Ute Mountain Reservation part of microgrid plan

Ice storms and other calamities driven by anthropogenic climate hijinx routinely knock out electric power often resulting in lost lives and the inevitable cyber attacks on the US will take down the grid for days, even months causing food shortages and mayhem but the addition of virtual power plants or VPPs can change that handling some twenty percent of peak power demand by 2030. 

So, 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.

Five communities — Parachute, Basalt, Granby, the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation and Silverton — each won a $100,000 Energizing Rural Communities prize from DOE to promote microgrids and clean energy projects. Silverton calls its resilience project GOLD — Goal of Less Dependency — and it has four objectives: prepare a resiliency plan for disasters, build a microgrid, find ways to move the old, inefficient infrastructure to electricity and join a regional climate action plan to transition to sustainable energy. [After “Snowpocalypse” killed their power, Silverton is turning on microgrids]

Here in New Mexico the Kewa Pueblo is expanding a broadband network built in 2015 and assembling a photovoltaic microgrid. In my home state of South Dakota the Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation built a microgrid, so have the Oglala Lakota Nation and Standing Rock Sioux where wind chills and blowing snow are putting thousands at risk. Many other nations are also building microgrids.

Learn more at the US Department of Energy.

ip image: the Sneffels Range rises above Ridgway.

Thank you @EnvDefenseFund for sharing our tribal energy success story with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe, as we supported their solar microgrid project. ⬇️ https://t.co/tTtoOcm1T4 #TribalEnergy #NativeEnergy #IndigenousPeoplesDay pic.twitter.com/OcOZ2WjKaA

— DOEIndianEnergy (@DOEIndianEnergy) October 9, 2023