Wildfires, strong winds, winter storms and summer heatwaves have caused power outages on Colville Tribal homelands in north-eastern Washington. Those power outages have left people without ways to heat and cool their homes or to store cold food, for days.
So, tribal leaders started looking at ways to keep services going and be more resilient during those times, said Jarred-Micheal Erickson, chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
“There's a lot to this. Keeping gas pumps flowing when the nearest gas station might be 30, 45 minutes away. So, we're just trying to make sure we have that available, and that these systems can help function during those outages,” Erickson said.
To help, Colville tribal leaders pinpointed three spots to build microgrids: at the tribe’s government center in Nespelem, at Paschal Sherman Indian School near Omak and at the Inchelium District. Later, they said they hope to expand to the Keller District.
The tribe is working with microgrid developer Open Access Technology International, or OATI.
“(The microgrids) have the, the smarts and the abilities to be able to operate as its own mini-grid and then be able to reconnect back to the grid when the time comes,” said David Heim, the company’s vice president and chief strategy officer.
The first microgrid is expected to be set up at the tribe’s government center. The plan is to start with rooftop solar panels and solar-paneled parking canopies, backed up with battery power. The tribe received grant funding from the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Tribal Clean Energy grants.
While every microgrid is unique, the technology has proven itself elsewhere, Heim said.
OATI has built microgrids in other disaster-prone areas along the East Coast, “that are able to serve residential communities or critical commercial facilities and can remove themselves from the grid, ride out the storm, ride out the outage, and then reconnect,” Heim said.
In addition, the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians in California built microgrids for their casino. Another project is the Colusa Indian Energy near Sacramento, Calif., said Grant Timentwa, general manager of the Colville Utility Corporation. The Spokane Tribe of Indians has also installed solar panels on buildings and homes.
Those projects helped inspire the Colville Tribe to build microgrids, Timentwa said. However, he said, there will be challenges, like competing costs with cheap Northwest hydropower.
“Anything that you look at has to compare to (the cost of) hydro. Typically, other sources of generation can be more expensive. And what is your resource? We don't have natural gas here,” Timentwa said.
While people might think there’s less sunlight in Washington than California, that doesn’t mean solar power is a bad proposition, Timentwa said.
“As long as it's daylight out, you're still getting something,” he said. “So, I think that's why some tribes have been active in solar, at least for now, on their residential and their businesses buildings.”
Adding solar to already built infrastructure helps keep utility-scale projects from harming traditional cultural spaces, Erickson said.
“It's hard to balance those when it comes to what makes sense for us? Infrastructure is the biggest thing we're looking at to utilize solar,” he said.
The microgrids on the Colville homelands will allow for more growth and the addition of newer technologies, as they develop, Heim said.
More than just providing power during outages, the hope is that these microgrids will help the tribe achieve energy sovereignty — only using power generated on its homelands.
“A lot of the power generated here, we don't see those benefits,” Erickson said, referring to power that gets shipped off to larger cities. “So, we're trying to be creative.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Washington exports the extra power it generates.
If the tribe is able to generate enough energy, he said, it could sell some and use that income to keep costs down for tribal members and elders.
Eventually, the tribe said it could develop microgrids for its casinos and potential data centers, which it envisions would be supported by tribally owned utility and telecom infrastructure.
