The quality of land on Native American reservations is often considered poor. These regions, where the U.S. government relocated tribes in the mid- to late-1800s to clear the way for westward expansion, were consistently remote, arid, windy, and unsuitable for agriculture and other forms of economic development. The effects still ripple through Indigenous communities today.

But one potential new bright spot could be found in the growing clean energy industry, an area where Native Americans may now have economic leverage, according to a new study. A team of researchers, led by professors Dominic Parker and Sarah Johnston in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, has quantified the economic potential of wind and solar energy projects on reservation lands. The team also characterized the regulatory barriers (and ways to reduce them) for tribes wishing to tap into clean energy.

“This is the first comprehensive analysis of the potential income that renewable energy projects could provide and the first outline of the regulatory barriers facing tribes wanting to pursue them,” Parker says. “However, we emphasize that this is not a call to impose federal energy priorities on unwilling tribes.”

The study, recently published in Nature Energy, found that reservation lands are 46% less likely to host wind farms and 110% less likely to host solar farms than otherwise similar adjacent lands. Adding to this striking overall disparity, wind and solar resources are especially abundant in the poorest 25% of reservations — most of which are located in remote areas where income opportunities from casinos and nearby urban labor markets are lacking.

The researchers used a statistical model to quantify the disparity between on- versus off-reservation land for wind and solar farms installed by 2022. The team combined those results with energy demand forecasts through 2050 to predict the income that tribes would leave on the table if the current disparity persisted until then.

In a scenario of high electrification and future reliance on renewables to meet energy demand, tribes would forego more than $19 billion in lease and tax earnings by 2050, or $11.6 billion in a low-electrification scenario. The equivalent estimate for casino earnings through 2050 is $67 billion.

The researchers identified multiple obstacles to development that help explain the disparity between clean energy projects on and off reservation land. One of the biggest roadblocks is the complexity and uncertainty of the permitting process for building the facilities and the transmission lines that feed the generated energy into the power grid.

“An earlier study found that 49 regulatory steps were required to develop oil on reservations compared to 4 steps for off-reservation projects,” Parker says. “This regulatory jumble makes energy projects almost as uncommon as where they are forbidden, such as in public parks, forests, and wildlife refuges.”

Launching a project on any privately owned land starts with obtaining leasing agreements, which generate income for landowners. For utility-scale wind farms, which are more spatially expansive than solar farms, this usually requires multiple landowners to sign off on leases. Because of historical land allotment policies, reservation land has more extensive ownership partitioning than non-reservation land, with an average of 14 owners for a 160-acre parcel.

This means developers planning to build a wind farm (which requires at least 5,000 contiguous acres) on 32 such parcels need to obtain the agreement of 448 owners to lease their land. That makes it very difficult for Native Americans living on reservations — the poorest racial and ethnic minority group in the United States — to pursue renewable energy projects, while wealthier people elsewhere have been benefiting from federal and state subsidies, Parker notes.

Energy sovereignty — empowering tribes to implement their own projects without regulatory steps imposed by federal and state jurisdiction — would help reduce barriers for development, according to the authors. This sovereignty would enable tribes to exercise their right to use or not use the natural resources on their land. It could also prevent a repeat of historical mistakes, such as efforts to build hydroelectric dams on tribal land in the mid-20th century. Some of these dams, which were built without tribal consent, have harmed salmon runs and caused flooding.

“Rolling back the red tape will be critical so that tribes interested in development can realize the economic potential of their own resources,” Parker says. “The key is to avoid green colonialism by not pressuring uninterested tribes while at the same time making it feasible for those wanting the income.”