Tribal nations looking to build clean energy projects are exploring new funding pathways after the Trump administration’s cuts to clean energy grants like Solar for All, which earmarked more than $500 million for solar development on tribal lands.
The Tribal Renewable Energy Coalition, an organization of 14 tribes which received a grant for more than $135 million in now-cancelled Solar for All funding, is continuing to use the solar project plans it developed but will seek funding sources like loans and philanthropy, Indigenized Energy CEO Cody Two Bears said during a November press call.
“I think that's the positive side of what we get out of Solar for All, is we had over a year to plan this out, and now we have some things teed up for tribes to go after and start to leverage some of these dollars,” Two Bears said. “And I think that's the plan for what we're going to do moving forward.”
After the Trump administration took office and began to cancel grants associated with the Inflation Reduction Act, “the large utility scale projects that we were working on suddenly became a lot more difficult to finance,” said Chéri Smith, CEO of the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy. “And yet, there are still opportunities there.”
Earlier this year, the alliance launched a suite of project finance and planning tools called the Weaver Platform, and is helping tribes “to use that tool to build their capital stacks,” at the same time that they’re “engaging with networks of investors of all flavors to try and take projects and fund them with private dollars instead of public,” Smith said.
The Trump administration’s grant clawback has rescinded a great deal of federal funding for clean energy from tribes, Smith said, noting that the alliance’s grant-writing team got $484 million in grants awarded to 46 tribes in 2024.
That was “really exciting,” she said, “and the [Indigenous Power & Light Fund] was going to bridge the gap between those dollars and what the full project cost was. Well, 85% to 90% of that has been clawed back.”
Our goal is really simple, that we won't let any tribal project die on our watch because funding was frozen.
Chéri Smith
CEO of the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
Connecting third-party investors with tribal nations to fund projects often isn’t straightforward, said Clara Pratte, founder of the solar company Navajo Power, during the November call.
“There is money and there is appetite in the capital markets, but that money comes with a lot of maybe misconceptions or misunderstanding about how tribes work,” she said. “As developers and practitioners, it's really our job to help demystify that for these markets, so that they feel comfortable investing their money.”
But the appetite for investment exists, Pratte said, as a lot of land in the Great Plains and further west “is under tribal control and tribal authority. So these markets would be remiss if they weren't looking at how to develop on these lands, and we have to demystify it. We have to make it comfortable.”
“There are so many blank canvases, essentially, from a developer's point of view in Indian country,” said Todd Halvorsen, head of energy finance and structuring for the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy. “The perceived credit risk that's out there in the finance community is not a real concern, and we should be able to rally enough good folk together to be able to pull the capital required to get these systems built to provide the reliable power, get those projects cash flowing.”
The Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy and the Solar Energy Industries Association in October launched a curriculum for clean energy developers and service providers called Pathways To Trust, which “addresses common knowledge gaps that often undermine cross-cultural collaboration and equips participants with practical tools to build mutually beneficial partnerships,” SEIA said in a release.
However, one cultural disconnect between tribes and outside developers — the specifics of law and regulations on tribal land — is also an opportunity for tribes to shape their energy future, said Claudio Clini, a policy analyst with the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, during the November call.
“We've been talking to tribes about this idea of replacing federal rollbacks of environmental protections and other things like that with tribal laws and regulations where applicable,” Clini said. “And in this way, we can work towards a self-determined future where tribes are exercising the full strength of their regulatory abilities and jurisdiction.”
Pulling projects back together
The $220 million Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty project, which aims to build a network of nested microgrids in northern California to benefit several tribes, lost an $88 million award through the Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience Innovations Program after it was cancelled by the Trump administration.
The microgrids would be backed up by battery and solar to create more reliability for the tribes they serve, who sometimes lose power for up to 20 days in a row, said Halvorsen.
We know the demand for energy is only going to continue in the coming years. Our hunger and appetite for energy is not going away. And in terms of tribal communities, we have to be players in this world.
Clara Pratte
Founder of Navajo Power
The Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy has been working to help replace the lost federal funding with partnerships, philanthropy and other sources.
“It took about six months to go from hyper-depressed meetings where the vibe was just down, to slowly getting to, ‘Maybe we can do this, maybe we can get this back together,’” said Halvorsen, whose team is coordinating the capital raise and financial structuring for the project. “We're out there talking with the vast majority of impact investors in the space, and building community — not just among industry in terms of supply chain and development talents, but with the financial communities, whether it be public or private.”
Though tribal nations are working to salvage many of the projects that were in progress, the disruption of suddenly losing funding is significant. Pratte said it has been “truly devastating for many of our communities” to not only lose the project itself but the jobs associated with it.
“It has this ripple effect — the hotels, the construction community, the utilities, all of these things, all of a sudden have the wind knocked out of them,” she said.
“The shift in administration, and policy, has certainly had a profound impact on the tribes,” Smith said. While multiple coalitions are suing the Trump administration over the cancellation of Solar for All funding, the alliance is choosing not to litigate the issue and instead help tribes “preserve the value of the work that they've already completed,” she said.
However, Clini said in November that the alliance is continuing to work with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to secure a waiver for tribes for the $5 million commercial readiness deposit required for projects to remain in an interconnection queue. The alliance has made the case to FERC that interconnection requests for tribal projects are not made speculatively, and that this deposit is impossible for the majority of tribes to make.
And even before President Donald Trump won reelection and began to rescind IRA funding, the alliance anticipated the potential for this and launched a program called Solar for All TRIBES, “an initiative to try and ensure that the six tribal consortia that received awards don't lose momentum because of political shifts,” said Smith.
“We're doing triage on a daily basis with the stalled projects, the stranded engineering work, and we see ourselves as here to protect that progress,” she said. “Our goal is really simple, that we won't let any tribal project die on our watch because funding was frozen.”
The benefits of alternatives
Halvorsen said he was leery of the potential for issues with Solar for All grants before any of the funding was rescinded.
“I saw a number of flaws and was already thinking, how do we do something better? What's going to be the replacement program for this?” he said. “I was already worried about unfriendly administration challenges and how some of the funding could get frozen or clawed back.”
He was particularly concerned about the requirement that every Solar for All project had to guarantee a 20% savings on electricity bills for a given end user — a requirement that he says made less sense for projects on tribal land.
Scale is huge in making these projects all pencil, because there's so many intermediary costs with getting any deployment done in renewables.
Todd Halvorsen
Head of energy finance and structuring for the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy
“Those calculations can be hard enough to pull together to begin with, so there's a lot of room for challenges,” he said. “And why is 20% savings the most critical thing when there's all these communities at the end of power lines that don't have reliable power?”
Halvorsen said he’s seen a mentality shift from grant-funded projects to third-party financed projects, with tribes “retaining ownership from the get go” and being able to leverage the IRA’s direct pay mechanism — which allows tax-exempt tribal nations to still benefit from the legislation’s tax credits — as an underwriting mechanism for “bringing in construction and term financing.”
With many of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits expiring soon as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and tribes being tax-exempt entities, “structuring these things in a way that makes sense for all parties, along with tribal ownership, is really crucial,” Pratte said.
After the passage of the OBBBA, “I think one of the things that we're beholden to is figuring out where we find that capital, where we continue the good work, because we know the demand for energy is only going to continue in the coming years,” Pratte said. “Our hunger and appetite for energy is not going away. And in terms of tribal communities, we have to be players in this world.”
One of the alliance’s goals is to take “all the good, the bad and the ugly lessons” from the residential and commercial solar industries and apply those on tribal land to “develop, finance, construct and operate projects with tribal developers and tribal asset owners as the core of the projects from the get go,” Halvorsen said.
“The more similar projects you can get per dollar spent, the more efficient the overall program becomes,” he said. “Scale is huge in making these projects all pencil, because there's so many intermediary costs with getting any deployment done in renewables — whether it's a single residential project, a hundred residential projects, an 100-kW project or 100-megawatt project.”
As tribal nations have accepted the formalized cancellation of Solar for All and other federal sources of clean energy funding, they’ve been able to pivot to new thinking about how to finance these projects, Halvorsen said.
“Indian country has an aversion to debt, so it’s been the focus that if there's free money coming from the federal government, let's go there before we're thinking about taking on any sort of liability through debt financing,” he said. “But now more increasingly we're hearing, oh, yeah, we're doing that in our casino. Why can't we do it for our clean energy power plants, which are going to be economic engines — even more so, potentially, than the casinos?”
The timing “may just be right, for whatever reason,” that these conversations are happening now, Halvorsen said. “And I'm very encouraged that we'll be seeing the first large scale portfolios of residential solar projects be developed and built in 2026.”
