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Economic potential of wind and solar in American Indian communities

Nature Energy (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Could renewable energy development on American Indian Reservations alleviate poverty? This Article combines data on wind and solar endowments, reservation characteristics and utility-scale renewable energy projects to offer three insights. First, the colonial process of reservation creation that intentionally deprived tribes of other natural resources unintentionally left them with favourable wind and solar, especially on reservations with the lowest-income populations. Second, despite favourable endowments, renewable projects are rare: reservation lands are 46% less likely to host wind farms and 110% less likely to host solar than comparable adjacent lands. Third, if this disparity persists, tribes may forgo over US$19 billion in lease and tax earnings that could be accrued under forecasts of renewable energy demand through 2050. We highlight barriers—such as regulatory complexity and uncertainty—that help explain this disparity and emphasize this is not a call to impose federal energy priorities on unwilling tribes.

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Fig. 1: Endowments on and off reservations.
Fig. 2: Mean endowments by reservation income quartile.
Fig. 3: Location of utility-scale renewable energy projects.
Fig. 4: Predictors of wind and solar utilization.

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Data availability

All data generated or analysed for the study are described in this article and/or its Supplementary Information. All publicly available data sources are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12735114 (ref. 60). All analysis can be recreated from the source data, and the final, processed data file for the township analysis is additionally provided.

Code availability

Statistical analysis was performed using R61 and Stata62. All code is available for download via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12735114 (ref. 60).

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported in part by the US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service due to J.B.W.’s authorship. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or US government determination or policy. For comments on earlier drafts, we thank participants at the ‘Symposium on Indigenous Economies’ sponsored by the Bank of Canada, Te Putea (Reserve Bank of New Zealand) and the Tulo Centre for Indigenous Economics and seminar participants at UC-Santa Barbara, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Energy Institute and the Nicholas School at Duke University. We also thank Z. Millimet, a legislative fellow at Senator M. Heinrich’s Office, for helpful feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Dominic P. Parker & Sarah Johnston

  2. Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Dominic P. Parker & Daniel Stewart

  3. Property and Environment Research Center, Bozeman, MT, USA

    Dominic P. Parker & Bryan Leonard

  4. University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

    Bryan Leonard

  5. Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA

    Daniel Stewart

  6. US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Kansas City, MO, USA

    Justin B. Winikoff

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Contributions

D.P.P. conceived the study, recruited the research team and drafted the manuscript. S.J., J.B.W., B.L. and D.P.P. performed data analysis and mapping. D.S., B.L. and D.P.P. performed the literature review on the discussion of barriers. All authors contributed to editing the manuscript, interpretating statistical results and responding to referee and editor input. All authors provided substantial input and have approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Dominic P. Parker.

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Nature Energy thanks Elizabeth Doris, Julie MacArthur and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Parker, D.P., Johnston, S., Leonard, B. et al. Economic potential of wind and solar in American Indian communities. Nat Energy (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-024-01617-4

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