The Moapa Band of Paiutes made history as the first reservation in the U.S. to host a solar farm in Indian country. Its utility-scale solar farm can generate enough energy to power up to 111,000 homes. That’s thanks in part to Southern Nevada’s environment, which has roughly 300 days of sunny skies a year, an attractive statistic for Arevon Energy Inc. CEO Justin Johnson.
“I’m not an oil and gas guy, and I never want to be, but this is like the Permian Basin for solar,” he said.
Now a decade since the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project began generating roughly 250 megawatts, tribal members and Arevon staff gathered in the Moapa Big Hall to celebrate having a more diverse economy on the reservation.
“I just can’t imagine what council, how they even took this challenge on 10 years ago without a blueprint and just let’s just do it because now I look back from our perspective today, looking back and I can just imagine the stress,” said Janet Myers, the current Chairman of the Moapa Band of Paiute.
She wasn’t chair when the first solar farm was being developed, but she’s been working to bring the next solar plant to the reservation. The tribe will break ground on their fourth solar farm in October.
“I feel the stress from this new project coming up, but I can just imagine what they went through 10 years ago,” she said.
A decade ago, the Moapa Valley looked different. Just a couple miles east of where everyone is gathered for the celebration stood the Reid Gardner Generating Station. It was a coal-burning power plant co-owned by NV Energy.
Vickie Simmons, a former tribal chairman, knew how dangerous it was to live near a coal-burning power plant for the community and its workers. Her brother worked at the plant.
“One day he got sick and he was immobilized, went straight to the hospital,” Simmons said.
He was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, or an enlarged heart. And after a month, he died at the age of 31.
Coal-fired power plants produce coal ash, which can cause heart disease, cancer, reproductive issues, and more.
Tribal members and the public began protesting the power plant operation around 2010.
“I was so appreciative of people that could go and speak and not be frightened of the outside,” she said.
In 2014, their voices began to be heard as half of the plant shut down. The plant shut down completely by 2017. Before the plant could shut down, the tribe signed their first agreement with Arevon in 2013.
Although the tribe no longer suffers from toxic air pollution and now benefits from having a company generate energy on its land for 50 years, that doesn’t mean the solar agreement was the best deal for the sovereign nation.
Under the agreement, the tribe locked in a half-century lease with Arevon to install and operate a solar plant on the reservation. Today, the energy is sold to utility companies in California.
The tribe receives none of the energy or revenue generated on the reservation. The tribe has to get its power from the Overton Power District.
“I think that looking at the solar project, it’s one that replicates a lot of what we see in Indian country, where we are the basis of raw commodity production,” said Dr. Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation and associate professor for the Department of Geography at the University of Arizona. He focuses on how Indigenous nations are incorporated into colonial economies every day. “Whether that be coal, oil, gas, in this case, solar, and that the value added doesn’t happen with tribes or for tribes; it’s captured by the energy companies or the owners of the production facility.”
Solar plants don’t generate many jobs, other than during the short-term construction phase. Once constructed, they don’t need many workers. Meaning fewer jobs for tribal members
The agreement between the tribe and Arevon includes no royalties, energy sharing, additional donations to a food pantry, road contracts, or a plan to make the reservation more energy independent through any other project. The company is using the land only for one of its best resources, the sun.
“It seems like a deal that doesn’t really benefit the tribe,” he said.
Economic development is limited in remote areas of Nevada. Currently, one of the tribe’s largest economic drivers is its gas station, which also offers tribal gaming. They will also sell fireworks for the Fourth of July.
The reservation’s location roughly an hour north of Las Vegas makes it hard to attract other industries, especially since North Las Vegas has built the Apex Industrial Park, where massive warehouses will soon house corporations just 20 minutes north of Las Vegas’s heart.
“These companies are not philanthropic,” Curley said. “So they’re just there to earn and they’re private, they’re trying to profit. Tribes are just trying to attract, like a lot of small governments are trying to attract, businesses by giving them lucrative deals,”
There are currently no plans to turn over the solar farm to the tribe at the end of the lease to become energy independent; that would in turn make the tribe more sovereign.
The tribe cannot afford to build its own solar plant to generate and sell its own power, though Johnson has expressed interest in helping the tribe achieve its future energy goals.
“We’ve explored it, certainly,” Myers said. “I know that’s of interest to the tribe. It gets tricky, those sorts of arrangements when you’re doing the financing, but it’s certainly something that we continue to explore.”
The tribe and the community will continue to advocate for the tribe’s future.
“I know for upcoming projects we were trying to get it inside the contract that in time we would be able to purchase some of the power so then we would have some ownership in the actual power,” Myers
But why stop there?
Simmons believes the Moapa Band of Paiutes could one day sell its own electricity to utility companies and provide for its tribal members for generations to come.
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