Power to the People

ABOUT THE PINE POINT COMMUNITY  

The Resilience Hub will be based at the 100% Native American Pine Point School,  co-located with an elderly community center, walking distance for 326 tribal members 

• The school community includes 82 students and 12 faculty members.  

• Pine Point School also serves as an emergency shelter for the Pine Point community, which experiences periodic storm outages caused by tornadoes, which are prevalent in the region.  

• By expanding solar generation capacity and adding

energy storage, the community hopes to enable  the school to serve as a community resilience hub,  improve the school’s energy savings, further  advance the White Earth Nation’s clean energy  and climate goals, and potentially serve as a pilot  project for future deployment of solar and storage  projects in the community. 

Pine Point Resilience Hub Starting in 2021, Akiing and 8th Fire Solar began a partnership with 10Power, a BIPOC and woman-owned solar company, and the Pine Point Elementary School to launch the ambitious Pine Point Resilience Hub. This project plans to address larger-scale energy poverty in the Pine Point community.

The Pine Point Community Resilience Hub will generate 809,068 kilowatt-hours of energy per year for a village currently facing economic challenges and will provide the community school with 100% of its electricity. This will completely negate the need to pay electric utility bills, which currently average around $71,600 and are paid to the Itasca Mantrap Cooperative. This project will also include backup batteries, ensuring the school and village have power during grid outages—an essential step to protect against harm caused by increasing blackouts during extreme weather events.

PROJECT: PINE POINT RESILIENCE HUB 

Solar plus battery storage will provide one full day of emergency backup power for the  community, year-round demand charge reduction for the school / community center and  potentially electric bill savings.  

Installation type: Ground-mount System Size: 500.8 kW-dc (350 kW-ac) PV in addition to  existing 21kW array and 2.76 MWh of energy storage  

Anticipated Annual Production: 696,700 kWh/year 

Phase: Shovel-ready, breaking ground June 2025

About the project

The project was installed in the fall of 2025, and is expected to provide the power fore the tribal school ! One of the project’s unique aspects is its use of solar panels made in Minnesota by Heliene in the Iron Range. Additionally, there is a strong commitment to training tribal members for both installation and maintenance, ensuring long-term sustainability and workforce development. The project was installed in October 2025, with hopes for a full connection and battery system by the end of the year. We have been working to negotiate a fair power purchase agreement with Itasca Mantrap Cooperative.

The Grid for the future

It was like that movie Back to the Future.  I traveled to a meeting with White Earth Tribal representatives, and 8th fire Solar to meet with some energy industry professionals in Minneapolis,  at OATI. OATI supplies software to manage the grid which moves electrical power around the country and around the world.    We discussed renewable energy- the future, and how local communities’ utilities and rural cooperatives are moving towards the sun and the wind for the future of power.   

 After the meeting, I traveled back to the reservation in a Ford Lightening, electric truck, I was in the backseat and two of my sons were in the front seat.  That’s the future.

What is the future of energy?  What do you want it to be?     Pine Point village on White Earth decided it wanted to have a little more control over the costs and future of energy.   This fall, Pine Point Elementary School, with l0 Power, 8th Fire Solar and Ziegler Energy installed 480 kw of solar power for the school- that’s a school that is l00% electric and serves one of the poorest communities in Minnesota. Their electric bill is whopping. Scheduled to  come on line by January of 2026, the project could  provide l00% of the school’s energy, and with battery backup  power, that school will keep the power going till the grid comes back up.  What’s wrong with that? 

For now, most of the power used by the school, and the White Earth community has been coming from some dirty coal plants in North Dakota, that have been spewing nasty stuff towards Minnesota, and a few big dam projects in Manitoba, which are destroying the northern river. That’s where fish, and migratory birds live. I’d like to move along. 

 On what my ancestors called the Scorched Path,  the bills will get bigger and the problem worse.  For a hundred years or so, economists and all have been saying Big is Best. But, more power outages, long inefficient transmission lines and generation which wastes about 61% of the energy between point of origin and use, is not a very reliable future. That’s why we need local power. 

 The White Earth tribal officials from the Tribal Utilities Commission and tribal planners went to see OATI, sort of the gurus of electric  grid. management. Simply stated, utilities power producers, and transmission entities need to move power around, turn off and on switches, “manage loads” and such,.

Computers and smart people operate the “ “smart grid”. 

With customers like Great River Energy, Ottertail Power Xcel  and others “OATI provides solutions for the operational challenges of energy providers in an industry that is constantly changing. Changes in technology, market demand, and regulations require utility companies to constantly adapt…” it says on their website.    That’s the future.   That’s being adaptable, or their words- having interoperability.  

The White Earth tribal staff and community members from 8th Fire Solar, and Akiing listened to these guys talk about the grids of the future.  That future grid is mostly renewable energy, and distributed energy, not all from centralized power plants.   That’s local generation, wind in a farm field, and community units called micro grids. 

The writing is on the wall, and we just all need to read.  This fall, the Federal Energy Regulatory Council reported, some 68% of the energy coming online in our region- is solar, with wind and batteries pushing that higher. And the majority of what’s getting retired is coal.  This region is called MISO,( Mid Continent Independent System Operators), and MISO is changing.

Despite attempts by the Trump administration to change the course of history, keeping a fifty-year-old plant that wastes lots of energy on life support doesn’t make any sense.   

It sure doesn’t make any sense for our communities.  Why should we pay for monopolized fossil fuel industries, when we can each bask in the sun. And, by the way, solar is a third less to put in than new coal, or some crazy mini nuclear plants on the Missouri River to feed a data center.   

Over there in OATI land, they had all sorts of charts and graphics, and what was clear is that the future is in these changes, and that most of the energy industry is embracing that.  What’s even better is the idea of using less energy. That’s what 8th Fire Solar is working on- reducing home heating bills by simple solar thermal panels.   Those can be installed on the south facing wall.  Heating bills can be reduced by up to 30% and considering that almost 40% of energy bills this time of year are heating, well that’ some savings.   

As the longest night of the year comes upon us, the sun will return, and I want to be ready. Let’s all work together to make a good future.  These rural cooperatives who serve us all can be part of making that future, and I think that these smart grid ideas, and community scaled projects are the power of the future.   

Pine Point and OATI are talking about the future of energy, right along with 8th Fire Solar, and as I sat there in the back of that electric Ford Lightning, headed back to the reservation, I realized that I want to be part of that future.    

Solar represents the largest share of new capacity additions in . . . MISO (67%).

Thank you for your interest and support of Akiing