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The urgency of the green transition hasn’t made tribal concerns any less important.
It’s windy in the Great Plains and it’s sunny in the Southwest. These two basic geographic facts underscore much of the green energy transition in the United States — and put many Native American tribes squarely in the middle of that process.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that “American Indian land comprises approximately 2% of U.S. land but contains an estimated 5% of all renewable energy resources,” with an especially large amount of potential solar power. Over the past few months, a spate of renewable energy projects across the country have found themselves entangled with courts, regulators, and tribal governments over how and under what circumstances they are permitted on — or even near — tribal lands.
In Oklahoma, a federal judge ordered that dozens of wind turbines be removed after ruling that the developers had violated federal law by not seeking mineral rights. In Arizona, two tribes and two nonprofits sued the Bureau of Land Management, objecting to the planned route of a massive transmission project. Tribes objected to designating an area off the Oregon coast for wind farming, and federal energy regulators announced a new policy requiring energy developers to get tribal permission prior to seeking any permits for projects on tribal lands.
“We are establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit,” the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said in a filing denying a trio of pumped-storage hydropower projects on Navajo Nation land in Arizona and New Mexico.
“Navajo Nation is in support of solar power, and the Navajo utility has developed some solar sites, which are operating right now,” George Hardeen, public relations director for the Navajo Nation leadership, told me. “But pumped storage, we’re not quite ready for that.” Just like everyone else in Arizona, New Mexico, or neighboring states, the Navajo Nation has a heavily contested relationship with its surrounding water resources. The Navajo Nation recently lost a case in the Supreme Court, where it argued the federal government had an obligation to meet its water needs under 1868 and 1849 treaties.
While the legal issues around tribal governance are distinct, the dilemmas and tradeoffs of energy development — renewable or otherwise — are not. Energy production itself is nothing new for the Navajo Nation. The now-shuttered Navajo Generating Station operated for almost 50 years with a workforce that was almost exclusively Navajo. Along with a neighboring mine, it generated tens of millions of dollars of royalty and other payments for the Navajo Nation and the neighboring Hopi Tribe.
But the competing goals of speedy renewable energy development versus protection of the landscape become heightened on native lands.
“You’ve always had consultation requirements,” Heather Tanana, a visiting professor at the University of California-Irvine, told me. “The big change is the weight of the tribal voice in that process,” describing FERC’s policy as a “shift to actual empowerment of tribal communities who decide what is going to happen.”
FERC’s decision is consistent with a Biden administration-wide effort to empower tribes on a “nation-to-nation” basis. This effort has naturally heavily involved the Department of Interior — led for the first time by a Native American, Pueblo of Laguna member Deb Haaland — which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as a bevy of agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which play major roles in energy infrastructure.
“Having the agency take this position is consistent is what the administration has said it should do,” Tanana said. “It’s good because it shows something tangible and real, and not just good intentions that haven’t always played out well in the past.”
That’s putting it mildly. The history of energy development and Native Americans is marked by exploitation, whether the subject is the Osage murders of the 1920s, lung cancer among Navajo uranium mine workers, or the construction of dams that obliterated native fishing grounds.
“The Biden administration is very sensitive to tribal concerns,” Warigia Bowman, a law professor at the University of Tulsa, told me. But enforcement of the new requirements will be up to regulators and prosecutors across the country, Bowman said.
That enforcement has been especially harsh in Osage County. Typically, landowners control both the surface and mineral rights of their land, which essentially means they can sell both the land they own and the rights to what’s underneath it. But the mineral rights on the Osage Nation Reservation are exclusively owned by the Osage Tribe and overseen by the elected Osage Minerals Council, which can lease out mineral rights. And, like many in the petroleum business, the Osage Minerals Council has lamented limitations on drilling.
“What’s special about the Osage wind case is the specifics of land ownership for the Osage,” Bowman said. “It’s unusual to have surface and mineral rights separated.”
It’s these mineral rights that have turned into a massive headache for wind developers. The energy developers Enel and Osage Wind leased over 8,000 acres in Osage County for a wind farm starting in 2010. The Osage Minerals Council sued in 2011, saying the project would block its ability to develop any resources underneath the area the developers had leased. Then the federal government sued in 2014 when construction began, arguing that the excavation for the wind turbines’ foundations constituted mining without permission.
Late last year, a federal judge ruled that the developers owed monetary damages and the “ejectment of the wind towers.” The developers estimated that complying with the injunction would cost almost $260 million.
And energy development doesn't have to be on tribal land in order to potentially run afoul of laws and regulations mandating consultation. The Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe, along with the nonprofit groups the Center for Biological Diversity and Archeological Southwest, sued the Bureau of Land Management seeking an injunction to stop construction of the SunZia transmission line, a decades-in-the-waiting 4,500 megawatt project that seeks to bring wind energy west from New Mexico. The project got approval from BLM last spring. The suit filed in January argued that the developers failed to adequately consult with tribes over “sacred and cultural resources in the San Pedro Valley,” even if the proposed route was on a mixture of federal, state, and private land.
“Under the [National Historic Preservation Act], agencies are required to make a good faith effort to identify Indian tribes for consultation,” Tory Fodder, a law professor at the University of Arizona, explained to me in an email. “The NHPA provides fairly robust consultation mechanisms for tribal cultural and religious sites that are not necessarily confined to the reservation of a tribe.” Since, Fodder said, both the Tohono O’odham Nation and the San Carlos Apache claim “ancestral connections to the area,” they should have been consulted early on.
The BLM and Pattern Energy both claim they were. In a response to the suit, the federal government argued that it had “engaged in lengthy, good faith consultation efforts with the Tribes and other consulting parties regarding the San Pedro Valley,” and that the route had been finalized since 2015, giving the tribes and nonprofits years to intervene.
In an emailed statement, Pattern Energy’s vice president of environmental and permitting, Natalie McCue, said: “Respecting tribal sovereignty and completing the United States’ largest clean energy project is not a binary choice. We deeply respect the Tohono O’odham Nation’s and the San Carlos Apache Tribe’s right to self-governance and to express their views on cultural protection. Given this, we were saddened by the decision to pursue legal action, especially given our commitment to open, good-faith dialogue on these vital issues.” Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for March; in the meantime, construction has been allowed to continue.
On the West Coast, there's growing tribal opposition to the beginning of a process for offshore wind development. The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians said they were “extremely disappointed” in the Bureau Ocean Energy Management’s decision to designate two areas off the Oregon coast for wind energy development.
While the BOEM said the designation only came after “extensive engagement and feedback from the state, Tribes, local residents, ocean users, federal government partners, and other members of the public,” the Confederated Tribes contend that the areas “are within the Tribe’s ancestral territory, contain viewsheds of significant cultural and historic significance to the Tribe, and are important areas for Tribal fishing,” and that the Tribes only became aware of the designation from the Oregon Governor’s office, not the BOEM directly.
Although the stakes of the zero-carbon transition are new, the issues of sovereignty and exploitation of Native American lands are as old as the United States. “The Tribe will not stand by while a project is developed that causes it more harm than good,” the Tribal Council Chair Brad Kneaper said in a release. “This is simply green colonialism.”
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And it only gets worse from here.
Hot and humid weather stretching from Maine to Missouri is causing havoc for grid operators: blackouts, brownouts, emergency authorizations to exceed environmental restrictions, and high prices.
But in terms of what is on the grid and what is demanded of it, this may be the easiest summer for a long time.
That’s because demands on the grid are growing at the same time the resources powering it are changing. Between broad-based electrification, manufacturing additions, and especially data center construction, electricity load growth is forecast to grow several percent a year through at least the end of the decade. At the same time, aging plants reliant on oil, gas, and coal are being retired (although planned retirements are slowing down), while new resources, largely solar and batteries, are often stuck in long interconnection queues — and, when they do come online, offer unique challenges to grid operators when demand is high.
For the previous 20 years, load growth has been relatively steady, Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins, explained to me. “What’s different is that load is trending up,” he said. “When you’re buying and making arrangements for the summer, you have to aim a bit higher.”
Nowhere is the combined and uneven development of the grid’s supply and demand more evident than in PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest electricity market, spanning from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. The grid now has to serve new load in Virginia’s “data center alley,” while aggressive public policy promoting renewables in states such as Maryland and New Jersey has made planning more complicated thanks to the different energy generation and economic profiles of wind, solar, and batteries compared to gas and coal.
PJM hit peak load on Monday of just over 161,000 megawatts, within kissing distance of its all-time record of 165,500 megawatts and far north of last year’s high demand of 152,700, with load hitting at least 158,000 megawatts on Tuesday. Forecast high load this year was around 154,000 megawatts. Earlier this spring, PJM warned that for the first time, “available generation capacity may fall short of required reserves in an extreme planning scenario that would result in an all-time PJM peak load of more than 166,000 megawatts.”
While that extreme demand has not been seen on the grid during this present heat wave, we’re still early in the year. Typically, PJM’s demand peaks in July or even August; according to the consulting firm ICF, the last June peak was in 2014, while demand last year peaked in July. On Monday, real time prices got just over $3,000 a megawatt, and reached just over $1,800 on Tuesday.
“This is a big test. A lot of capacity has retired since 2006 and the resource mix has changed some,” Connor Waldoch, head of strategy at GridStatus, told me. While exact data on the resource mix over the past 20 years isn’t available, Waldoch said that many of the fossil fuel plants on the grid — including those that help set the price of electricity — are quite old.
PJM’s operators have issued a “maximum generation alert” that will extend to Wednesday, warning generators and transmission owners to defer or cancel maintenance so that “units stay online and continue to produce energy that is needed.”
PJM also issued a load management alert, a warning that PJM may call upon some 8,000 megawatts of electricity users who have been paid in advance to reduce demand when the grid calls for it. Already, some large users of electricity in Virginia have reduced their power demand as part of the program. There are historically around one or two uses of demand response per year in each of the electricity market’s 21 zones.
“Demand response is a real hero,” Silverman said.
Elsewhere in the hot zone, thousands of customers of the New York Independent Systems Operator lost or saw reduced power on Monday, along with over 100,000 customers affected by voltage reductions. On Tuesday, NYISO issued an “energy watch” meaning that “operating reserves are expected to be lower than normal,” and asking customers to reduce their power consumption.
Further north, oil and coal made up 10% of the fuel mix in ISO New England by Monday night, according to GridStatus data. The region has greatly expanded behind-the-meter solar generation since 2010, which as of 2 p.m. Monday was generating over 21% of the region’s power. But the grid as a whole hasn’t been able to keep up, thanks to a nationally anomalous shortage of gas capacity and still-insufficient battery storage. As the sun faded, so too did New England’s renewable generation.
“You don’t see coal very often in the New England fuel mix,” Waldoch told me. In fact, there is only one remaining coal plant in New England, which can typically power around 440,000 homes — though that’s based on normal electricity usage. On days like the past few, it may power far fewer.
Moving into Tuesday, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright invoked emergency authorities to allow Duke Energy in the Carolinas to run certain of its units “at their maximum generation output levels due to ongoing extreme weather conditions and to preserve the reliability of bulk electric power system.”
The strained grid and high prices come as grid operators question how effectively their current and planned generation capacity can meet future demand. These questions have become especially pressing in PJM, which last year shelled out billions of dollars in payments to largely fossil fuel generators in what’s known as a capacity auction. That’s already translating to higher costs for consumers — in some cases as high as 20%. But even that could be nothing compared to what’s coming.
“If you take the current conditions that PJM is dealing with right now and you add tens of gigawatts of data to center demand, they would be in trouble,” Pieter Mul, an energy and infrastructure advisor at PA Consulting, told me.
Right now, Mul said, PJM can muddle through. “It is all hands on deck. Our prices are quite high. They’ve invoked some various emergency conditions.” But that’s before all those data centers are even online. “It’s a 2026, ’27, and beyond question,” Mul said.
Today, however, “it’s mostly just very hot weather.”
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
The new Nissan Leaf is joining a whole crop of new electric cars in the $30,000 range.
Here is an odd sentence to write in the year 2025: One of the most interesting electric vehicles on the horizon is the Nissan Leaf.
The Japanese automaker last week revealed new images and specs of the redesign it had teased a few months ago. The new Leaf, which will arrive in 2026, is a small crossover that’s sleeker than, say, a Tesla Model Y, but more spacious than the previous hatchback versions of the car. Nissan promises it will have a max range above 300 miles, while industry experts expect the company to target a starting price not too far above $30,000.
The updated Leaf won’t be one of those EVs that smokes a gas-powered sports car in a drag race, not with the 214 horsepower from that debut version and certainly not with the 174 horsepower from the cheaper version that will arrive later on. Its 150-kilowatt max charging speed lags far behind the blazing fast 350-kilowatt charging capability Hyundai is building into its Ioniq electric vehicles. But because it lacks some of these refinements, the new Nissan may arrive as one of the most compelling of the “affordable” EVs that are, finally, coming to drivers.
Not bad for a car that had become an electric afterthought.
The original Nissan Leaf was a revelation merely for its existence. Never mind that it was a lumpy potato derived from the uninspired Nissan Versa — here was the first mass-market electric car, heralding the age of the EV and welcomed with plenty of “car of the year” laurels at the dawn of the 2010s. Its luster would not last, however, as the arrival of the Tesla Model S a couple of years later stole the world’s attention. The second-generation Leaf that arrived in 2017 was an aesthetic and technological leap forward from its predecessor, with a range that topped 200 miles in its most advanced form. It was, for the time, a pretty good EV. Almost immediately, it was overshadowed by the introduction of Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, which catapulted Elon Musk’s company into complete dominance of the global EV market.
It took nearly a decade for Nissan (which fell into corporate mismanagement and outright crisis in the meantime) to update the stale and outdated Leaf. As a result, you might think the new version of the OG EV will arrive just in time to be outshone again. Yet the peculiar nature of the evolving electric car market has created an opportunity for the Leaf to finally grow and thrive.
There was a time when the mythical affordable Tesla could have taken the brand into the entry-level car market, and perhaps below the magic starting price of $30,000. But that has turned out to be a distraction dangled in front of fanboys and investors. In reality, Musk effectively killed the idea as he instead rolled out the Cybertruck and pivoted the company toward the dream of total vehicle autonomy.
Thanks to Tesla’s refusal to act like a normal car company, the affordable EV market is still there for the taking. Some are already in the game: Hyundai’s little Kona Electric starts at $33,000, and I’ve lauded Chevrolet for building a base version of the Equinox EV that starts around $35,000. In the next year or so, an influx of EVs in the $30,000 to $35,000 range might really change the game for electric-curious buyers.
The new Leaf is suddenly a big part of that mix. No, it won’t compete on price with a comparable combustion Nissan like the Kicks crossover that starts in the low $20,000s (not without the $7,500 tax credit, which would have made the new crop of affordable EVs directly cost-competitive with entry-level gas cars). The Leaf is likely to start just above $30,000, with the price creeping higher for buyers who opt for better performance or more range (and as I’ve noted numerous times, you ought to buy all the range you can afford if an EV is going to be your main car).
Arriving next year to compete with the Leaf is the new Chevy Bolt, another revival of an early EV icon. Experts expect a similar price range there. The anticipated Kia EV3 should come to America eventually with a starting cost around $35,000. The Jeff Bezos-backed Slate electric truck shocked the world with its promise of a bare-bones EV in the $20,000s — but, by the time the average buyer adds enough amenities to make it liveable, most Slate trucks will probably top $30,000.
Elon Musk may have abdicated his role as the Leaf’s antagonist via his refusal to build an affordable car, but erstwhile ally Donald Trump is poised to assume the role. Since the Leaf is slated to be built in Japan, the EV would be subject to whatever tariffs might be in place by the time it goes on sale next year. A 25% tariff, plus the federal government’s flip to punishing EVs with penalties instead of rewarding them with incentives, would kill the car’s value proposition in the U.S. Perhaps, then, it will become the next great affordable EV — for everybody else.