Harnessing the Saudi Arabia of Wind
The Rosebud Sioux Bring Renewable Energy to the Dakotas
“The wind is a blessing. Harnessing this gift can benefit our people, help reduce the impact of global warming, and provide economic restoration. I’ve never seen a situation quite like it. It’s win-win-win.”
— Patrick Spears, President, Intertribal COUP
As signs of global warming become increasingly dramatic, concerns are growing about how to arrive at the clean energy future. While governments and industry drag their feet on big picture solutions, some communities are taking action at the local level to develop their own response. In the Great Plains alone, wind energy potential could provide as much as 75 percent of the electricity needs of the continental United States. The Rosebud Sioux tribe of south-central South Dakota has taken a huge leap in harnessing this potential, constructing the first Native-owned wind turbine on reservation land. In so doing, the tribe has carved a path to self-sufficiency for the Lakota people and a route for others to follow.
So the story goes, an elder from a southwest Pueblo visiting the Rosebud Sioux tribe asked, “Say, all your animals up here kind of lean over to one side. Do they fall over when the wind stops?” The Sioux answered, “We don’t know. It never stops blowing.”
The constant wind through the Rosebud reservation carries ancestral voices of warriors like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and the ancient traditions of a way of life that lived in harmony with nature. Roaming buffalo, big sky, and open prairies are still there, but they are only part of the picture. Casinos, ruthless winters with temperatures dipping 30 degrees below zero, wrenching poverty, a multitude of health concerns, and an average wind of 18 miles per hour are another part of the story.
For Native Americans living on the reservation, life is a daily challenge. Work is in short supply. Casinos, ranching, and the reservation school system provide the bulk of the available jobs, but most of them are low paying. The farming season is brief, which means healthful food is hard to come by or must be trucked in—an expensive luxury in a community where families often share cramped houses, as many as seven to a bedroom.
While South Dakota, the state that surrounds the Rosebud reservation, boasts the lowest unemployment rate in the United States at 3.6 percent (the U.S. average is 6 percent), on the reservation unemployment is a staggering 34 percent, according to official U.S. figures.1 Tribal officials say the figure is closer to 80 percent. Tony Rogers, director of the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Utilities Commission (RSTUC), says mistrust and fear are at the heart of this discrepancy between U.S. and tribal unemployment figures. “Unemployment on the reservation is high, it’s close to 90 percent, but the U.S. figures come from the census,” Rogers said. “Our people don’t always answer the door. Many are afraid of talking to U.S. government folks.”
Sioux leaders say the pervasive poverty, fear and mistrust on the reservation goes back at least to 1944, when the U.S. government decided to dam the Missouri River, forcing most Plains Indians to relocate away from the river basin. The Flood Control Act authorized six dams to be built along the once-mighty Missouri River. The last dam was built in 1963. For the Great Plains tribes, the river was the source of life. They depended on it for fishing, hunting, and farming; all their subsistence needs centered on the river. When the dams went up, the Sioux members were relocated to less-hospitable lands with poor soil, poor water delivery, and harsher weather.
As Patrick Spears, president of Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (Intertribal COUP), a consortium of 12 Plains tribes working to bring lucrative, green power to reservations, told us: “The flooding of the Missouri River was the second most destructive blow to our basin people since the killing of the buffalo.” He should know. Spears was 13 years old when the river where his grandfather took him hunting and fishing was flooded. In a curiously matter-of-fact tone, Spears said, “It’s a serious emotional issue for us. We’ve been flooded, and moved. The animals had to move and we lost our best timber-lands. … That was our land, our way of life … We were giving up our land for the public good, for the rest of America.”
Most of the people moved to new, poorly planned communities on the reservation, but many moved away to find work. During the relocation process, the U.S. government tried to move Native peoples to more urban areas. The adjustment was tough: the Sioux struggled with challenges of racism and bigotry. Many languished in ghettos, unable to transition to the urban setting.
Unhappy in the cities, the Sioux returned to the reservation, despite the poverty and harsh conditions. According to Spears, “Over 90 percent live in a different community now: clustered housing, no jobs, no food, little garden space, no topsoil like we had on the river. It wasn’t our choice to move, but we’re doing the best with what remains. … They come back, despite the poverty, because these are our homelands.”
Another challenge facing the Sioux was the difficulty of providing its people with one of the basics of modern living: electricity. Some 5 percent of reservation inhabitants live without electricity, nearly quadruple the U.S. national percentage.2
In the 1990s, the federal housing officials introduced a well-intentioned energy-saving measure, retrofitting reservation homes with vapor-barriers that retained heat. But the barriers also trapped moisture inside, exacerbating a persistent mold problem that now affects 75 percent of reservation houses. Mushrooms have sprouted in the dark corners of some homes.
Throughout these travails, the wind kept blowing as always. Then one day something new could be heard on the breeze—the promise of a clean energy future, and a fresh hope for tribal prosperity and self-reliance. In the late 1980s, while searching for a low-cost energy source, the Rosebud Sioux learned that the wind on their reservation alone could potentially meet one-twelfth of U.S. energy needs. “Our jaws dropped,” Robert Gough, secretary of Intertribal COUP told Fortune Small Business.3
Despite a lack of experience of any kind in wind technology or energy policy, the tribe determined to harness what people were calling “the Saudi Arabia of wind”—the tri-state area of North and South Dakota and Nebraska.
Without funding or experience with wind-energy technology, the tribe succeeded in erecting the first Native-owned and operated wind turbine on reservation land. Through hard work and tribal unity, the Rosebud Sioux have distinguished themselves as enterprising leaders on the razor edge of eco-energy technology. They have shown how communities can take advantage of their unique local resources to bolster their economic self-sufficiency.
By choosing a green solution that honors their spiritual beliefs of living in balance with nature, the Rosebud Sioux have also contributed to addressing the U.S. energy challenge and the threat of global warming. Their success has inspired tribes throughout the wind belt to take power into their own hands. Perhaps most importantly, the success of the turbine has restored some of the trust that the community lost during generations of abuse and oppression.
It is difficult to overestimate the potential for wind energy. Wind power is the cleanest of all the energy resources, and like solar power, it will never disappear. It does not pollute or require painful extraction methods such as mountaintop removal for coal or superheating the earth for oil. Wind power does not even require dedicated land—cattle and buffalo can graze and farmers can till around relatively unobtrusive wind towers.
Wind energy is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, and is the fastest growing energy technology in the country. According to the American Wind Energy Association, worldwide wind-generating capacity increased by 27 percent in 2006, continuing a trend of speedy growth in recent years. More than 90 percent of that capacity was installed in the United States and Europe. In 2004 alone, installed capacity of windmills increased 36 percent—enough to light the city of Detroit. Yet despite the ready availability of wind and the industry’s technological advances, less than 1 percent of total electricity in this country is currently generated from wind.
U.S. reliance on dirty electricity-generation methods—such as the burning of oil, gas, and coal—is often defended by industry proponents as a matter of cost savings. They point out that a switch would require a burdensome infrastructure investment in higher-priced, clean energy sources, such as wind and solar. But costs for wind energy are dropping with each investment. The definition of “cheaper” is called into question by about $6 billion a year of federal subsidies for dirty energy.4
The fossil fuel companies are quite satisfied with the status quo. According to the 2006 Fortune 500 ranking of America’s Largest Corporations, six of the top ten earners were oil and energy corporations or auto makers, including ExxonMobil, General Motors, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, ConocoPhillips, and General Electric. Only the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart (which came in at number two) broke the fossil-fuel industry’s sweep of all top seven spots.
Yet as corporate profits have soared, so too have consumer energy costs. Between late January and early March 2007 alone, the price of gas at the pump increased 60 cents per gallon. Home heating costs surged an estimated 62 percent between 2003 and 2006, with more increases predicted.
While corporate executives blame war abroad and a lack of refinery capacity at home for increased oil costs, clearly those factors are not hampering shareholder’s profits. Our government, rather than investing in a renewable infrastructure, is subsidizing major “external” costs of the fossil fuel model. For example, the expensive war in Iraq and major U.S. military bases throughout the Middle East are not reflected in the prices we pay at the gas pump. Not included in the cost of our home-heating oil or electricity is the price we pay for air pollution and its attendant health problems. Were such externalities factored into the true cost of our addiction to fossil fuels, the price of developing wind technology—already competitive—would be far lower than traditional sources of energy. And of course, wind and solar are clean, and do not contribute to global warming, which, as Hurricane Katrina proved, has huge costs. As Native American leader and environmental activist Winona LaDuke has written, the wind potential on Native American lands is “enough to reduce output from coal plants by 30 percent and reduce our electricity-based global warming pollution by 25 percent.”5
For the Rosebud Sioux, wind power offered the possibility of creating self-sustaining economic assets, and also fit with the environmental values and cultural spirit of the tribe. Spears told us, “The four winds have great significance for Native peoples. For Lakota people, they are prominent in our ceremonies, and in recognition of the powers of the great spirit.”
As Tony Rogers—and everyone involved with the wind turbine—will tell you, the inspiration for the turbine came from the late Alex “Little Soldier” Lunderman. Trained as a public defender, Lunderman was vice president of the Rosebud tribe, and twice served as president of the Rosebud Utilities Council, including between 1991-1993, when the utilities code was passed, green-lighting the turbine. “It was his vision. He believed that we could use modern technology and nature’s resources in a way that was compatible with our values,” Rogers said. “It was his vision that we could break down barriers. We ran into many, including from our own people.”
Strange, perhaps, to those unfamiliar with the shared experiences of Native peoples, but the biggest barrier was internal. Despite a range of technological and financial obstacles, the highest hurdle was the pervasive fear and mistrust among the Sioux. Rogers told us, “When you lose a war, like the Indian wars, and the people are put on reservations—they were like prison camps, initially—well, it has taken generations for people to trust. Some thought maybe by creating our own energy we would be making trouble with the local electric cooperative, that maybe they would disconnect their service.”
It required countless meetings and conversations to overcome tribal apprehensions. Even then, there was a long way to go. The tribe had no background in the field of wind energy. They had no energy economists, nor did they have the capital needed for the building of a wind turbine.
Despite never having worked in the industry, and not having a specialized degree, Tony Rogers was tasked with heading up the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Utilities Commission. To many non-Native peoples, it would seem natural for the tribe to look outside the reservation for leadership on the project. But the Rosebud had a commitment to investing in their own people. The decision to put someone with no expert knowledge in charge of such a project would be unthinkable to many, but it was part of a larger vision of tribal self-sufficiency.
Tribal attorney Bob Gough assisted in the development of the Rosebud Tribal Utility Commission, serving as the first acting director, a temporary position because he was not a tribal member. After seating the initial commission and raising funds, he stayed on as a consultant. Spears was also hired by the RSTUC to assist with the wind turbine project. Gough and Spears contracted with the NREL Wind Technology Center to provide assistance.
“If you had asked me in 1996 how to do this, I’d say, ‘I’ll get back to you,’” Rogers said with a laugh. “We had to teach ourselves. The elders told us to be patient, to bring back the knowledge and teach us. I had some good teachers. There was one good, good gentleman, Dale Osborne out of Denver; he just wanted to help us. That is how we learned.”
Dale Osborne was indeed a well-qualified teacher. He is widely credited with leading the U.S. wind industry from its infancy in the 1980s, when it was just a handful of small firms, to its more robust and technologically advanced state today. After years as an industry executive, he now runs a small wind firm, DISGEN, which enabled him to work with the tribe and help them achieve their goals. As Osborne told an interviewer with the Department of Energy (DOE):
Many Native Americans residing on reservations live in conditions that would not be tolerated anywhere else in the United States. My belief is that developing wind energy represents the greatest economic development opportunity … for rural America in my lifetime. Indian reservations are as rural as it gets. So, if we can determine how to develop wind projects on tribal lands and create the maximum economic benefits for tribes and their members, then new jobs and revenues from sales of power will help tribes to manage other, almost overwhelming, issues in their lives.6
The tribe spent the next two years researching what was needed, and consulting among themselves how they would organize the momentous tasks before them. By 1995 they had installed an anemometer to collect wind data. Many couldn’t even pronounce it then, much less understand its readings. Testing determined the most beneficial places on the reservation and the exact height that would capture the most continuous wind. As Rogers recalled, the anemometer was up for two years collecting data. “Eighteen miles per hour,” he told us was the average. “That’s a class five resource. Excellent!”
Financing would prove the most difficult task. The cost of erecting the turbine was more than $1 million and the tribe was insistent that control remain in their hands. “We had to find our own funding, which came from a few places. We got a cooperative grant, a 50-50 grant, we had to match it,” Rogers said. “We had to show the Rural Utility Services that it was feasible overall. It was understood that this was a private project; they were used to working with electrical cooperatives. We had a lot of people to convince.”
To gain the trust of possible investors, Rogers and his tribal colleagues were engaged in constant discussions. There were a dozen agencies to contend with, hundreds of bureaucratic hurdles and countless meetings.
In the end, the funding came from a variety of sources, including a grant from the DOE in 1998 and a loan from the U.S. Rural Utility Service. The tribe’s first customer, Ellsworth Air Force Base, bought five years’ worth of the turbine’s capacity up front. This was enough to break ground on the project in 2001. But perhaps the most critical support came from a partnership with a one-year-old alternative energy company, NativeEnergy.
What NativeEnergy brought to the table was a bold marketing plan that would ensure tribal autonomy over the commercial turbine by raising $250,000 of the capital needed through the sale of “Green Tags,” otherwise known as renewable energy credits. Intertribal COUP was also involved in the hunt for resources for the turbine. As Spears recalled, “We were looking at other Green Tags out there, and found NativeEnergy. We asked them, ‘Are you Native?’ They said, ‘No, we meant “native” as in “homegrown”.’ We said, ‘Good. We like that. How do you do that?’”
NativeEnergy markets Green Tags to the general public through its website, usually selling the carbon offsets in relatively small numbers. Financing the Rosebud project would require a larger effort. So NativeEnergy bought the remaining Green Tags up front, and then sold them to green-friendly companies, including Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farms, and the Dave Matthews Band. What was in it for businesses such as Ben & Jerry’s? As the company’s natural resources manager Andrea Asch told Fortune Small Business, “It solidified what our brand stands for and why people buy our product. The investment comes back fourfold in recognition.”7
It wasn’t just the green enterprisers that stepped forward. Turner Network Television—which was filming a movie on Lakota lands called Into the West—also wanted to green its practices. TNT bought enough Green Tags to offset the CO2 emissions for the movie’s premiere, offsetting more than 175 tons of greenhouse gasses and highlighting the turbine project and the Green Tags while touting its own green practices. More than 1,000 individuals also purchased Green Tags that would ultimately finance the Rosebud turbine.
The plan was a win-win for all involved, as the funding enabled the project to make it to the finish line. In February 2005—after an eight-year process—a 190-foot, 750-kilowatt, commercial turbine was installed, enough to power 220 homes. It is named “Little Soldier” in honor of Alex Lunderman, who passed away in 1999, but whose vision of the tribe blending technology with ecological balance inspired the process.
The turbine supplies power to the Rosebud casino, but the windmill’s output is more than the casino can use, so it is also connected to the local grid, run by Basin Electric Power Cooperative. Basin Electric, which services the Rosebud reservation and surrounding communities, was the country’s most polluting utility, according to a recent report by a national coalition of environmental groups. Now, some of that dirty energy has been replaced with Rosebud’s clean wind energy. Looking toward the future, over the next 25 years this single windmill will eliminate 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide, comparable to the emissions from 8,300 cars during that same time.8
Feeling bad about climate change, greenhouse gases, and your own ecological footprint? A single round-trip, cross-country flight emits 8,160 pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The average U.S. household creates 35,000 pounds of CO2 and other pollutants each year. Unlike power generated from fossil fuels, renewable energy sources such as wind or solar do not contribute to global warming. So every time conventional power is replaced with renewable resources anywhere in the world, the overall effect is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But renewable energy is not yet available in every electricity market, leaving some consumers with no option other than traditional dirty energy to meet their needs. Green Tags offer a solution.
Green Tags are a way for purchasers with no access to clean energy to off-set the climate change caused by their daily energy consumption. This is done by paying a little more—through a Green Tag purchase—for someone else to switch to clean energy where it is available. For every Green Tag purchased, a set amount of energy that would have come from a polluting source is instead generated from a renewable “green” source. Or the Green Tag can be used to erect new wind turbines, as Native Energy promotes, thus creating new sources of green energy for the future. It does not matter to the atmosphere where the Green Tags are purchased or where emissions are generated—therefore a Green Tag purchased in Oregon results in an overall reduction in emissions, even if the Green Tag is applied in South Dakota.
If the Rosebud turbine story ended here, it would be a great victory. But the story continues, and the success grows. “What it has done—we’ve been able to show other tribes how we did this. We ended up owning this 100 percent,” Rogers said.
In 2007, construction began on a 30-megawatt wind farm on the Rosebud reservation with as many as 18 “Little Soldiers.” Two other nearby sites are being examined for similar wind farms. Rogers said, “We are talking to other wind developers, and we’re hoping to produce 50 megawatts by 2010, right here on the Rosebud.” As Spears explained, a single megawatt is enough to power 250 homes, or one average energy-intensive Wal-Mart.
The project has created several spin-offs for the Rosebud that will increase tribal income and job opportunities in the field of energy conservation. In cooperation with the local housing authority, Intertribal COUP, the Lakota Solar Enterprise, and other agencies and partners, a special single-family solar home has been built on the reservation. “Little Thunder,” as it is called, is a model energy-efficiency project, with a real family living inside. Through a series of innovations—including solar heat panels, a wood burning stove, a family-sized windmill and 13 trees for windbreaks and shade—the goal, according to Rogers, is to “see if we can get the cost of energy to zero.” If successful, this will be a new area of green enterprise for the tribe that will also improve conditions on the reservation. Yet the real excitement remains in the wind sector. As Spears told us: “We’re well-positioned to develop this resource and provide power to the rest of the region. With help from our treaty partners, we can move it to urban areas where growth is anticipated. We can reduce the number of coal plants that are being planned. If we can do this, grandmother Earth gets the benefits, and all the ecosystems and humans too.”
The damming of the Missouri river that forced tens of thousands of Native Americans to move was supposed to provide a lifetime of hydropower for the region, but that promise is evaporating. Persistent droughts and low water flows—perhaps related to climate change—have reduced electricity generation, requiring more electricity generated from fossil fuels. When the river is so low it can’t produce energy, the regional power authority has a contract to buy fossil fuel energy from other utilities, usually at peak rates.
“We’ve been witnessing reduced water levels on the Missouri River for the last 15 years,” Spears said. “Reduced water, global warming, and a seven-year drought. Some say it’s a cycle. Yes, it’s the beginning of a new cycle, but one like you’ve never seen before. Everything is happening at the wrong times. It’s confusing to the animals when creation is out of balance.”
The irony that climate change begets more climate change is not lost on Spears. “It’s definitely a negative-feedback cycle,” he said. “We’ve got to do something.” And Intertribal COUP is positioning itself to do just that. They think the government should be buying wind power to replace (and to conserve) the diminishing water source, which they point out would also save money. The existing utility contracts, however, are set in place. But the Sioux believe that after all they have accomplished so far, there are ways to work around that obstacle too. “It is a cultural and spiritual issue for us, that is what drives us to pursue this despite the barriers,” Spears said.
As the centerpiece of its tribal empowerment strategy, Intertribal COUP purchased a controlling interest in NativeEnergy in 2005, making it truly Native—as in Native-owned. The Green Tags will help support new reservation energy development, and it means the Native nations will not have to rely on federal government grants or loans in the future.
According to both Spears and Rogers, tribes throughout the United States are now examining wind energy. Tribes located in regions where wind generation is not a promising option are looking to adapt the model to fit their situations—for example, by exploring the potential of solar power.
Tribal self-sufficiency means more than just creating some long-overdue economic justice; it promises environmental justice too. Harnessing the wind could mean that the old ways of compromising values for an infusion of capital are gone. No more allowing corporations or the government to use tribal lands for uranium or coal mining, or industrial hog farming. And it isn’t just tribes that are looking at the model. Municipal utility districts around the country are looking at wind energy and learning from the Rosebud experience. More than just a catchy lyric, it appears that for Native Americans, and perhaps for everyone else, the answer really is blowing in the wind.