How PlanitWorks is Going to Modernize Tribal Communities and HBCUs
What if a nation struggling with reducing its heavy carbon footprint, an affordable housing deficit, and substandard energy efficiencies could tackle all three at the same time?
Well, it can and we’re going to do it.
The ingredients? Some serious outside-the-box thinking and a marriage of innovative technologies.
Our testbeds? Where affordable housing and energy efficiencies are at their worst: Native American reservations and HBCUs. If we can do it there, we can do it anywhere. And by ‘we’ we mean the nation.
A Game of Leapfrog
A cornerstone to innovation, economic growth, and prosperity is communication. With it, a diverse array of decentralized people are able to get things done. Without it, communities remain isolated and left to their own devices.
Across virtually the entirety of the 20th century, Africa, India, and China lacked access to telecommunication landlines. As recently as 2000, for example, Manhattan enjoyed more ‘fixed line penetration’ than the whole of sub-saharan Africa.
Rather than invest countless billions erecting poles and stringing tens of thousands of miles of transmission lines, these countries and their investors opted to move straight to mobile. Up went cell towers and into the hands of billions went mobile devices to connect to them.
By leapfrogging costly, increasingly outdated landlines, these regions were able to bypass earlier technologies and the costs that came with them.
All that was needed to fuel this revolution: forward-looking vision and innovative technology.
Which brings us back to affordable housing, energy efficiency, and decarbonization.
Housing and In-Powering the Nation’s Disadvantaged Communities
America has its share of poor people too. And it should come as no surprise these communities struggle with a lack of affordable housing and outdated, inefficient, polluting energy systems. Which got us to thinking, what if we could leapfrog intermediate technologies and systems to fast-track these communities into smart, energy-efficient homes they could afford?
So that’s the vision. The innovation?
We will concentrate not only where the need is greatest, but also where economies of scale can be practiced and results clearly measured. Translation: we’ll initially focus on tribal communities and HBCUs. Here’s how we intend to do it:
- Housing: We’ll leverage pre-fabrication technologies and patented insulated paneling systems to construct affordable homes, dormitories, and administration buildings at half the cost and twice the speed of more conventional approaches. Roofing systems will be pre-fabricated for solar panel installations.
- Efficiency: In addition to those insulation standards, we’ll incorporate rooftop solar with community microgrids to export energy back to the grid and ensure 24/7 supply.
- Decarbonization: We’ll either retrofit existing plant tech with modern heat pump systems or altogether replace them. In both instances, net-zero emissions are the goal, not the wish.
We can provide more detail on these with an upcoming white paper. But for now we’re stealing a page from mobile tech and planning to leapfrog today’s outdated affordable housing and energy programs to move some of the nation’s poorest communities to the forefront of what is possible.
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We’re excited to announce that Pasture Voltaics LLC and its unique SunTracker technology have joined the PlanitWorks partner family.
Using raised, high-tensile cables positioned nine feet above the ground to control a solar grid array to track the sun, SunTracker enables ranchers, farmers, Native American tribes, and other entities with vested land management interests to:
- Provide green energy development
- Protect their herds from excessive heat
- Regenerate land
- Feed power back to the grid
The elevated, cabled solar canopy is particularly ideal for livestock, because they provide badly needed shade (for animals and the land), thereby reducing stress on the animals and mitigating evaporation.
A typical 1,200-acre installation generates up to 200MW of electricity. Additionally, the cabling systems are based on well-known bridge-building principles, enabling them to withstand the kinds of high winds typical on open ranges.
While Pasture Voltaics does the actual instllations, PlanitWorks is managing all development efforts including planning, permitting, and working with ranchers.
To learn more contact us for a free consultation.
Federal hurdles, including onerous fees and development delays, are seriously hampering tribal nations’ efforts to implement ambitious alternative energy projects that could generate reliable power, new jobs, clean energy, and massive new economic opportunities.
Although the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) committed hundreds of billions to support clean energy initiatives across the country, a perfect storm of interconnection requirements, a high volume of complex interconnection requests, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) fees to remain in the development queue have all conspired to create a logjam in the system.
This has proved particularly challenging for many tribes, which are looking to alternative energy solutions,(e.g., solar, wind, and geothermal) as reliable sources of power rather than purely green power initiatives.
“Tribes are unfairly being lumped into the same pool as speculative developers,” says Brian McLaughlin, CEO of PlanitWorks. “At the end of the day, these communities simply want access to reliable power. Understandably, they’d like to take charge of their own energy destinies.”
Big Fees Are Impeding Progress
Per FERC’s Order 2023, within 14 to 30 days, all interconnection requests must be accompanied by a commercial readiness deposit of $5 million (reduced from an original $7.5 million). These fees are designed to limit speculative requests from developers that are actually unprepared to perform the work or that abruptly withdraw (the $5 million would cover withdrawal penalties).
But for most tribes, coming up with that kind of money on such short notice is all but impossible. And to reiterate, the tribes aren’t interested in speculating, they’re interested in generating reliable power.
In its August 2023 report to Congress, DOE’s Office of Indian Energy released the results of a tribal survey showing that 72% of tribes had no ownership or control of their electrical infrastructure. The survey also revealed that tribes suffered an average of 10.5 power outages per year compared to a national average of just 1.6 annual outages.
In other words, far from dabbling in speculative bidding for interconnection opportunities, the tribes simply want access to, and some modicum of control over, a reliable power source.
“If you have homes that don’t have electricity in them, do you believe that they’re really thinking about clean energy,” asks Onna Labeu, the Indigenous Power & Light Fund’s managing director and the former director of the Office of Indian Economic Development at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Labeu added that while it’s understandable the federal government is focused on reducing emissions, it’s important to remember “there are communities that are way ahead of everybody else, but the tribal communities are significantly behind.”
Reliable Power is the Focus
Ironically, Order 2023 is designed to accelerate the approval process for interconnection requests. According to a report by the Berkeley Lab of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the number of requests in recent years has exploded, most in solar, wind, and storage.
Today more than 10,000 projects (a 40% year over year increase) representing roughly 1,350GW of power generation and another 680GW of storage await approval to connect to the grid. Because part of that effort to speed up things includes the hefty fees to ward off speculative types, tribes are asking for an exemption.
“We have petitioned FERC on behalf of the tribes we serve to waive [or defer] the commercial readiness deposit … and to allow tribes to remain in the interconnection queue,” said Chéri Smith, CEO of the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy.
She noted that large alternative energy projects are “big economic engines” that not only could produce reliable sources of energy, but also generate new jobs and other economic opportunities.
Despite what may seem like a steady drumbeat of bad news regarding electric vehicle (EV) sales and leases, the industry is actually enjoying sufficient growth to suggest it soon may achieve a 10 percent share of the domestic auto industry.
Kelley Blue Book estimates EV sales in the third quarter hit 346,309 units, reflecting a year over year growth rate of 11%. EV sales also established new volume and market share records. Even Tesla, which struggled in the first half of the year, enjoyed strong growth in Q3.
Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox Automotive, acknowledged much of that growth was likely due to an aggressive slate of government and industry incentives and discounts (at 12%, industry incentives for EVs were significantly higher than the 7% offered for other vehicle types).
Electric vehicle incentives compared to the rest of the automative industry. Source: Cox Automotive
But Valdez Streaty believes that “as more affordable EVs enter the market and infrastructure improves, we can expect even greater adoption in the coming years.”
What is perhaps most important is that EV’s domestic market share climbed to 8.9% compared to last year’s rate of 7.8%, leading industry observers to believe a 10% market share may not be far off.