Indigenous Communities Power the Future with Microgrids and Solar Projects to Cut Costs and Boost Energy Sovereignty

Remote Indigenous communities across North America are investing in solar microgrids to achieve energy sovereignty, reduce reliance on diesel generators, and lower electricity costs, with new funding supporting projects from northern California to Australia’s Northern Territory.

The Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty (TERAS) project, a solar microgrid initiative on an electrical circuit that splices through Yurok and Hoopa tribal lands in northern California, aims to provide reliable renewable energy to thousands of people in the Hoopa Valley region, where approximately 20 percent of residents are tribal members.

This project builds on existing solar microgrids on Blue Lake Rancheria Tribal lands, which have already met 15 percent of electricity demand in a disaster-prone region vulnerable to floods and landslides that disrupt service.

According to Matthew Marshall, director of energy resilience and business development for the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe, the TERAS project is intended as a demonstration and proof of concept for a larger deployment involving multiple tribes.

Solar microgrids, which can operate independently or within a larger grid, use solar panels and batteries to generate electricity and have been deployed elsewhere, including powering Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay and EV charging stations in Davis, California.

In Australia, a ground-breaking microgrid project in the Northern Territory has secured an $8.3 million grant and is set to begin construction, aiming to address diesel shortage concerns and halve power bills for Indigenous communities.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity has announced approximately $10.5 million in funding for microgrid-related research, development, and demonstration projects targeting underserved and Indigenous communities in remote, rural, and islanded regions across the United States.

This funding supports efforts to promote microgrids as a core solution for increasing grid reliability and resilience, serve as aggregation points for distributed energy resources, reduce microgrid capital costs by 15 percent by 2031, and cut project development, construction, and commissioning times by 20 percent.

Indigenous-led organizations such as Sacred Earth Solar are working to co-design and install solar microgrids on tribal lands in the U.S. And Canada, replacing diesel reliance and empowering local leadership through community control and Indigenous knowledge.

These initiatives address chronic energy poverty on Native American reservations, where roughly 14 percent of households lack access to electricity — a rate nearly 10 times the national average — leading to dependence on diesel generators that produce high emissions and limit energy access.