Minnesota tribal nations have legal sovereignty. They want energy sovereignty.

Native Sun Media
Oct 16, 2025
8 min read

October 16, 20258:00 am

Still, the work goes on: Bob Blake, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and owner of a Minneapolis energy development company, helped secure a pre-Trump federal grant to set up a “tribal virtual utility” on the Red Lake Reservation in far northern Minnesota. He retained a blue-chip “tax and assurance firm” to lay the legal groundwork for a new electric provider in a strictly regulated state where utility territories are set more or less in stone. The utility would purchase cheap, renewable power and deliver it to customers without spending huge sums on its own power plants.

The effort by Minnesota’s Indigenous communities to achieve energy sovereignty is gathering pace.

In the shadow of Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island nuclear power plant, the Prairie Island Indian Community now generates much of its electricity from onsite solar installations.

Near the headwaters of the Mississippi, the White Earth Nation oversees one of the country’s only tribal utility commissions, giving it real leverage over local, non-Native utilities.

The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe is arguably the most important customer of — and a key decision-making authority for — Minnesota’s third biggest rural electric cooperative.

The tribes seeking energy sovereignty face a stiff challenge, however, in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back clean energy progress, as well as the White House’s apparent disregard for Indigenous communities.

Still, the work goes on: Bob Blake, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and owner of a Minneapolis energy development company, helped secure a pre-Trump federal grant to set up a “tribal virtual utility” on the Red Lake Reservation in far northern Minnesota. He retained a blue-chip “tax and assurance firm” to lay the legal groundwork for a new electric provider in a strictly regulated state where utility territories are set more or less in stone. The utility would purchase cheap, renewable power and deliver it to customers without spending huge sums on its own power plants.

The long-term goal is something resembling Yakama Power, a tribal utility that steadily absorbed small electric co-ops over the past two decades and now serves thousands of people across rural Washington State. There’s no reason the Minnesota utility couldn’t serve multiple tribal nations across the state and perhaps beyond, Blake said in an interview.

“What I eventually see is tribal nations coming together, forming their own electrical associations and then selling power on the grid like the big guys,” he said.

Eventually. The virtual utility idea is on hold due in part to the Trump administration’s cut of $7 billion in funding for the Biden-era Solar For All program, which subsidizes renewable energy deployment in low-income and historically marginalized communities. As litigation drags on, Blake said up to $80 million in funding that could have gone to Red Lake is in limbo.

Workers install a ground source heat pump system at Treasure Island Resort & Casino. (Photo courtesy Prairie Island Indian Community)

“We have a lot of time to plan now,” he said. “These opportunities will present themselves again and we will be that much more ready to move forward when they do.”

Rural utilities come around

Minnesota tribes aren’t waiting on Blake’s ambitious vision to reshape the state’s energy landscape.

In 2022, as Enbridge routed its controversial Line 3 oil pipeline near its reservation, the White Earth Nation stood up a tribal utility commission with the ability to set rates, permit infrastructure and issue legally binding orders to the electric, gas and telecommunications utilities serving its 1,100 square-mile territory. It’s among the few commissions like it nationwide.

“The community came out and said, ‘We want to be in control if that happens again, that anyone who wants to build infrastructure through our reservation needs to get a permit for it,’” Nate Matthews, the commission’s executive director, said on the panel at the recent Minnesota Solar Energy Industries Association’s annual conference. He sat alongside Matt Dannenberg, head of tribal affairs for the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy.

The tribal utility commission also gives White Earth more pull with the four retail electric utilities serving its members in northwestern Minnesota. Rates can vary wildly across relatively short distances on the reservation, Matthews said, leaving some members wondering why they pay twice as much for electricity as their neighbors. The commission recently wrapped up work on a net metering policy requiring the utilities to compensate members fairly for electricity produced by solar arrays and other small, customer-sited power sources.

Also under the commission’s jurisdiction are larger power projects that will give White Earth some measure of energy independence.

The tribe is nearing construction of a $2.8 million solar array that Matthews said could supply two-thirds of the power consumed by its Shooting Star Casino in Bagley, Minnesota. Though it promises to eat into regional transmission co-op Minnkota Power’s sales, Matthews said the utility indicated they won’t push back on the project.

White Earth began construction this year on a smaller but more complicated “resilience hub” at an elementary school and community center in the village of Pine Point. That project — developed by locally owned 8th Fire Solar and 10Power out of California — expands a small existing solar array and adds enough batteries to power critical loads at the facilities for up to 12 hours. It’s engineered as a self-contained microgrid that can disconnect from the public grid during outages.

Resilience is a common goal in tribal communities, said Gwe Gasco, director of sales and marketing for 8th Fire Solar. 8th Fire’s core business is producing and installing solar thermal panels that — unlike more common solar photovoltaic panels — convert the sun’s energy directly into heat.

Solar thermal systems can’t entirely replace gas, propane, or electric building heat, but they can significantly reduce winter heating loads and cut users’ energy bills, Gasco said. One or two panels is enough for most residential and small commercial sites. Though 8th Fire can handle larger projects like an eight-panel installation at a planned Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe resilience hub in South Dakota, Gasco said much of its business comes from people looking to wrest some control over their energy bills back from utilities.

“People are getting fed up with what’s going on…they’re realizing they can do a lot of this stuff ourselves,” he said.

Like Minnkota in Bagley, Matthews said the regional transmission utility for Pine Point, Great River Energy, is on board with that project. So is Itasca-Mantrap Cooperative Electric Association, which operates the lower-voltage distribution network serving individual customers in the area.

“The new leadership and younger folks at Great River Energy…instead of closing the drawbridge, they’ve been really excited to work with us on this,” he said.

Steve Johnson, Itasca-Mantrap president and CEO, said in an email that the scale of the Pine Point project — which he called “an inspiring, community-driven effort” — required careful study before getting the go-ahead to connect to the grid. But he suggested the utility and the tribe are aligned on energy strategy in their remote corner of Minnesota.

“We understand the deep challenges facing rural communities, from rising energy costs to increasingly frequent and severe storms, and we share the goal of building a stronger, more resilient, and equitable energy future,” he said.

Matthews said the utility commission is considering a utility franchise fee that could fund future projects like Pine Point and Shooting Star, plus service line extensions, hookup fees and other costs normally borne by customers.

Dannenberg, a member of Wisconsin’s Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, said that the White Earth Tribal Utility Commission’s work puts it on the leading edge of the Indigenous energy sovereignty movement in the United States. He characterized it as a small step “to right the historical injustices” of a power system that has treated tribes as an afterthought.

“This is recent history where tribes are asserting their sovereignty in the energy space…saying, we’re fed up with blackouts, brownouts and not getting the energy services we deserve,” he said.

Big enough to matter

With its self-generation and resilience projects, White Earth Nation is following a path blazed by Minnesota Indigenous communities like the Mille Lacs Band and Prairie Island Indian Community.

In 2022, the Mille Lacs Band commissioned a 3-megawatt solar array in Hinckley. The system ties into the East Central Energy grid but offsets a substantial amount of electric demand from the tribe, which runs Grand Casino Mille Lacs and Grand Casino Hinckley.

The tribe’s initial vision “turned out to be beyond the scope of what was possible from an engineering standpoint. We said, ‘Let’s put away the legal stuff and diagrams and tell us what you want,” said Justin Jahnz, ECE president and CEO.

That turned out to be pretty simple: a sizable solar system that reduced the tribe’s carbon footprint and gave it some energy independence. As the partnership deepened, ECE invested in grid resilience efforts that would directly benefit the tribe, further boosting its energy independence. Mille Lacs has long been part of ECE’s member resource council, Jahnz said, in recognition of their importance as a major customer.

The Prairie Island Indian Community and Dakota Electric Association — the state’s second largest electric distribution cooperative — have a similarly close working relationship, Dakota Electric CEO Ryan Hentges said in an email.

Hentges said that since 2000 or so, the cooperative has worked with the community on major projects like a full backup generation system for the entire Treasure Island Resort and Casino campus; new infrastructure to improve local power quality; and — most meaningfully for the community’s energy sovereignty and climate goals — the development of a 5.4-megawatt solar array and a separate geothermal heating and cooling system at the casino.

The solar and geothermal systems are part of the first tranche of projects in the Prairie Island Indian Community’s net zero initiative, Andrea Zimmerman, the tribe’s energy program manager, said in an interview. So is a community-wide energy upgrade initiative underway now that will significantly improve the efficiency of its aging housing stock.

A second tranche will bolster weatherization, upgrade commercial buildings across the community and potentially roll out an electric vehicle fleet, Zimmerman said.

The budget President Trump signed in July could make those next projects harder to underwrite, however. Alongside the widely-panned health care cuts Washington Democrats are fighting to undo, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act drastically shortened the window for owners and developers of wind and solar energy projects to qualify for generous federal tax credits that under Biden-era legislation would have remained in effect into the mid-2030s.

The cuts are forcing Prairie Island Indian Community to change their approach and consider other funding strategies, Zimmerman said.

Dannenberg said the Trump administration’s cuts to Solar for All affected some of the projects supported by the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, too. For now, his group — which provides technical assistance and project finance for tribal energy projects — is simply trying to do as much as it can before the tax credits expire next year.

“The name of the game now is how many Solar For All projects can we salvage and get across the finish line,” he said.

But the Trump administration’s heel turn from Biden-era energy policy so far hasn’t knocked Minnesota off its clean energy goals. The state aims for a carbon-free power grid by 2040 and a net-zero economy by 2050.

It sees tribes as vital to those efforts. In 2023, the Legislature established the Tribal Advisory Council on Energy, the first state-funded body giving tribes an official voice on state energy policy. Prairie Island Tribal Council Member Michael Childs Jr. is a TACE co-chair.

Blake, who pushed the Legislature to create TACE, said in January that tribes’ political sovereignty makes them critical partners in transforming Minnesota’s energy economy.

“Native people are the only people with their own government in this government,” he said. “In regard to the energy transition, if we aren’t giving Tribes the opportunity and chance to collaborate, they will never reach their potential.”