody was talking about this.

- Right.

- So tribal energy sovereignty's become a big buzzword for a reason, right?

The need is significant, the market opportunity is equally great.

- Right.

- And tribes are, yeah, really recognizing that.

- Yes, tribes hold six percent of the land in this country, and much of it is suitable for wind and solar and other renewables, and there's not a lot of land left that can handle utility-scale development, so tribes are really good business partners for that reason and others.

- That's right, yeah.

I mean, renewables alone in Indian country, you know, have the potential for almost five billion dollars a year in revenues for tribes.

- Yeah, interesting.

- Non-renewables, you've got, you know, 1.5 trillion dollars worth of assets.

Tribes can help be a solution to the energy crisis in this country and really help become proponents of public power, help chip away at some of this IOU service territory, bring rates down, not just for the tribes, but for neighboring communities, entire regions, right?

And so I think we're really on the precipice of a revolutionary shift in the way that power is delivered and from who in this country.

- Right, right.

So, our listeners might think of Arizona, and Utah, and New Mexico, but really, across the U.S., there's opportunities for things like this at various scales, for partnerships and-- - Oh yeah.

- Tribal integration.

[Ken] Yeah, absolutely.

- Well, that's really a powerful thought, I think, so, Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Cheri, thank you very much for being with us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Yeah, thanks, Scott.

- Yeah, it's been great to visit, thank you.

- Likewise.

[Scott] As the nation formed, the U.S.

government relegated tribes to remote reservations on poor-quality lands.

Today, those are often at the ends of power lines, leaving tribes to pay high prices for low-quality power with six times the outages as elsewhere in America.

So, many tribes are building their own natural gas co-generation projects along with solar, small hydro, and other lower-emission energies.

They're connecting these to their own microgrids to supply electricity to tribal homes, casinos, and community buildings.

Their goals are more reliable power under their control at lower prices so they can invest the savings in other tribal projects, but the bigger hope is to sell energy to outside customers, or better yet, to bring energy-hungry customers to the reservation, like data centers and manufacturing.

In the process, they hope to train a Native energy workforce that could build projects for outside customers and other tribes with a goal to have their own tribal energy.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, redefining management education to empower transdisciplinary leaders.

Arizona State, The New American University.