Tribal Lands are rich with solar potential.
Indian Country represents approximately 2% of the U.S. landmass, but more than 5% of solar PV potential in the United States. Despite the significant potential of solar PV development on Tribal lands, only a handful of large-scale projects have been installed.
Regulatory hurdles are preventing Tribes from achieving their solar generation potential.
American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native Villages are, by definition, sovereign nations and are not subject to state or local jurisdiction. While tribes are sovereign, the electric utilities that serve them are not. The utilities are most often subject to state oversight, and their interconnection policies and regulations are designed for non-tribal entities. This barrier, along with other regulatory hurdles, have hampered the rapid adoption of solar technologies in Indian Country.
NREL and MTERA have partnered to address regulatory barriers to Tribal solar adoption.
In 2020, MTERA kicked off a 3-year project with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO).
The goal of the project is to articulate key barriers to Tribal solar and Tribal solar-plus-storage adoption at all scales and to ready stakeholders to implement options to address these challenges.
The project supports the growth of emerging Tribal solar markets by increasing institutional capacity and developing frameworks, trainings, and a technical document repository for Tribes, regulatory bodies, and electric utilities.
We will accomplish this using a two-pronged approach:
Identify barriers and develop materials to address those barriers; use input from all three stakeholder groups (regulators, utilities, and tribes) to develop solutions that will be documented in a set of guidebooks.
Build capacity for addressing these barriers within and among the three stakeholder groups. This capacity is built through stakeholder participation in working groups, in person and online, throughout the project.
This three-year project involves:
Stakeholder engagement in the form of a questionnaire at the project start, midpoint, and end, to inform project topics and to evaluate changes throughout the project;
A set of virtual listening sessions in the first year to identify barriers and potential solutions;
The development of project training and guidance materials in the second year, including virtual and in-person sessions to gather stakeholder perspectives;
The deployment of these materials in a series of workshops and events in the third year to guide stakeholders in the use of the guidebooks in their contexts; and
Sending final project materials to all participants and making them available after the project period through NREL and MTERA.
Expected outcomes:
In the environments in which state regulators and utilities are well positioned to develop permanent solutions to the challenges addressed, the project team expects that elements of the guidebook may be incorporated into the codified policy framework for solar and solar + storage.
In contexts where a permanent solution is less likely, the project team expects the guidebook to serve as a starting point and guide for discussions between tribes and utilities, and in some cases state regulators, to reduce barriers to solar deployment. An important aspect of capacity building in this project is to build trusted relationships among stakeholders.
We appreciate your input.
Your participation is critical to the success of this project. Please click the button below to learn about how to participate: