Dances with Wind

Rosebud, S.D.—Drive carefully through the Dakotas. You’ll be dodging erratic swallows and butterflies on invisible roads of their own—the massive wind currents that swoop continuously over the rolling prairies of the upper Midwest. What do we make of this wind? Is it merely a meteorological characteristic of the region—like rain in the Northwest or burning sun in the desert? Or is it a means to an eventual and long-overdue end: snuffing out America’s reliance on fossil fuels?

A new wind turbine will be erected near this Sioux Pow Wow site.

To the native people of the Dakotas, harnessing the wind’s power may soon mean more sustainable reservation economies, environmental justice for many tribes across America, and less reliance on fossil fuels for all of us.

According to Bob Gough, secretary for the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (COUP), Native Americans have suffered disproportionately from the effects of conventional energy development. Tribal lands have often been the richest sources of raw materials that supply the oil, gas, coal, and hydropower industries, whose extraction practices leave physical and economic scars on the landscape and its people. Tribes in the Dakotas and in Montana, for example, have had their reservations flooded to create reservoirs that serve dams on the Missouri River, and the changing water levels in the reservoirs now erode tribal cemeteries from the shorelines.

Native American tribes also face unfair power disadvantages. Many reservation homes have no electricity at all, and if it is available—and the locals can afford it—often the poorest tribal communities end up paying a unfair amount of their household income for power. “If you live on an Indian reservation,” says Gough, “you’re ten times more likely to not even have electricity than anywhere else in the country. The wires simply don’t get there.”

The wind that bathes the Dakota prairies may just be an answer to local tribal problems. “Through large-scale wind production, tribes could provide home-grown energy for local reservation use,” says Gough. “We could also develop this clean, renewable energy resource into an opportunity for export, providing much needed jobs and a sustained revenue stream for the reservation. Some of that money could also be used to get some off-grid folks access to electricity. And that’s just one piece of it.”

This northern portion of the Rosebud Sioux reservation shows the rolling countryside and another potential site for wind generation.

On a national scale, wind power can help offset our reliance on oil imports by forcing power plant operators to turn down coal and oil generators when wind forces turbines into full operation. By making these polluting power plants run less often, wind farms create direct environmental benefits, the most important being that less carbon dioxide—the natural byproduct of fossil fuel combustion—is emitted into our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is one of the main gases that contributes directly to global warming. Currently the United States leads the world in carbon dioxide emissions, and some of the utilities in the Great Plains are the highest producers of CO2 per megawatt hour of electricity generated in the nation.

According to the Intertribal COUP, wind resources on only 12 reservations in North and South Dakota could provide over 200,000 megawatts of wind-generated power. Comparatively, the hydropower dams on the main stem of the Missouri River and the coal-fired plants in the region collectively generate a mere 8,000 megawatts of power.

“Learning how best to develop our wind resources has been an ongoing priority of my administration,” says William Kindle, President of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. “We are interested in providing clean energy and economic opportunities for our people,” he says, “but the benefits of reservation wind development also flow downstream, to everyone who lives downwind because they get to breathe cleaner air, without the pollutants that cause acid rain, or mercury poisoning in fish and the rest of the food chain, or that contribute to changing the climate all over the planet.”

NativeEnergy and Clean Air-Cool Planet teamed up to raise awareness
about their partnership with the Rosebud Sioux at the recent Ben &
Jerry’s One World-One Heart Festival in Warren, Vt.

NativeEnergy, a Vermont-based company that brings wind energy to the marketplace, and Clean Air-Cool Planet see wind energy as a win-win-win situation for the tribes, energy purchasers, and the environment. In a partnership together, Clean Air-Cool Planet and NativeEnergy offer a direct way for consumers who can’t purchase clean energy in their neck of the woods to purchase “green tags”—or renewable energy credits—through NativeEnergy’s Windbuilders^sm program. Funds from the sale of the credits will support construction of the first large-scale Native American-owned and operated 750kW turbine in the country, on the Rosebud Reservation. Clean Air-Cool Planet then retires the credits so that companies using fossil fuels can’t buy them to excuse their own pollution.

Wind energy in Vermont is captured
by Green Mountain Power at their
Searsburg facility.

In the simplest terms, buying NativeEnergy’s renewable credits is like buying emissions reductions for homes, factories, and power plants that operate on fossil fuels elsewhere. Individuals and businesses can have the same impact as powering and heating their homes and businesses entirely with wind-generated energy.

“This project is a great example of the added benefits of supporting renewable energy where it has the greatest environmental benefit,” says Tom Boucher, president and CEO of NativeEnergy. “Just one kilowatt of energy produced by wind at Rosebud, which is interconnected with a coal-based system, will produce twice the CO2 reduction that would be realized here in New England.”

The Vermont-based company has worked closely with the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Council since the fall of 2001 to provide financial support for the turbine. Both Rosebud and Intertribal COUP see this relationship with NativeEnergy as a strategic way to initiate more tribal wind development upwind, with the support of many downwind partners who will find this an opportunity to “think locally and act globally”.

Read more at http://www.nativeenergy.com/how-works.html. Or, take a virtual tour of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation.

--Katurah Mackay