The Biden administration announced Tuesday that the federal government will fund 17 projects across the United States to expand access to renewable energy on Native American reservations and other rural areas.
The $366 million plan will fund solar, battery storage and hydropower projects in sparsely populated areas where electricity can be expensive and unreliable. The money comes from President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, signed into law in 2021.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called the announcement “historic” at a summit of clean energy tribes that began Tuesday in Southern California.
“This is the largest amount the Department of Energy has awarded to tribes for energy projects,” he said.
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The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that about a fifth of homes in the Navajo Nation, located in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah, do not have access to electricity. About a third of homes with electricity on Native American reservations in the United States report monthly outages, according to the Biden administration.
The announcement comes as indigenous tribes in Nevada and Arizona fight to protect their lands and sacred sites amid the Biden administration’s expansion of renewable energy. It also comes days after federal regulators gave Native American tribes more power to block hydropower projects on their lands.
The Biden administration will provide funding for 17 projects only after negotiations with project bidders, federal officials said.
The projects cover 20 states and cover 30 tribes. These include $30 million to provide plant-based energy to wildfire-prone communities in California’s Sierra Nevada, $32 million to build solar and hydroelectric power for a Native American tribe in Washington state, and $27 million to build a hydroelectric plant to serve a tribal village. includes. In Alaska.
In 2019, the Hopi tribe in Arizona lost jobs and a longtime source of energy when a giant coal-fired power plant closed after nearly 50 years. It was an important source of income for the Navajo and Hopi tribes.
The Biden administration plans to commit more than $9 million to a project led by Arizona State University in partnership with the tribe to build solar panels and battery storage for the Hopi Nation.
Kristen Parrish, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, said the project will provide tribal citizens with a reliable source of power.
“More important than it being cleaner is that it’s reliable,” Parrish said of the project.
The Department of Energy also announced funding for a $57 million project to provide solar power and battery storage to up to 175 public health centers in the rural Southeast, including Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
The idea for the project stemmed from power outages in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 that hampered the ability of health workers to do their jobs, said Ben Money, senior vice president of public health at the National Association of Community Health Centers. People living in rural areas sometimes only have access to one health center in their area, Pul said.
“If there is a power outage or a natural or man-made disaster, the residents of that community are more dependent on the location of the community health center than the residents of communities that may have other options,” he said.