How the Nez Perce are using an energy transition to save salmon

The sun rises over Lapwai, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Reservation. Since 2022, the Nez Perce Tribe has been installing solar energy infrastructure. The tribe’s goal is to eventually produce 5,311 megawatts of energy to replace the electricity generated by the four Lower Snake River dams. (Tailyr Irvine/High Country News)

by Emily Senkosky, High Country News

If you drive easton Highway 95 through the Idaho Panhandle, the Clearwater River will be on your right, winding its way slowly and surely toward Lapwai, Idaho, on the Nez Perce Reservation. The river, which is the largest tributary to the Snake River, is typically dynamic, though on the days when it’s glassy and still, it clearly reflects the clouds as well as the emission plumes from the paper mill on its banks.

Just past the reservation’s border, a billboard greets the driver with an admonition, urging you to “Honor the Treaty of 1855 with the Nez Perce — Breach the Snake River Dams.” 

The billboard is the tribe’s response to the four hydropower dams on the Snake River. The Lower Snake River dams have long been controversial for the part they have played in decimating the Pacific Northwest’s once-abundant salmon and steelhead populations. 

As night falls on the reservation, another response can be seen in the growing number of homes illuminated by solar power. In an innovative push to replace the hydroelectricity generated by the four dams, the Nez Perce Tribe is creating a new energy infrastructure that could make it easier to breach the dams and restore the salmon.

Solar panels shine from rooftops across the Nez Perce Reservation thanks to the tribe’s solar initiative, Project 5311. Launched in 2022 under the tribal company Nimiipuu Energy, it is named for the amount of solar power the Snake River dams’ operator says is required to replace the electricity the dams generate: 5,311 megawatts. The tribe’s goal is to eventually produce 5,311 megawatts of energy, beginning by generating 500 megawatts by 2027. It is catalyzing a clean energy transition that could help loosen hydropower’s grip on the Pacific Northwest.

“This is an opportunity to create energy,” said Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe. “Project 5311 is something of a vision that can be utilized for the development of other energy projects that will definitely come together at some point in time.”  

Wheeler first glimpsed this opportunity in the spring of 2021, when Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson proposed an infrastructure plan to replace the dams, marking a historic shift in the politics surrounding the dams.

“Project 5311 is something of a vision that can be utilized for the development of other energy projects that will definitely come together at some point in time.”  

Starting on their own reservation, the Nez Perce have installed photovoltaic solar panels on community buildings in Lapwai, including at the Boys and Girls Club, where the panels were installed by an all-female Indigenous crew. Solar panels have also been installed on the wastewater plant, the public safety building, the elder housing community and the casino. In 2023, the tribe started putting panels on house rooftops. By the spring of 2024, panels were in place on 57 homes, with plans to install more.

Nez Perce tribal member Basil George has been a part of the solar initiative since it started. As the lead installer, he was a part of the nine-man crew that mounted solar panels on one of the first buildings, the Pi-Nee-Waus Community Center, back in October 2020.

“What we have accomplished already, it’s huge,” said George. “The whole world wants these things, and, you know, we have it here. It’s a huge thing to be Native American and be able to do this.” The Tesla Megapack, which is used to sustain the tribe’s grid, is the first in Idaho. The project partnered with experts at RevoluSun, a solar installation company, to train its solar panel installers. When Nimiipuu Energy advertised training opportunities for a handful of positions, more than 50 tribal members applied. Today, it employs an all-Indigenous team of 25 workers. So far, the Nez Perce have generated roughly 600 megawatt hours in one year, according to Janet Poitra, the tribe’s executive deputy director.

George says that amount of energy produced is expected to grow exponentially: The new home rooftop panels have the potential to produce between 12 and 15 kilowatts per home.

“People can recognize and see, whoa, they’re really doing something and bringing all these groups together,” George said. “We’re doing it one solar panel at a time.”

Long before the dams were built on the river, the Nez Perce way of life was centered on the rivers and tributaries that run through the tribe’s ancestral territory in present-day Washington, Oregon, Idaho and parts of Montana. These freshwater arteries provided the tribe’s primary food source — salmon — which comprised 60% to 70% of the people’s diet. Salmon is integral to Nez Perce culture, so much so that many tribal members believe their own DNA contains the DNA of the salmon.

In the Treaty of 1855, which was a formal agreement between the United States government and the Nez Perce Tribe, the tribe ceded much of its ancestral land for a 7.5 million-acre reservation. But when gold was discovered on the reservation in 1863, the Nez Perce were forced into a second treaty that reduced their reservation to its present-day 770,000 acres along the Clearwater River in Idaho. Both treaties, however, preserved the right to fish in “all usual and accustomed places,” which extend beyond the reservation’s boundaries to include the entire Lower Snake and Columbia River Basins and tributaries. 

Less than a century later, hydropower was the new gold rush. As the dams went up into the 1970s, fish populations plummeted, justifying conservationists’ fears about the dams’ environmental costs and diluting the Nez Perce’s longtime treaty rights.

“The decline of salmon was a transfer of wealth, both from the land, and from our people,” Wheeler said. By 1986, coho salmon had vanished, and wild sockeye were nearly extirpated from the Snake. Ten years later, the Endangered Species Act protected all Snake River salmon populations, including the spring and fall chinook. In 2023, just over 6,000 wild spring and summer chinook returned to the Snake. Today, all of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead species are listed as either threatened or endangered, with their populations at roughly 2% of historical levels.

In the summer of 2021, the Pacific Northwest’s tribes met to discuss renewable energy and how it could be used to help save the salmon. In 2022, solutions such as those the Nez Perce had proposed began to materialize, as tribes laid the groundwork for green energy. In 2023, several hundred participants attended the Northwest Tribal Clean Energy Summit online and in person, representing an estimated 12 tribes.

Most recently, on Feb. 23, the Biden administration joined four tribal nations and the states of Oregon and Washington to sign the Columbia River Basin Agreement in support of the development of alternative energy in the Pacific Northwest as part of a path toward breaching all four dams.

“The Biden administration agrees that we need to do something different to recover salmon populations in the Columbia Basin,” said Kayeloni Scott, a member of the Spokane and Nez Perce Tribes and communications consultant for the Nez Perce. “The status quo is not working. It’s not green energy if it’s killing fish.”

OVER THE PAST YEAR, more funding has become available for tribal renewable energy projects through federal programs such as “Solar for All.” Many of the programs support research, development and deployment of solar energy, Wheeler said. Since the Nez Perce launched Nimiipuu Energy, tribes from all over the region have visited Lapwai to examine the solar operations. The Nez Perce have also been helping to consult on the design of other renewable energy projects in the region.

“Having the tribe at the forefront of this type of work is often not the case,” Scott said. “People are getting inspired by knowing that we are continuing the fight to do more to offset the energy produced by the hydro system.” 

The tribe is also working actively with the U.S. Department of Energy and other federal agencies and state governments to ensure that the transition away from hydroelectric power considers the needs of all the stakeholders involved with the Lower Snake River dams.

“We want to work with irrigators, we want to work with the transporters, the shipping industry,” Wheeler said. “We want to resolve their issues, because resolving their issues will resolve our issue.”

Although the decision on dam removal is ultimately up to Congress, the federal government plans to partner with a growing consortium of tribes to assist the Pacific Northwest’s energy transition.

“The status quo is not working. It’s not green energy if it’s killing fish.”

“We’re self-sufficient in our capabilities of developing and utilizing resources that are there to modernize us,” Wheeler said. “Energy is a huge thing for us, and we understand that it’s going to help not only us but the region as well.”

The effects of the tribe’s initiative continue to ripple out. In March 2024, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, D, and members of the Washington State Legislature matched $600,000 of federal funds to support a study on the best way to replace the energy, transportation and irrigation services provided by the Snake River dams.

Both Scott and Wheeler believe that Project 5311 is on track to meet its goal by 2027. The working mantra for some of the workers and panel installers is that each solar panel represents one fish. In offering solar for salmon, the Nez Perce Tribe hopes to energize a transition that helps the people uphold the deep cultural relationship they have with the fish.

“To see the salmon return would restore peace in my heart,” Wheeler said. “Fishing with my relatives reminds me of times in my life when I was safe and at peace. That is what the salmon covenant means to me.”    

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Related Posts

Nevada and Kentucky just got $140M for clean energy projects. Here’s where it’s going:

More than 40% of global electricity was carbon-free in 2023

China completes the world’s largest pumped storage station

The US hydropower supply chain is struggling. Here’s how it might recover