Discover how microgrid projects are revolutionizing energy independence in three Tribal communities by showcasing advanced grid expansion and local power generation solutions that electrify essential buildings and significantly reduce costs. Learn how these initiatives are enhancing resource security and fostering economic growth for remote communities.
MIKE VEHAR: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Tribal Energy Program Review Mini-Series, covering microgrids and distribution infrastructure. Next slide, please.
So, before we dive into today's webinar, we wanted to cover a few housekeeping items. To turn on live captions, click on the “show captions” button in the control panel at the bottom of your screen. To submit a question for the presenters, click on the “Q&A” button that is also in the control panel at the bottom of your screen. Please use the Q&A feature to also message our webinar team if you're having technical issues and we'll do our best to assist.
Today's webinar is being recorded. And that recording, transcript, and slides will be available on the Office of Indian Energy Webinar's website in the next one to two weeks. And finally, all registrants for today's webinar will receive a copy of the slides via email in advance of them being posted on our webinar page. Next slide, please.
Today, we have an opportunity to hear from three communities that are at the forefront of revolutionizing energy independence through microgrid projects. These initiatives are showcasing advanced grid expansion and local power generation solutions that not only electrify essential buildings but also significantly reduce costs. We'll learn how these efforts by the Native Village of Port Heiden, Unalakleet Native Corporation, and Colusa Indian Community Council are enhancing resource security and fostering economic growth within their communities. We will also briefly cover how the Office of Indian Energy supports these transformative and vital projects.
For today's webinar format, all presentations will be given first. And that will be followed by a question and answer or Q&A segment. We'll be covering questions submitted during the registration and those received live via the Q&A feature. We'll do our best to get to as many questions as we can. But please remember, we'll be prioritizing as many as time permits. Next slide, please.
My name is Mike Vehar and I'm a technical project officer with the Office of Indian Energy. And I will be your host today for this tour of a few of the innovative and critical projects that are supported by our office. We'd like to thank each of the presenters today for taking the time to share their projects with us. Next slide, please.
Our director is Mr. Eric Mahroum. He was named as the director of the Office of Indian Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy on January 12, 2026, reflecting on his commitment to Indian Country. This follows an appointment by President Trump in January of 2025 to serve as the director of DOE's Office of State and Community Energy Programs. Eric also proudly served in the first Trump administration. Director Mahroum has a track record of forging partnerships, promoting innovation, and connecting entrepreneurs with America's dynamic energy sector.
Mr. David Conrad serves as the deputy director for the DOE Office of Indian Energy. He's previously served at the Department of Interior and in other roles supporting Indian Country. Next slide, please.
Twenty years ago, the Indian Tribal Energy Development and Self-Determination Act of 2005, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, authorized the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Indian Energy. The vision for our office was to establish in law and charges us to promote Tribal energy development, efficiency, and use; reduce and stabilize energy costs; enhance and strengthen Tribal energy and economic infrastructure; and electrify Tribal lands and homes. I'm happy to share that this vision continues to be carried out. We have a successful track record of working with Tribal Nations.
We're excited that in 2025, last year, we celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the Office of Indian Energy. We are here and ready to continue to support Tribal Nations as they pursue their energy vision. We are continuing to find ways to be more efficient and effective as we rise to meet our congressional mandate and achieve our mission. Next slide, please.
The Office of Indian Energy supports Indian Country. And this includes federally recognized Indian Tribes, Alaska Native corporations, intertribal organizations, and Tribal Energy Development Organizations or TEDOs. Pictured here are two projects our office has funded, featuring energy projects that diversify energy sources to strengthen energy reliability and affordability. Next slide, please.
The Office of Indian Energy offers three main areas of support to Tribes—first, financial assistance on a competitive basis to develop and deploy energy infrastructure and technology; second, no-cost technical assistance to advance Tribal energy projects and energy commerce; and third, capacity-building activities through webinars, workshops, and workforce development opportunities, with the goal of supporting Tribes to fully participate in unleashing American energy. Next slide, please.
We wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that the DOE Office of Indian Energy currently has an open funding opportunity. This slide gives a high-level overview of the $50 million being made available under the Notice of Funding Opportunity or NOFO to unleash Tribal energy development.
The Office of Indian Energy is soliciting applications to advance affordable, reliable, and secure energy in Indian Country. I'd like to note that this is an expansive NOFO, covering a wide range of energy projects. So please visit the IE-Exchange website, ie-exchange.energy.gov, for full details on this funding opportunity.
As this NOFO differs from recent announcements, we have given a 120-day application window with a due date of July 24, 2026. And we anticipate announcing selections around November 2026 and making awards around February 2027. Next slide, please.
So now, for our first project presentation, I'd like to introduce Tatum Christensen. Tatum is a project manager for the Native Village of Port Heiden and she will be presenting on their powering unelectrified Tribal buildings project. Tatum, the floor is yours. Next slide, please.
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: Thanks. I'm going to try really hard not to be so nervous. I was watching the participant count going up. And I'm freaking out just a little bit.
So my name is Tatum Christensen. It says my name right up there. My name is Tatum Christensen and I am a Tribal member of the Native Village of Port Heiden. And we were awarded a grant to power Tribal facilities in Port Heiden. And next slide, please. Having a tough time. Struggling to keep it together.
So Port Heiden is a rural village. In the slide, you could see where it is located in Alaska. So we're right on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula, right on the coast.
We're very near to Aniakchak National Preserve and Monument. And we have about 100 year-round residents. And historically, we're a subsistence; we've practiced a subsistence fishing and commercial fishing lifestyle. And right in the photo there is Mike Willey. He was a fisherman. He was also my great grandfather. Next slide, please.
So, a little bit more about Port Heiden. It's changed quite a bit. We've had climate change and that's had a huge impact on our residents there.
We've battled erosion. And as a result to that erosion, our coast has been eroded and gone more inland. And our old village is almost completely washed away.
So we've had to move our village closer, more inland. We've had to move inland. And part of that is we need more electrical powering of our facilities that weren't quite hooked up yet. Next slide, please. Sorry, struggling here.
So Port Heiden is…so our grant is going to connect 14 buildings or facilities that didn't have power or were underpowered. And in this picture, you can kinda see where they are in the village. And when we power, just…hopefully, the end goal is that we're all powered, everything's connected, and we can have a more reliable power service. Next slide, please.
So a couple steps that we've taken or working through this grant. We've gotten a contractor. Our contractor that we're working with is called ATD Attention to Detail Power Solutions. The owner of that, his name is Lee Hewitt. He's got all the little details in his brain.
So I'm not the electrical person. I can screw in a light bulb and that's about the extent of what I know. If Lee was here, I'm sure he could recite all the things in layman's terms, but it's not my strong suit.
So anyway. So we've retained their services. We got a contract with ATD and they got all the materials ordered. And everything started to become manufactured. What do you call those things? The transformers, those had to be built from scratch. They had to have all the specifications for the transformers. And then what we thought was going to be, I don't know, say, five months to get those built would have doubled in time. So instead of something being five months really ended up taking 10 months. So that added to our time.
And then shipping—it's another huge factor because of how remote Port Heiden is. There's really only a couple ways to get things shipped out there, and that's through either a barge, which is pretty expensive, but not as frequent. I think Port Heiden only gets a few barges per year.
The other option is by plane. And that's even more expensive. But it's on…what's the word I'm saying? It's more frequent. They're able to be out there more frequently.
Most everything we did, all the material we did get shipped out via plane just because of time constraints when we had to get the material out there. And then one of the transformers did have to be barged out. It was too big to fit on a plane. So they ended up barging the last transformer out there.
And that ended up extending the project out just a little bit.
So once everything got shipped out there, then ATD. was able to get their guys out there and start work. And most of the work that they completed was done in…I think it was done in February 2025. They had their guys out there. And they did a bunch of the digging and the trenching and laying of the wires and stuff, laying of the cable.
So they got most everything done February 2025. But there was a few more things that they had to hook up and finish up. And they went out there this past March to finish up almost everything.
And then we thought they were going to be done. But we got this close again because they went out in March. There was some frozen things that…I don't know. Lee explained it so much better than I could—some frozen ice—ice is frozen—that they were trying to push through and couldn't.
So they do have to go back out one more time. But once all that's done, then we could do some inspection and testing and then move on. Next slide, please. Oh, sorry. I forgot there was a little added thing in there.
So the 14 buildings that we're hooking up, they serve a variety of buildings. There are a variety of buildings. And they serve a number of different functions. And on the screen, you can see a list of what the buildings are.
But funny story, though, for those, number 11, the temporary housing and isolation units, they blew away. They're gone. There was a very windy day and they blew away. So we don't have many more.
ATD. did still put in electric—sorry, that's not like that. They put in electricity to that spot. So hopefully, in the future, we can put up more permanent housing in that area instead of just the temporary housing that was there. The temporary housing was for COVID. But again, they blew away. So there it is. Next slide, please.So in this picture, this slide is just more of the specifications of what ATD. was able to get done. Again, I'm not the electrical expert. I couldn't tell you what all this means in layman terms. I just know they did 1.7 miles worth of trenching. So they dug 1.7 miles.
And they used that crazy machine there to dig and stick the wire in. And they buried 4.7 miles of cable, which is I don't know why that's insane to me. But it is. Next slide, please.
And then for the money side of it, the total budget was right there, $1,038,799, which I don't know why that blows my mind. But fortunately, DOE—thank you—was able to pick up 90% of that tab. And Port Heiden's portion—we're kicking in 10%. And Port Heiden's portion is just over $100,000.
And most of that is going toward the contractor. So, all the money that we were granted is going into work and materials being done. Next slide, please. Sorry, take a breath. Struggling…on a struggle bus.
So why are we doing this? For those kids in the picture, our whole goal is to be more self-reliant. We want to provide residents with reliable power.
Port Heiden has gone through enough power outages over the winter even. And then your house freezes. And it's just crazy. So we want to offer reliable power.
And then as a whole, we want to be a self-sustaining village. We want to be self-reliant and self-sustaining. There's an initiative with a farm out there.
So they're starting to grow food, their own food and raise…they're raising pigs. We've got a pig farm out there and chickens and whatnot. So we want to be a self-sustaining village. Next slide, please.
So next up for Port Heiden would be after our unelectrified buildings grant is all taken care of, next up is we're getting two wind turbines and a battery back up to go with it. And hopefully, that's going to be installed this fall, maybe this winter—hopefully. But we'll see.
But I'm sure everybody who's in here knows things get delayed and backed up a bit. So initially, we were hoping to put them in summer of 2025. But things happen. Things get pushed back. But that's about it.
So once we get these wind turbines in, our two wind turbines, hopefully, it'll replace 50% of our energy needs. And right now, Port Heiden is on strictly—we are on generators. So the whole village is run off of generators.
And they fail. Hence, I mean, people losing power and whatnot. But that's next. Next slide, please.
Well, that's it. Yay. Oh my gosh. OK, Mike, thanks.
MIKE VEHAR: Thank you so much, Tatum.
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: Try not to die.
MIKE VEHAR: Great job. I did see a question that came through asking the size of their microgrid. And I know that Tatum stated that the 200 kW they're anticipating for the potential wind generation would cover 50% of their needs. So that would put them at about 400 kW. Just back of the envelope math. Wanted to throw that out there. Thank you so much, Tatum. We really appreciate it.
Next, I would like to present Reese Huhtah and Leah Olsen. Reese is the general manager of the Unalakleet Valley Electric Cooperative. And Leah is an engineer with Deerstone Consulting.
They'll be presenting on the Unalakleet Native Corporation's energy infrastructure project. So, Reese, go ahead when you're ready. And next slide, please.
REESE HUHTA: Good afternoon. And thank you to the Department of Energy and Office of Indian Energy for helping us get this project rolling. And we're nearly complete—or excuse me, we are complete. We're in the monitoring stage. So next slide, please.
That first slide is some of our turbines. We're located here on Norton Sound. We're in Western Alaska. We're further north than Port Heiden but we're in a similar setting.
We are coastal. And as you can see here, we're nested right along the West Coast. We're just a little bit south of Nome. You might see our latitude here. We're north of Anchorage. We're about the same latitude as Fairbanks and Reykjavik and Nuuk.
And due to our location, we also have barge service for about four months in the summer season. We are ice free a little bit longer than that. But our commercial deliveries have to be March through September. And that's how we get most of our large freight and fuel. Next slide, please.
So our village here is Unalakleet. It's largely Alaska Native. There's less than 800 folks here. The 400 miles from the road system means we're basically up an hour and a half from Anchorage by plane.
Depending on the tailwind, it could be an hour and 15 minutes. And we're about 150 air miles from Nome, which is the largest community in our region. It's about 3,600 people in Nome, which does act as a barge freighting hub. But we do have regular air service from Anchorage. And for our project, which we'll be describing today, most of our freight also did come by air.
Unalakleet Valley Electric has been around since 1961 but fully independent and operating under our own certificate only since 2011. So as the electrical provider in the community, we did partner with Unalakleet Native Corporation, who was our primary applicant in this project. They are the large landholder. They're Alaska—not regional corporation, but Alaska corporation. And next slide, please.
And one of the reasons why we work so closely with UNC or Unalakleet Native Corporation is because we lease our land from them for our wind farm site. And their shareholders are our members.
And the Tribal members who are members of the Native Village of Unalakleet also are members of our cooperative.
So our entities work very closely together. And one of our major goals, when we went out and built a wind farm in 2009 and 2010, was to reduce the amount of diesel fuel we import. We are seeing fuel savings. But they haven't lived up to their predicted benefits.
And there were some technical reasons why. And this project helped get us over some of those hurdles. So, as you can see here, this is one of our bucket trucks.
We're doing service up on the hill. This is about 2 miles out of town. So we have a significant run from our powerhouse to the wind farm.
And because of that development, a road was built. The site was prepared. Power lines were put in. And then there was additional development along the route where residential and commercial services have relocated.
So UNC, as I said before, also provided some construction financing in terms of a loan to build our wind farm. Our wind farm, once again, was a large project. The majority of it was grant-funded by the state of Alaska's Renewable Energy Fund and our local CDQ group. And then our members funded one-sixth of that project. Next slide, please.
So some of the reasons why we were only saving, on average, 60,000 to 70,000 gallons per year instead of 100,000 gallons per year as predicted was because of a line voltage. And we were able to learn that our line capacity and reactive power through a couple studies was being impacted and reducing our efficiencies. So our settings or the barriers that we were able to identify was a contradictory setting, where at our line voltage, which was 41, 60 volts, why, we would have reactive power rise with increasing wind output.
And our power factor then would also be depressed. And we were getting situations where we had to run a second gen set. So we were in this situation where the more wind we had, the more of our support we required. And a capacitor bank was tried in 2010. And it failed. It didn't perform as modeled.
So VAr support was provided only by diesels. So this impacted our efficiency. As you can see here in our line notes, line losses were high at maximum wind output.
So as a result, we curtailed wind in operational mode many, many times when we didn't have confidence in our wind turbines. An electric boiler was put in line, which was to help absorb some of the rapid changes that would happen during high-wind events. But even then, a rapid shutdown at the wind farm would cause a shutdown on our grid. So we'll talk a little bit about those impacts later on.
Next slide, please.
So these barriers were identified not only our efficiency and our line loss issues but also looking at our controls and our switchgear. And these problems were identified at the outset. In 2019 and 2018, we had a technical assistance grant from Office of Indian Energy, also with our regional Tribal nonprofit [INAUDIBLE].
They funded an on-the-ground assessment, where we had some experts come in. And in two days with boots on the ground, they were able to inspect our setting, look at our setups, look at our operations, and develop some recommendations. So they essentially gave us a snapshot and then identified the problems that we had.
And these are the barriers that we've described in the prior slide in this one. So we had some big gaps in our SCADA. We had some outdated controls. And all these experts coming together helped us with identifying that grid stability was an issue and needed to be addressed.
So we started to look at, how could this grid stability be remedied? What's the black box? Is there a solution out there? And there was. So next slide, please.
We identified that with some changes and largely the upgrade in voltage between the wind farm and the power plant, we could use some of our existing equipment, make it operate better with the goal of getting a single genset operation. And then once our grid was stable, not only would we realize additional fuel savings but we'd be set for more renewables and energy storage. Next slide, please.
So with our technical assistance grant and the group of experts, once again, they were in engineering. They were in operations. They were in infrastructure and energy. They were able to identify that we should upgrade our SCADA, get trending so we could track these events better, we can replace some controllers, modernize our control objective.
And the big thing was and the most expensive part was upgrade our voltage essentially three times. So get to an industry standard on our transformers, which, once again, we were a legacy voltage back from when Department of Defense operated sections of our grid. And uniquely, the FAA operated sections of our grid.
And those transformers were getting harder and harder to find. And they had to be custom built if you wanted them new. So replacing and upsizing transformers is a big deal. And by doing this, we could reach these other outcomes. And the big thing was, once again, reduce our reactive power so we could use wind more often. Next slide, please.
So as part of this project, we were able to leverage some additional funds from Alaska Energy Authority. We were part of one of their rural power system upgrades. So we were able to get new Woodwards, as you can see here in our plant. We're able to get new controls, upgrade our trending software and additional metering inside the powerhouse. Next slide.
So to that end—next slide—we could monitor demand, gather more power data, and then—next slide—get the trending. So we can look at events, alarms. We don't have a smart grid. We don't have smart meters yet. But we're making our powerhouse a lot smarter. Next slide, please.
And this was another big win in our setup. We have Northwind 100. We have six of them. They put out 100 kWs each. And we were able to make some changes by working with the firm that maintains our turbines, power grid partners, and engineering firm, electric power systems.
We're able to get them to make changes at the turbine level and make some adjustments to have our turbines create or consume VArs and make some key setting changes. Next slide, please. So with those setting changes at the turbine and a new segment of line being built here in Unalakleet, though the line work was the most expensive piece, the two working together definitely got our power factor much, much better. And we were able to deal with our reactive power and get into one diesel mode.
But just some notes here, right here on the pictures, some of the challenges with our build, like Port Heiden, we do have permafrost in some sections. We did have to build a new section underground line. We had to hang it from a bridge. And then we had to do some pole straightening. And we're asked to replace over 50 transformers.
So with our new overhead line—next slide please—we were able to bypass a line that was often inundated and would cause overhead line failures. So we were able to reroute in this picture here in the bottom right corner—there's a 90-degree dashed line. We were able to eliminate this section in the bottom of that grid.
So with a new underground section of about a mile, we were able to keep our hillside community, which is outside the main city, which is located on the coast—it's in the hills. We were able to keep over—well, it's over 52 residential meters and four commercial facilities online and high-water events, when normally we'd have to deactivate because of infrastructure that would get flooded out.
And those 100-year storms or 50-year storms are becoming more frequent. We were inundated by Typhoon Merbok, which ravaged Alaska West Coast. But because of this project, when ex Typhoon Halong hit last year, we were able to keep our hillside energized the entire high-water event.
Even the water came in and flooded our low-lying areas. We weren't reliant on this segment and with ground-mounted transformers in these low spots. So we didn't have to de-energize. So that was a big win. So essentially, this project built about a mile of new line. But it upgraded over 3 and a half miles of line. Next slide.
So in terms of outages, one of our takeaways is we definitely had fewer of them in 2020 than in 2026. And when we did have outages, they were shorter duration. Most of our outages are brief. A lot of this is, once again, caused by wind stability.
And prior to our construction completion in 2024 December, we would have outages caused by wind turbines and the diesel instability, once again, rapid shutdowns that would happen too quickly or if we didn't have confidence in our electric boiler or those controls. This one outlier way up here in the midsection of the map in June, this was a major generator failure. So this one is not wind-related.
But like I said, we have 34, 56 generators that put out 475 kW each. We operate them basically in pairs. We wanted to be in one diesel mode. This project got us there.
But when they're both running and one fails, they share some cooling and lubrication systems. So we had cross contamination. That's why we had such a long outage. Next slide.
So a reduction in outages was a takeaway from our project. We felt like we met that goal. Our wind turbine usage is up slightly. We have had maintenance issues with our turbines.
But overall, you can see this December highlight here for 2024. That's when our construction was complete. And we did get great output, initially 63% penetration of wind.
Our goal was 50. We weren't able to maintain that. We do see the seasonal dip in wind regimes in our summer. We are windiest in the fall and winter months. Annually, we did see more wind in 2025 than 2026. However, our demand did grow during that time as well. Next slide, please.
So in talking about some of these outcomes of wind, this graph is comparing two particular months. And I'd like to have Leah talk a little bit about our one diesel operation and how to interpret a couple of these next couple slides.
Once again, Leah is an engineer. She's also a grant manager with Deerstone and help guide us through this process. So Leah, could you take a control here for a short time?
LEAH OLSEN: No problem, Reese. Hi, my name is Leah Olsen. I'm with Deerstone Consulting, as Reese said. So we've got a bunch of different data here and a bunch of different colors. So stick with me.
In the upper section, we're showing October 2023 full months’ worth of data in the lower November 2025. So just showing a representative month from before the power system upgrades were completed and after the power system upgrades were completed.
Each one of those rows, represented by a separate color, is one of evacs for diesel gensets. So you can see it's repeated for each month. And so what we're trying to display here is exactly what Reese was describing, where in the time after the power system upgrades were completed and the control set points were changed on the Northwind 100s UVEC has found that they're able to operate in this one diesel mode very often in windy months.
And so it's a little bit hard to see on this scale. But if you look at that first row, you can see basically—if you don't see any color there, that's an indication that the generator is offline, is not producing any kW. And then anywhere you see data or color, the generator is online and producing data.
And so if you look at that lower graph showing November and look right where that line is, you'll see that at that time, there's only the green generator has a kW value there, showing that they're in single generation mode. And so it's a little bit hard to parse at this scale. But if you look at the upper graph, you'll see that there are many times where there are two gensets running together.
And then sometimes, even a third comes into the mix. For example, you've got the green and the pink together there. And then yellow is popping on and off. Whereas in that lower graph, after the power system upgrades were complete, UVEC is able to operate very often in just the single generator mode. Next slide, please.
Another dense data graph here for you all. So this graph is showing a 24-hour period that was in November 2025—so after the power system upgrades were complete. And this is aiming at, again, showing what the improvements are in the power system stability based on the changes that were made.
So if we start with the black lines, you can see that at that moment in time where that dashed vertical line is, we've got 525 kW of wind power across the operating turbines. So it's quite windy. I'm guessing they have five turbines online at that moment in time.
And so this would be one of the types of moments where UVEC would, in the past, have had to preemptively shut down their turbines, either some or all of them. And now, with the power system upgrades that have occurred, you can see that there is a power factor response, as shown in the red there.
And so in that very windy moment, the power factor is about 0.7. And you can see below that, just similar to the previous slide, we're showing each of the four gensets there. And we've got only the blue one showing 192 kW, whereas the other three are fully off.
And so this was one of the worst moments we were able to find in some of the windy 2025 months. And really, this graph is meant to exemplify that the system is able to remain stable and deal with very high generation from the wind turbines in this point in time after the power system upgrades have been completed. With that, I'll pass it back to Reese to wrap it up. Next slide, please.
REESE HUHTA: Thank you, Leah. And thanks for sharing that explanation. As we have wrapped this project up, my board members of which there are—like I said, we're a member-owned cooperative. And our board members live here. They experience what I experienced. I live here, too.
The big kicker for doing this project was to get our fuel savings up. And we have confidence we're going to get there by keeping our grid stable and keeping our turbines turning and not doing manual curtailments. And one diesel mode is just a step.
We do want to be diesels off. But we couldn't get there. And we didn't want to put any of the funds of this particular project and our financing in and into batteries without us being stable. We now feel like we can take another step.
So this one diesel mode helps us in terms of budget by extending our overhaul intervals. It helps us stretch those interval periods from every three years to every five or four. I should say four. I don't want to be too overly optimistic. We're seeing the decrease in fuel but also decrease in oil consumption or simply less runtime.
So I do want to definitely thank DOE for helping us get through this project. I don't recall if we had a financial slide in here. But this was essentially a $1.2 million project, and the DOE's share was 53%.
And our share for our members is 47%. And by having the DOE and Office of Indian Energy help us with this project, we were able to do it faster than we could have done it on our own. And more economically, we did have some challenges, like Port Heiden did with COVID. We also changed engineers in the project due to a death.
We lost our lead utility engineer. We did have logistical challenges, too, with long-lead-time items. We had to wait over a year for transformers. So it wasn't easy. But we do appreciate the support we got from the DOE. Thank you.
MIKE VEHAR: Thanks so much, Reese and Leah. Great job and great project. We appreciate it.
And so for our final presentation, I would like to introduce Ken Ahmann. Ken is the chief operating officer at Colusa Indian Energy. He will be presenting for the Colusa Indian Community Council's Reese Housing Power Project. So Ken, go ahead when you're ready. And next slide, please.
KEN AHMANN: Thanks, Mike. So I'm Ken. I'm the Tribal Utility Authority director for the Colusa Indian Community in Northern California. I'm also the chief operating officer of Colusa Indian Energy, which is a Section 17 for-profit enterprise owned wholly by the Colusa Tribe, with the intent of exporting our decades of microgrid expertise to any other Tribes that might benefit from it. Next slide, please.
Quick outline of the presentation. I'll give you just a brief summary on the Tribe that I've worked for over 20 years, history of the Tribal utility authority that I helped the Tribe to create, and then the two grant-funded projects. One is the Reese Road Housing Power Project, which is just basically an extension of our existing microgrid.
So we built the first Tribally owned modern microgrid in the country back in 2004 and have been voluntarily operating it off grid for two decades. And so anytime there's new construction on this portion of the reservation that's fed by the microgrid, we are the utility and have to find the funding to be able to expand the utility infrastructure. And so that's what that project is for.
And then the second project is the Packer Ranch Solar PV Project. This is a grid tied up in a NEMA agreement with the IOU on fee land. So I'll get more in depth into both of those here shortly. Next slide, please.
A little bit about the Tribe that I've worked for. It's the Colusa Indian Community. It's actually 115 members now. It's the Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians with a total of just over 160 residents on reservation.
The Tribe resides in the heart of Northern California's ag land on a noncontiguous reservation totaling 520 acres along the Sacramento River, about an hour north of Sacramento in California. The Tribe also owns over 14,000 acres of fee land, and over 4,600 of those are actually pending trust right now.
The Tribe owns and operates the Colusa Casino Resort, which is a modest gaming facility powered, heated, and cooled completely by the Tribal Utility Authority's cogeneration power plant, which is really the heart of our 9.1-megawatt microgrid. We have had zero power interruptions at all on reservation now in over 14 years, making this little Tribe a global leader in utility uptime. Next slide, please.
A brief history of the Tribal Utility Authority itself. The Tribe created an electrical department back in 2003, staffed with journeyman electricians, primarily just low-voltage guys and a couple of apprentices. The cogen power plant, the microgrid itself, was commissioned in 2005. And so that was a separate department of the Tribe.
And so in 2021, we officially formed the Tribal Utility Authority to unify the resources and leadership of both of these departments. That team includes the director, managers, technicians, operators, journeyman electricians, welders, pipefitters, fabricators, and apprentices today. Next slide, please.
This is a little bit of a timeline I'll go through explaining what we've already built before these projects so that at least one of these projects makes more sense. So between 2004 and 2005, the casino resort was expanded. The hotel was built.
At that time, the reservation was experiencing over 50 power outages per year from the local utility PG&E. And so instead of handing over 10-plus million dollars to the IOU to upgrade their own infrastructure with no performance guarantee, no Tribal ownership, the Tribe very progressively decided to invest in their own energy infrastructure. And that's when I was hired to scope this project out and to bring a cogen to life.
Originally, the microgrid was built to power the casino resort, including casino hotel, Tribal administrative campus, and actually also the Tribe's water treatment plant, wastewater treatment plant, and medical clinic. This originally consisted of four 1-megawatt Jenbacher natural-gas-fired engines and a pair of Thermax absorption chillers to provide all of the air conditioning to the resort for free as a waste byproduct of generating our own electricity. Next slide, please.
So between 2005 and 2013, only we're burning natural gas for our source of power generation. And so we got a renewable energy mandate that came down from the Tribal council to look at investing in some type of renewables. And so we went to this Office of Indian Energy and got a 90% grant to begin phase 1 of our solar PV project, which added a total of 600 kilowatts of PV to the microgrid.
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2017 to 2018, the original gas engines were replaced. We added another pair of 1-megawatt gas engines. So now, our total gas engine capacity is 6 megawatts.
All of these engines are 100% hydrogen-ready. And we've got some pretty cool hydrogen projects underway on reservation as well that I'm happy to chat with anybody about offline. Next slide, please.
2019, we actually completed our microgrid solar PV project with another 90% grant from the Office of Indian Energy. Thank you very much again. So this brought our total PV capacity up to 1.1 megawatts, which actually accounts for roughly a third of the annual load consumption on the microgrid. Next slide, please.
2020, this is the project that I'm most proud of. This is when we completely evicted PG&E from the entire reservation. So now, we don't only power the casino resort, Tribal admin campus, and water plants, et cetera. We also power all of the Tribal members' homes—all businesses, gas station, tobacco shop, agricultural loads. Literally every single electrical load light switch across the entire reservation is powered 100% by our own microgrid, owned and operated under the Tribal Utility Authority.
This project was also grant-funded, 90% by the Office of Indian Energy. This was after nearly a decade of negotiations, I guess you could call them that, with PG&E to try to purchase their dilapidated, poorly maintained 50-year-old overhead distribution lines across the reservation that fell through. So we trenched in parallel new underground infrastructure with the help of the DOE. Next slide, please.
In '22, we completed our absorption chiller expansion. And we began our central battery UPS system expansion as well. Next slide, please.
So there's all the background. And here, there's some details about the projects themselves. So like I said earlier, the Reese Road Housing Power Project is an expansion of our existing underground distribution system for our microgrid. And so this little graphic on the left shows the far left.
That lightning bolt is where the cogen is. You can see for…I guess they're supposed to be arrays. That's where the parking canopies are.
All of the yellow is existing power circuit underground at 12,470 volts. And then everything in red was that the proposed expansion of that existing distribution. And then the photo on the right actually shows the new homes that we were able to power with this project. Next slide, please.
The objective—expand, again, our existing medium-voltage distribution to seven new homes. These are new construction, with the addition of medium-voltage cabling, step-down transformers, smart meters, and street lighting. So there were two—or I'm sorry, it was 10—new street lights that were installed along Reese Road. It was pitch black out there before. So that was also a part of this project.
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Project summary: the total project cost was a little over $1.1 million, with about 57% of it ending up being grant-funded. Construction began October of '23, was completed less than a year later. Seven new homes on Reese Road are now powered by the Tribal Utility Authority's microgrid. And 10 new street lights have been installed.
And so what's unique for us is that we are the utility. And so there's nobody else to call. So the IOU has the Tribe in their service territory. But we evicted them. So we are 100% responsible from the point of power generation through distribution all the way to the meter on the side of the home. And so all of that infrastructure was accounted for in this project. Next slide, please.
The second grant-funded project is…this was a first for us. So like I said earlier, the Tribe owns over 14,000 acres of fee land. It's primarily used for agriculture. So the Tribe grows almonds and walnuts and rice. The Tribe has its own walnut huller. It's a part owner in their own rice mill. And so a lot of ag activity.
And ag well pumps use a lot of electricity. And they also come with significant demand charges, standby charges from the utilities. And so since these loads are not on trust land—not yet, anyways—we came up with this project just as strictly a cost savings for the Tribe to offset as much of the utility bills as we could, which were significant. Next slide, please.
So these are actually two separate projects. So a very small array that was also grid-tied for a single Tribal member's home and Tribally owned ag shop, that is 34 kW DC. The other one was for the larger project offsetting. I believe it was eight—yeah, eight ag well pumps that were all contiguous to one another. And that was over 850 kilowatt DC array.
And so we interconnected the solar array to offset the uses for one shop, one home to reduce energy costs, reliance on fossil-fuel-burning power sources, and ultimately increase Tribal self-reliance and Tribe-owned power-generating assets.
Now, since these loads…well, specifically this home and shop are still connected to PG&E. If PG&E loses power, these guys lose power. So they don't have the same uptime that the microgrid has but significant cost savings. So that was the primary purpose of this project. Next slide, please.
So the summary of this one is total project cost was over $1.7 million. So before the grant was applied, it had a five-year ROI. So PG&E has some of the highest energy costs on the planet, honestly. It's the third highest in the country, third only to utilities in Alaska and Hawaii.
So you can pay between 40% and $0.50 per kilowatt-hour for power in this service territory. So coming up with a clean ROI for an aggregated solar array like this is very straightforward. The project was awarded to the Tribes own energy company, Colusa Indian Energy, for this large array at over 850 kW.
And then we don't do residential small stuff. So we hired a company called CMCO to complete the small residential array. Next slide, please.
So current project status for the Packer Ranch solar PV project…we've generated almost…well, today, probably over 1.4 million kWh. 100% of the usage has been offset by solar.
So it's a one-to-one under this NEMA agreement with the utility. So 1 kWh generated offsets a kWh that's consumed. And so it's virtually wiped out all of the consumption bills from the utility company, which is saving the Tribe a significant amount of money.
Construction timeline. This one started in June 25. It only took us four months to build it. It took us six months to wait on the county. We had to deal with the county again because this was on fee land.
Interconnection for the large array…all interconnection documents have been submitted to PG&E. We're now awaiting PG&E to finish work on their side for the permission to operate. It sounds like that's going to come here in just the next few weeks.So overall, both projects—incredibly successful. It achieved the objectives. We were able to complete them on time and under budget and without really any significant hurdles. So I feel bad hearing about the typhoons and the ice sheets. And I feel guilty.
For our sake, these projects were very straightforward. And the Tribe is ultimately very grateful to the Office of Indian Energy for their support. Next slide, please.
That's all I've got. Here's my contact info. If anybody wants to chat about these projects or any of your own projects, I'm happy to take calls or emails anytime from anybody in Indian Country. Thank you very much.
MIKE VEHAR: All right. Thanks so much, Ken, and to all our other presenters. We appreciate it. We do have some time now for questions.
So our presenters have graciously agreed to stick around and answer some questions from you all.
And as I said earlier, we'll cover some questions that were submitted during registration as well as some that came in through the Q&A feature throughout the presentation. So we'll do our best to get to as many as we can in the next 20 minutes or so.
And so, Ken, I'm going to throw the first question your way. And this is probably taking you way back to when with this whole thing began. From feasibility to licensing, funding, and maintenance, what are some of the essential steps to starting a private community microgrid? I know that's a big question.
KEN AHMANN: Yeah, that's a big question. That's loaded for sure. So I think number one for us is just identifying what the actual goal is. Is it about resiliency? Is it about cost savings? Is it about Tribal member workforce development? Is it economic development? Is it flexing sovereignty or a combination of any or all of those?
And so that helps us dial in what type of system we would propose. Funding is always the biggest hurdle, honestly, and the Colusa Tribe did all of this themselves up until this office assisted with that first project back in 2014 for that solar PV array. And so there are options. Especially if you're living in California service territory, it's pretty easy, honestly, to come up with a project that is financeable and is going to save the Tribe money.
I think finding the right partner…I think there's 1,000 to 1 consultants versus people who actually build stuff, it seems like, in this space. And so finding…obviously, I'm going to plug us, Colusa Indian Energy. But there are other good partners out there.
And then the other thing I would mention is take advantage of the free resources that exist. First, if you're just getting started, reach out to the Office of Indian Energy. Reach out to the National Lab of the Rockies, the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy. There are a lot of organizations, federal and philanthropic, that provide free Tribal utility authority formation advice or microgrid basic pre-engineering planning work and stuff like that.
And then the last thing is, if you can, get your own energy expert on staff. And that's easier said than done for a lot of Tribes, obviously. But if you can, I would really recommend it.
I think there aren't enough of us working directly for Tribes. And you can save a lot of time and money if you have somebody on staff that you can rely on. And then long term, you're building out this institutional knowledge that otherwise you would have to rely on consultants and contractors for. So hopefully, that answers the question.
MIKE VEHAR: Yeah, that's great. Thanks so much. I know it was a big one. Next question I'm going to throw to Reese and Leah.
We have a question of, where did you source the wind turbines that are there in Unalakleet, noting that they were smaller capacity than usual?
REESE HUHTA: Yeah, Mike, our turbines were manufactured by Northern Power Systems and their Northwind 100s. One thing to note is that they are no longer supporting those turbines. So there are a few around Alaska in the field. And we had to go to another party to continue our annual maintenance and get support.
And we're not alone in this. UVEC has some. And KEA has some. Excuse me, KEA might have phased theirs out. But I ramble. Could you talk a little bit more about that, Leah?
LEAH OLSEN: For Reese, I think, obviously, it's a really big deal, the O&M on these small turbines around remote Alaska, because they're hard to maintain and easy to break. Like you said, Reese, there are those Northwind 100 turbines and a variety of places, also including one in Deering, Alaska, and two in Buckland, Alaska. And PowerGrid partners is the name of the company that's picked up where the original Northwind 100 folks left off. They are still providing support within Alaska to those turbines.
MIKE VEHAR: Great. And since I got you guys here, do you know how tall the hub height is on those turbines?
REESE HUHTA: 30 meters?
MIKE VEHAR: Great. Thank you.
REESE HUHTA: Yeah, 30 meters.
MIKE VEHAR: Appreciate it. Tatum, I had a question here I think I may know the answer to. The question was, does the million-dollar project cover the two wind turbines and battery that you all were looking to incorporate in the future?
And I believe the answer is that the $1 million is the project that you are working on completing with the electrification and that the potential wind turbines and battery were not a part of that. Is that correct?
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: You are correct. Man, if we could get those wind turbines in with the million bucks, that'd be amazing. But no, that's totally separate.
MIKE VEHAR: OK, good. Yeah, that's what I thought. Ken, back to you. Good question here. Did Colusa have to pay PG&E for any of the infrastructure when evicting the utility? And to clarify, are there now no connections to power outside of the reservation?
KEN AHMANN: No, we don't maintain an outside power connection anymore. So we run 100% isolated from the grid. And the Tribe paid $0 to PG&E for them to take all of their equipment off of the reservation. PG&E tried to make the Tribe pay.
So PGA sent a senior VP to my office at one point telling me that they're not in the business of handing over a single square foot of service territory to anybody. And then they got a lesson in Tribal sovereignty. And so then the answer was, fine, we'll sell this junk to you but it's going to be 10x the fair market value. And so that's when we went back to the DOE and deployed this plan. And so at the end of the day, PG&E was told to take all of their equipment out and at no cost to the Tribe.
MIKE VEHAR: Thank you. Back to Unalakleet, I have a question here. Are you all looking to add battery backup to help stabilize wind loads.
REESE HUHTA: Yeah, Mike, we're looking at adding batteries to go to diesels off. And we're looking and investigating. We're seeking out some additional funding sources.
But we're looking at not hours’ worth of storage but, once again, to help stabilize our situation. We only need an hour or two of storage so we could do maintenance on gensets or spin up our generators if the wind does drop out. So we're actively seeking some funding through federal and state agencies and also trying to shop it to our banks.
MIKE VEHAR: Great. Thank you so much, Reese. And then I have a question for Port Heiden, Tatum. So obviously connecting these Tribal facilities to reliable electricity is a great step for the community. Just curious, how has this project helped the community economically with local businesses or job opportunities or just daily life? Can you speak to that?
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: Why? Why again, Mike? Why? Everything just left my brain. So this one is just the next step. We want to be able to get everything a little bit more reliable. And right now, it's not there. But you said it in the question. Mike, why'd you do this to me and put me on the spot again?
MIKE VEHAR: I could see from the list of buildings, for example. It looked like there was several— including a food bank—there were several very important buildings electrified or that will be electrified once this is completed. So I assume the impact is pretty legitimate for the community.
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: It's already there. So there was buildings that had no power and just to…so they can have some heat and electric. It makes a big difference. For the food bank building, yes, who doesn't want to have lights on?
MIKE VEHAR: Right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much.
TATUM CHRISTENSEN: Terrible, don't do this again.
MIKE VEHAR: I've got a few for Colusa here. So Ken, have you integrated supercapacitors for grid stabilization?
KEN AHMANN: No, I'm interested in having…I saw that question. I think he should reach out through our website and get a meeting set up with our business development team. It's worth talking about.
What we integrated was a central battery UPS system. So between our generation assets and our distribution system, we have a four-megawatt central battery UPS that backs up all of the loads on the microgrid. So on the downstream side of that battery system, we have perfect unity, power factor, perfect voltage regulation, perfect frequency, the cleanest power on Earth.
Supercapacitors are valuable in a lot of applications. We haven't deployed them at our home microgrid. But we've looked at them for other projects. So yeah, worth talking about for sure.
MIKE VEHAR: And then just to follow up, I have one more here. Was Colusa able to terminate the right of ways that PG&E had their equipment located within?
KEN AHMANN: Yes. Yeah, well, I could talk all day about the legal aspects of this and what a nightmare it was. But we call PG&E Pacific Greed and Extortion for a reason. These guys are comically terrible IOU.
And they've gotten a lot better. I have to give them that. When it comes to actually trying to interface with Tribes, I would say the last three or four years, they've really made this big effort. But they're still awfully expensive. And hopefully, they're treating Tribes better than they did the Colusa Tribe back when we were negotiating all of this.
MIKE VEHAR: OK, cool. Thank you. For Unalakleet, are there any trade-offs when changing the wind turbines to power factor mode?
REESE HUHTA: I couldn't find my button there for a moment, Mike. No, they were all wins.
MIKE VEHAR: Great. And then just to follow up on that, Reese, what was the most significant challenge in upper…in upgrading Unalakleet's SCADA and high-voltage lines? And you talked about it earlier. But how did these improve outage frequency and duration?
REESE HUHTA: Well, our big wins were being able to keep our grid fully energized during high-water events. And annually, we'd have some outages on the hillside because of high-water events. Keeping everybody online was a huge win to us and then not having these intermittent outages because of too much wind or overcoming what our boiler could absorb.
And everybody likes their power seamless. And I am quite envious of Colusa. But we're pretty used to it. We take it for granted until it's not there.
So that was one of our biggest wins, not having those long outages because of weather events and then not having these short events that happened just because we have too much wind and our diesels aren't ready. We can respond quicker now.
And our operations are easier for our operators. We're a small team. We have three people in the powerhouse, not 24 hours a day. We're not staffed around the clock. There's one shift per day.
So we have coverage with three individuals who work in our plant. And they do everything from generation to distribution. And we rely on outside contractors for major mechanical and major line work.
But other than that, we have two people in our office. So we're a real small team. The biggest challenge was dealing with contractors, long lead times, sourcing materials.
One of our big challenges is we went with a contractor who was a for-profit subsidiary of Alaska Native Corporation. And they have a great Alaska team. However, their power team is in New Jersey
And they never set foot in our community.
And they relied heavily on their subs. And that was challenging. It was stressful. But we got through it. But yeah, right now, we're ready for the next step.
We've got some challenges. Our city is a big energy user for us. They operate the wastewater and water systems. I'm thankful we're not a joint utility. We're an independent member-owned co-op and powers what we do. But there's some big efficiencies that we could help them with if we can work together. So there's a lot of opportunities to take this to the next step, to the next level.
MIKE VEHAR: All right. Thanks so much, Reese. Well, thanks, everybody, for being here today. That's the time that we have. Next slide, please.
So yeah, thank you everyone for joining today. We invite you to stay connected with us after the presentation. Please subscribe to our email updates. And follow us on social media.
And don't forget to check out the IE-Exchange website, which is ie-exchange.energy.gov, for details on that open Office of Indian Energy funding opportunity. And again, the application deadline is July 24, 2026. So you still have plenty of time.
And you can connect to our office via phone, email, or by visiting our website. And you can also follow us on social media. The Office of Indian Energy is on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Next slide, please.
And a special thanks again to our presenters, Tatum, Reese, Leah, and Ken, for taking the time to share your exciting energy projects with us. We're really happy to be working together with your communities on these projects that are revolutionizing energy independence and reducing energy costs in your communities.
We'd also like to thank the Office of Indian Energy's leadership and webinar team for pulling this program review miniseries together. Thanks so much, everyone, and have a great day.