Photo: Ken Ahmann, Chief Operating Officer of Calusa Energy
Today in the United States about 1.4% of the nonindigenous population does not have access to electricity. In Indian Country, fully 14% of the population lacks regular access to a power grid.
One hour north of Sacramento, California, on the Colusa Rancheria, things are very different. There, on the reservation of the Cachil DeHe band of Wintun Indians, the tribe has been generating and distributing its own electricity for 20 years.
For the past 13 years— even while established utility companies in California regularly experienced major energy blackouts— the Calusa Rancheria has suffered none.
Before the Calusa Indian community developed the capacity to generate their own electricity, its energy came from the beleaguered behemoth called the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. With PG&E, power outages were commonplace on the reservation, happening on average some 50 times each year. It’s an all-too-common problem across Indian Country. By and large, tribal lands are in rural and remote areas and are grossly underserved by many major utility companies.
In 2023, the tribe formed Colusa Indian Energy, a Section 17 corporation. Chief Operating Officer Ken Ahmann recalled, “I helped the tribe stand up their own tribal utility authority. We completely evicted PG&E and powered our resort casino, the tribal administration campus, medical clinic, water plants, and all the tribal members’ housing. All the businesses and gas stations and thousands of acres of agricultural land. It’s all owned and operated by the tribe. Colusa Indian Energy was formed really, as a means of exporting our decades of expertise to any other tribes who might be able to benefit from it.”
According to Ahmann the original aim of Calusa Indian Energy was to purchase PG&E’s existing 50-year-old overhead distribution lines that served the reservation. But the company wasn’t having any of that. Instead, a 10-year-long legal battle between PG&E and the tribe ensued. In the end, the electrical giant was expelled, learning a hard lesson in tribal sovereignty.
“The biggest misconception is that tribes aren’t sophisticated enough to do this themselves. We’re trying to eviscerate that misconception by showing what we have done at Colusa for 20 years, that tribes are more than capable.”
As Ahmann says, “Luckily, we already had a plan in place to start running underground distribution to every one of the homes, so nobody was without power for any substantial amount of time. We got money from the DOE office of Indian Energy. We got a 90% grant to start expanding our grid. This is where the battle really took place.”
PG&E’s recalcitrance resulted in Calusa Indian Energy’s engineers gaining invaluable knowledge and experience, which it will share with other tribes for generations to come.
The Indian energy startup’s immediate goals are to eliminate outages and unreliable utilities for tribes. The working model is to help tribes invest in their own tribal member workforce development.
To that end, Ahmann boasted, “We develop our own workforce. Priority is for tribal members of course. Tribal member workforce development for all of our projects is a top priority. These utility jobs already exist on reservations, but they’re in the hands of non-tribal members serving private shareholders.”
Ahmann continues, “We use our home microgrid at Colusa. We like to call it the ‘tribal energy training academy.’ That’s where everyone gets trained. But we also have global teaming agreements with big companies like Caterpillar, Rolls Royce, and Honeywell. These partnerships are good for us because we get distributor-level pricing and lead time on critical equipment. But most importantly the sticking point for those negotiations has been that we need to have top-level factory training access, not just for our own people, but also for the tribes we’re developing.”
So, what exactly is a microgrid? “It means you have a source of power generation on site and distribution on site,” said Ahmann, “where you’re generating any percentage of your own power and you are distributing your loads on site. A single house could be a microgrid or it can be an entire community or reservation.”
At the Colusa Rancheria specifically, the microgrid is a natural gas fired cogeneration powerplant.
“It’s ultra efficient in that we capture all the waste heat from burning gas and we use that waste heat to provide the casino resort with 100% of its space heating, its hot water, and even its air conditioning as a waste byproduct of generating electricity. Being as efficient as possible is always our charge,” said Ahmann.
After the energy infrastructure is set up, a native workforce is trained and a new tribal utility authority is established. Calusa Indian Energy does not require any membership fees. Ongoing partnerships are welcomed, but perpetual contractual financial obligations are not part of the business model.
“We view the next logical step for self-determination as taking control of your energy destiny, your energy future. The biggest misconception is that tribes aren’t sophisticated enough to do this themselves. We’re trying to eviscerate that misconception by showing what we have done at Colusa for 20 years, that tribes are more than capable.”
Over the next year about a dozen other reservations are slated to begin construction and operation of their own self-sustaining microgrids. As many as 60 other tribal entities have also begun preliminary engagements with Calusa Indian Energy.
