This summer, Len Necefer finally planned the road trip he’s been thinking about for nearly a decade: Going coast-to-coast in an electric vehicle, stopping only to charge on tribal lands.
As a Navajo citizen and tribal energy expert who used to work in the federal government, he saw it as the ultimate test of how far energy infrastructure had come.
Stop by stop, his plans came together until North Dakota, where a dearth of chargers seemed to prevent a Midwest crossing. Then, he spotted it: a level-2 charger at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation.
It was more than a lucky break. Over the past three years, Standing Rock has installed chargers across the reservation as part of the Electric Nation project, a regional effort to create an intertribal charging network.
By the time the project wraps at the end of November, Standing Rock Nation will operate 13 E.V. chargers, most of them in North Dakota. While there aren’t many E.V.s in town yet, each new charger makes driving one easier than before.
“I want to show folks that this technology is not out of our affordable reach, but that it is here for us to use,” said Joseph McNeil, the chief executive of SAGE, a clean energy organization owned by the tribe that is spearheading the project.
The Standing Rock Reservation, home to the Lakota and Dakota peoples, is rural and spread out, straddling the border between North and South Dakota. The cost of gas aggravates the reservation’s high poverty rates. With the closest commercial centers at least an hour away, access to reliable transportation is a measure of well being.
“Our economic situation shouldn’t dictate our access to sustainability,” Mr. McNeil said. He wants every SAGE project to create jobs or revenue for the tribe. Institutions that are hosting the E.V. chargers, like the college, will eventually take ownership of them and collect any revenue.
SAGE’s project director, Fawn Wasin Zi, said E.V.s were part of a longstanding push for clean energy on the reservation. In 2016, the tribe was in the midst of planning a wind farm when protests to block the Dakota Access Pipeline engulfed the reservation. Their fight against a plan to transport oil over their sacred lands was recognized with an award from the Wallace Global Fund, which came with a $250,000 prize and a $1 million investment earmarked for the ongoing wind farm project.
The tribe may be widely known for the anti-pipeline movement, Ms. Wasin Zi said, “but there’s so much more going on.” She was managing the wind project at the time and used the prize to start SAGE. “The traditional way is to live with Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, not against her,” she said.
The pipeline also helped inspire the regional E.V. project.
“As I was protesting, I thought, ‘What if we connected all the tribes in an electric vehicle charging network?’” said Robert Blake, a solar energy developer in Minneapolis. “It would be another form of resistance against fossil fuel infrastructure.” A few years later, Mr. Blake formed Native Sun, a nonprofit group dedicated to renewable energy outreach in tribal nations.
In 2021, Native Sun and SAGE teamed up and jointly won a $6 million Department of Energy grant to create Electric Nation. More funders followed, and the project took off.
Today, eight chargers have been installed at key locations around Standing Rock including local schools, a tribal administration building, Sitting Bull College and two casinos. Four more, coming later this month, will mark the completion of the project.
Read the full story on the New York Times here.
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