Blogger's hometown of Elkton to host solar farm as wind power blows out

The cost of subsidizing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting, maintaining then removing and disposing of just one wind turbine eyesore bat and bird killer would take about six hundred subscribers to energy self-reliance. Microgrid technologies are destined to enhance tribal sovereignty, free communities from electric monopolies and net-metering only gives control back to utilities enabled by moral hazard. 

No corporate taxes, a compliant regulator, a dearth of environmental protection and cheap labor make South Dakota the perfect dumping ground for Earth killers like coal and eyesores like wind farms. 

Nevertheless, according to Earth hating Public Utilities Cartel Commissioner Chris Nelson the amount of wind power generation may have reached its plateau. In a 2019 interview with WNAX Radio Nelson said he believes there will be rapid development of solar power production facilities instead. But, the predicted shift toward solar, wind energy didn't stop entirely; major projects like the $400 million Crowned Ridge Wind Farm still moved forward around that timeframe. However, his prediction accurately foreshadowed a broader regional and national trend of diversifying renewable portfolios with rapid solar deployment to balance out the grid. 

Walworth County has a population of about 5,300 souls; it's rural, backwards and overwhelmingly Republican so Doral Renewables targeted slightly less primitive Brookings County for a solar farm instead.

Doral Renewables has much of the land it needs for a proposed 1,000-megawatt solar farm near Elkton in Richland and Elkton townships. “We’re at an endpoint regarding acquiring enough acreage to host the construction of the entire project,” Curtis Nordick, a senior development manager with Doral, told The Brookings Register in a recent interview. The proposed project has a lot of hoops to jump through at the state and local levels, including permitting processes, before it can even hope to break ground. But if it does, it’ll provide jobs for 200 to 300 workers during its multi-year construction phase that would start in early 2029 and continue into at least 2031. “We’re not taking the land out of production, necessarily; we’re just changing the use to be kind of an accommodation regarding the solar project,” Nordick said. [Proposed solar farm near Elkton reaches land milestone]

Utilities are not your friends so don’t tie your photovoltaic system to the grid but if you use it as a backup keep your own electricity completely separate from the utility that reads your meter.

South Dakota still hemorrhaging talent

In 2025 WalletHub's surveys revealed South Dakota was 40th in innovation but 50th in its share of technology companies and 48th in R&D spending per capita. Today, the horrible red state is 41st in innovation, 45th in human capital rank, 47th in innovation environment and 50th in share of technology companies.

White pastors preach spiritual genocide on Wind River Reservation

In the US where sovereignty rights are leading culture and language resurgence, growing capital resources from cannabis and casinos are building alternatives to historical trauma, hopelessness, suicide, and repression in Indian Country. 

So, in 2018, the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project began to address more broadly the food insecurity and high rates of diet-related disease in the community. With help from the Nature Conservancy, Wind Cave National Park in occupied South Dakota contributed to the reintroduction of bison to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation sending fifty to Wyoming in 2021. Today the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative is part of a program that teaches members traditional methods of drying meat and even modern canning techniques. 

Jason and Sarah Lucas say they felt their god leading them to start a ministry on the Wind River Reservation so they moved their family to Wyoming to birth what they call "Foundations For Nations."

On Sunday, as the Northern Arapaho Sundance ceremony was in its final day, Foundations For Nations Pastor Sarah Lucas stood before her congregation on the Wind River Reservation and suggested Native people should turn away from their traditional ways, calling them a false “idol.” As the video began circulating on social media on Wednesday, several hundred Native community members moved swiftly to protest, to demand that Foundations For Nations leave the reservation. The Lucas family fled, citing death threats. The church’s related food shelf closed its doors. But the backlash has continued, with calls for the tribes to invoke the “bad man” clause in their treaty with the U.S. government, which empowers the tribes to ban people from reservation land. [Sermon faces backlash] 

The Bad Man Clause has been applied in other actions.

The "bad man" legal argument was successfully used by Lavetta Elk, another Oglala Sioux, in a lawsuit alleging that a U.S. Army recruiter had violated the "bad man" clause when he sexually molested her while transporting her to a military recruiting appointment. Elk recently won a $650,000 settlement that left intact a federal judge's ruling that said the treaty language requires the government to reimburse Sioux tribe members who are injured by "any wrong" done by "bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States."

Tribal nations are recognized by the federal government as political sovereigns, not a racial group. Ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit and as part of the Cobell settlement the Interior Department's Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations, some three million acres in fifteen states are being returned to Tribal trust ownership. So, a plan by the US Bureau of Reclamation to remand some 60,000 acres on the Wind River Reservation to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes is long overdue.

Trump Organization racing to lock out tribes, public from public lands

An increasing number of scientists believe the US Fish and Wildlife Service isn't doing enough to crack down on red states that flout or simply ignore protections for vulnerable species so now some 80% of original grassland ecosystems are gone. 

Ag producers have destroyed shelter belts to plant industrial crops that deplete aquifers and now drought is blowing toxin-laden topsoil into downwind states. Another early spring wildfire season has begun in Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the panhandles of Oklahoma, Texas and other Republican-held areas where moral hazard and poor ranching practices routinely decimate the high plains. In the last 10 years alone, we have lost more than 50 million acres of grasslands. 

 In January Earth hater Doug Burgum pulled the Bureau of Land Management leases from American Prairie. In February BLM and Forest Service bumped the Animal Unit Month or AUM lease to $1.69 from $1.35 for one cow and her calf, one horse, or five sheep or goats for a month. 

Now, BLM and Forest Service have an app that locates unused grazing allotments so ranchers can even claim livestock act as wildland fuel reduction.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — would instead expand the practice. The proposed rules would also ratchet back public participation in the agency’s decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would strictly limit who has a say and when they can object, eliminating many steps where the public has been able to observe and comment on decisions to issue or renew permits. Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction, tipping the scales toward ranchers. They point to proposals allowing ranchers to continue business as usual if they appeal agency decisions limiting grazing, threatening Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison and enshrining highly subsidized grazing fees. [First major overhaul of public lands grazing rule in a generation looks to cut out the public]

Devil finally takes Lindsay Graham; McConnell and Trump next?

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) May 3, 2016