Colorado’s small Ute Mountain Ute tribe brings utility scale solar project online despite political pushback

…NPR.org … KVPR… 6 July 2026

With the Trump regime killing renewable energy tax credits and calling the infrastructure “ugly”, this tribe’s 15-year determination to the stay the course demonstrates the value of “the long game.”

…Over the next year and half, solar panels capable of generating 270 megawatts worth of electricity, and 180 megawatts of battery storage will be built on tribal land in … New Mexico, according to the project’s developer. Although its arid reservation edges into Utah and New Mexico, most of the tribe’s 933 square miles sits in the southwest corner of Colorado … a landscape of arroyos and sandstone cliffs, and at the center, the sacred mountain known as Sleeping Ute Warrior..

For 75 years, over half the tribe’s annual budget had to ride the boom-bust oil and gas roller coaster. Until 15 years ago, with the rise of federal support for phasing the US out of fossil fuels, clearing the air, and powering a renewable energy transition, The tribe started reviewing how it could participate.

“They were so passionate about going forward …” said Sandra Begay [Navajo], a retired mechanical engineer from Sandia National Laboratories, [working for decades with tribal communities across the US on solar development.]

In 2015, with support from the US Department of Energy, Begay led a workshop with the Ute Mountain Ute tribe [encouraging them to develop a strategic plan] as a long game… They started small with residential rooftop solar. Then came a one-megawatt array that helped power the tribal casino out on the highway [and bring more interest from developers]….

…By 2023, the tribe was homing in on a utility-scale solar development, on its lands in New Mexico. A project known as Foxtail Flats ^{[see the development image at that link]}. The demolition of a nearby coal fired power plant left behind a network of transmission lines and electricity customers… to El Paso, Texas, throughout New Mexico, Utah markets, Colorado markets…Arizona, California…

Last year, of course, tfg’s BBBill deep-sixed renewable energy development credits, and US Dept of the Int’s Doug Burgum’s Departmental Review Procedures for Decisions, Actions, Consultations, and Other Undertakings Related to Wind and Solar Energy Facilitiesdoi.gov/media/document/ added “68 new layers of red tape that amount to a moratorium on Solar Energy permitting,” risking 36% of electricity capacity planned to come online through 2030, and countless other projects stalled out, says Sean Gallagher, a policy analyst at the Solar Energy Industries Assn,

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe just managed to get their solar and battery storage project in under the wire, to the relief of already-contracted purchasers of their energy – the Los Alamos County New Mexico Board of Public Utilities, was in for an entire half the output.
 
Although some other projects are still moving — Foxtail Flats is connected to the San Juan Solar photovoltaic and battery project in Farmington, NM — the present wider outlook is grim, but Navajo renewables expert and engineer Sandra Begay sees the current political situation as a sort of winter season – good for research and planning, in anticipation of an eventual build-able spring. The average American home uses just under one megawatt-hours per month, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration., and both residential and business population continues to grow. More and more customers in this region will support projects because they need the power potential that land use under tribal authority can provide, for mutual benefit.

It only needs more and more communities and voters to recognize where OUR own shared best interests lie, and act accordingly.