Excerpts from Minnesota Reformer article.

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. 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. 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. 

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.

Read the full article here: https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/10/16/minnesota-tribal-nations-have-legal-sovereignt[…]8ba4&emdi=85230ce0-a7aa-f011-8e61-6045bded8ba4&ceid=376007