Native Americans are among the poorest ethnic groups in the United States. More than 40% of people residing on reservations or in areas with a historic tribal presence live below the poverty line.

The social impacts of this impoverishment are enormous. On the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the high school dropout rate is 70%, infant mortality is 300 times the national average, and the average home has seventeen residents. Life expectancy for men is 48 years, and for women it’s 52 -- the second lowest rate in the western hemisphere, behind Haiti.

This is the background against which an ambitious wind power initiative is unfolding. Spearheaded by the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy (COUP), a coalition of 14 Great Plains tribes, it aims to place wind turbines on members’ reservations, generating electricity for Native American and non-tribal populations.

It’s an integrated community-development initiative as well as an alternative-energy project. Among its goals: making tribal housing more affordable and efficient through better design, retrofitting, and the use of local, natural materials such as straw bale and earthen plasters. Another goal is to create green-collar jobs with a view toward both improving energy efficiency on the reservations and staffing up Intertribal COUP’s emerging wind-power business. “This isn’t only a matter of having technicians be Native Americans,” says Bob Gough, Intertribal COUP’s secretary. “We want the entire business to be tribally owned and operated.” 

Wind has the potential to help bootstrap tribes’ emergence from poverty. Casinos have provided Native Americans with one financial lifeline. Wind has as much or more promise as an economic-development engine, and it comes without gambling’s down sides.

The COUP acronym is no coincidence. In the Native American tradition, “counting coup” is a form of honorable battle. The coalition, says Gough, is committed to building sustainable homeland economies as a way to “do honorable battle with climate change and the major pollution issues that threaten the planet.”

Intertribal COUP starts with a significant asset: huge amounts of wind. “On the Rosebud Sioux reservation,” says Gough, “the Tribe set up an anemometer, which measures wind, and got an average 17.9 miles per hour wind speed. That’s golden.” According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, there is enough wind energy on all tribal lands -- not just Intertribal COUP partners -- to produce over 535 billion kilowatt hours per year and meet 14% of U.S. electricity demand.

Indian Country’s first turbine, a 750-kilowatt unit, was installed on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in 2003. Gough says, “It went up over two days, but it took eight years to get to those two days.” This drawn-out process is not surprising, as Native Americans have historically faced many challenges when dealing with the federal government.

One special challenge arises from the fact that federal policy penalizes tribal ownership of wind power projects. One of the major incentives for wind power development is the production tax credit (PTC) that pays based on the amount of electricity produced. However, they are only useful to private-sector organizations with sizable federal tax obligations. Because tribes are governments themselves, they do not pay federal tax and so the PTC provides no benefit.

This makes it more difficult for Indian tribes to succeed on their own, and it also discourages businesses from partnering with them. According to Gough, “If a business partnered with a tribe on a 50/50 basis, the business would get a 50% PTC and the tribe would also get a 50% PTC, which it wouldn’t be able to use. If the business developed the project on its own, it would get a 100% PTC.” Two pending bills (H.R. 1954 and S. 2520) have been introduced in the U.S. Congress that would allow tribes to transfer their PTC to their joint-venture partners.

Another problem emerges from the familiar real-estate adage: location, location, location. Tribes situated in the Northern Great Plains are selling into an energy market dominated by cheap lignite coal electricity, which is very climate-unfriendly. According to Patrick Spears, President of Intertribal COUP, it is cheap “only because we don’t count the pollution and greenhouse gas costs.” Because the price of electricity is the lowest in the country, this creates a competitive challenge for renewable energy.  “A two-cent penalty in a three- or four-cent market is significant,” says Spears.

Despite these challenges, progress is occurring.  Several small tribal wind turbines projects have been installed across the Dakotas, with a 30-megawatt project pending at Rosebud. COUP has also become an owner on behalf of its member Tribes in Native Energy, a carbon offset company that helps fund clean energy projects on native and non-native land.

The scaling-up process is just beginning. By 2015 the organization aspires to produce 3,000 megawatts of wind power annually, spread over twenty reservations. That’s a big number, representing enough energy to power about two million homes. How likely is it to happen? Says Gough, “In 2001, we announced our target. Two years later the Western Governors’ Association announced a goal of 30,000 megawatts of clean energy for 19 states, making our goal only 10% of the Western states’ goal, and eminently do-able.”

It has required enormous perseverance for Intertribal COUP to get as far as it has, and there’s still a long way to go. The prospects are favorable, though. The organization is well along on the learning curve, and demand has never been greater. The winds are shifting in its favor.