“I want to make a revolutionary impact in energy in Indian Country before I’m done,” says Ken Ahmann, Chief Operating Officer of Colusa Indian Energy.
The independent power company is a Section 17 corporation, fully owned by the Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Rancheria, which is situated about an hour north of Sacramento, California.
“I have worked for the tribe for a little over 20 years,” says Ahmann. “I’ve spent the majority of my adult life with this one tribe. I originally showed up as a contractor working to build their original cogeneration power plant. The reason we did that is because PG&E averaged over 50 outages per year at the reservation, which is pretty bad business, and especially for a casino. Before I came to Colusa, I had my hands in the construction, management and operation of over 50 micro-grids across the country, and this was the last one we built as that company.”
Ahman says he may be a corporate executive, but he is decidedly not a capitalist. He says seeking the greatest financial gains are not what gets him out of the bed in the morning and credits the tribe’s traditional ways as providing the moral and ethical backbone of the organization.
In effect, Colusa Indian Energy uses profits from doing business with more financially well-off tribes to subsidize build outs on the reservations of tribes lacking the same kind of monetary largess. Once the power grids are built and installed, and tribal members are trained to operate and maintain them, no further monetary contractual obligation with Colusa is required.
To be sure, company policy, practices, and culture might read like an aspirational, more altruistic way of doing business. But Colusa Indian Energy’s laudable ethical standards are not merely goals for some far-off future. This is how the tribe has conducted its operations since day one.
If you read part one of the Colusa Indian Energy story in our March issue, you might be inclined to think the indigenous energy revolution Ahmann speaks of has already begun. And if you’ve been paying attention to U.S. economic policy news, you may have heard the tariffs on imported goods are allegedly part of a plan to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.
The challenge to that notion, however, is the fact that the re-shoring of conventional manufacturing to the United States will take years, not weeks or months to develop.
Presently, the tech sector in the U.S. remains strong and globally competitive. Unlike the manufacturing of hard goods, technological productivity does not depend on extensive build outs of physical, non-energy-related infrastructure.
Instead, as Ahmann says, “Development in the tech sector is energy intensive. I view tribes as the obvious next-step-collaborators with state and federal governments as far as energy planning. For instance, if you want to build a data center today in PG& E territory, it will likely take 7 to 10 years for them to give you that power. The grid is on the brink of collapse nationwide, and a lot of this is because we’re leaning on a century-old-model that needs to be broken.”
Indeed, there isn’t anything like a single, grand, interconnected power grid in the present-day United States. According to the sustainable-energy-focused nonprofit, Rocky Mountain Institute: “The U.S. power grid is, in fact, highly fragmented and consists of not one, but three different sections. These are called the Eastern, Western, and ERCOT interconnections — three separate power grids that are almost completely isolated from one another, electrically speaking.”
Moreover, at a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference held in October of 2022, Aaron Bloom, Executive Director of NextEra Energy Transmission, flatly stated: “The United States is the only macro grid in the world that doesn’t have a plan of any type.”
Instead of waiting for further catastrophic grid failures, or for FERC to develop a comprehensive and herculean restructuring effort, perhaps Colusa Indian Energy and its various partners, hold a more practical and realistic perspective.
“I’m a huge proponent of public power, of municipal utility districts. I want tribal utility authorities to be viewed the same as a municipal utility like a SMUD [Sacramento Municipal Utility District], Roseville Electric, or Redding Electric, so that the tribes can not only take their own energy futures in their hands, and not just for their own reservations but also for adjacent communities too,” says Ahmann.
“Those adjacent communities have a lot of difficulties and red tape to overcome. That, to me, is a very long-term strategic goal, you know? How do we get policy makers to view tribal utility authorities as collaborators?”
According to Ahman, when the Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Rancheria decided to cut the cord to PG&E, the company made it clear it was not interested in giving up any territory to any client. But that has not, thus far, proven to be the standard operating procedure of every other energy supplier.
As Ahman explains, “Often times, we will interface with co-ops or with municipal utilities or whatever who already have good relationships with tribal communities and they will tell us they have been losing money for years. Please take this over.”
The very idea that any company, which provides something as needfully essential as energy and is demonstrably failing at it, should decline help from an enthusiastic and more capable entity is extremely questionable at best.
“It’s exploded with interest,” says Ahmann. “We’re two years old, and we are in development with 60 tribes. We’ve been picked up by some non-tribal governments as well. Some big corporations and farmers too. It’s just crazy.”
“We’ve had to scale this thing much faster than we wanted to, but we are trying to meet the demands of Indian Country. What we are doing here is not just brutal capitalism. We are engaging in tribe-to-tribe business.”
The reality of indigenous peoples boldly charging forward in this way and at this time when their services are so desperately needed is, in itself, an electromagnetic vision quest come to fruition.
