TOWAOC – The Ute Mountain Ute reservation is an expansive 553,000 acres stretching across the southwest corner of Colorado and parts of San Juan County, New Mexico, with little in the way of natural resources except land, what is underneath it and what shines on top of it.
For 70 years, the tribe has been in the business of selling what comes out of the ground – mostly gas and some oil – but those revenues have been on the decline for some time, Tribal Chairman Manuel Heart said.
And so now, the Ute Mountain Utes are turning to the surface of their land. The tribe has entered into a lease contract with Canigou Group, a global green energy developer, to build a 971-megawatt (direct current) solar facility on 4,400 acres of the reservation south of Towaoc. The project is called Sun Bear.
“We want to be able to utilize the land that the government put us on – this reservation,” Heart said. “… We want to get as much as we can out of the resources and the land.”
And utilize, they will. When completed, the project is slated to be among the largest solar installations in the country. It is projected to generate about half as much power as the two remaining units of the nearby coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant.
Canigou has a bold expectation for the project: The company hopes to break ground this summer, said Director and Co-Founder Justin Passfield.
The project will be about 8 miles long and about 1.5 miles wide, ranging in width across the landscape to accommodate sensitive archaeological and biological resources in the area.
It will cover over 4,400 acres of desert with about 2.2 million solar panels and generate an estimated 1,700 to 2,400 gigawatt-hours annually. The power will be enough light a small city of 214,000 homes – about 20 times the size of Montezuma County.
The $1.5 billion project is expected to bring between 600 and 1,000 construction jobs to the area and will need between 10 and 50 full-time employees for the 35-year life span of the array.
The panel installation will flank U.S. Highway 160, primarily on the south side, starting 2 miles west of its intersection with U.S. Highway 491. A transmission corridor will run northeast along 160, about 1.5 miles north of the intersection to tie the power into the Western Area Power Administration lines that cross the reservation.
Solar power faces one major hurdle: storage. Power can only be generated when the sun is shining, and the amount of generation varies depending on the sun angle, cloud cover and amount of daylight. The project will include battery storage, although the exact capacity will not be determined until customers are secured.
Over 400 federally threatened Mesa Verde cactuses were found in the area during surveys, and the burrowing owls, which are threatened within the state, were observed at five locations in the project area.
Developers plan to create 200-meter “no-construction” buffers around the threatened cactuses and will remove occupied habitat or high-quality habitat from the project area. According to a planning slide on the biological resources in the area, active owl nests will be buffered by 400 meters during nesting season.
Reservation land is held in trust by the federal government, and despite the fact that the tribe is a sovereign nation, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs must still sign off on the proposal. Canigou has already completed the requisite environmental assessment, Passfield said, and is hoping to receive a Finding of No Significant Impact, or FONSI. BIA could instead decide there is a need for an Environmental Impact Statement, which would delay the project significantly.
If BIA does issue a FONSI and Canigou secures the final grid connection agreement, as is expected to happen shortly, Passfield said the company hopes to break ground by mid-July, although he acknowledged that was an optimistically ambitious timeline.
He hopes to have Sun Bear online by the end of 2026.
The partnership between Canigou and the tribe comes at an opportune time, said the tribe’s environmental programs director, Scott Clow.
Fossil fuels have been a significant part of the tribes economy throughout that history, Clow said. But the volatility of the fossil fuel market paired with disappearing infrastructure in the region has made that resource a less reliable source of income.
“There has been a massive downturn in that side of the economy in the last 15 years or so,” Clow said. “So, what do we do to help the tribe survive?”
At the same time, the Utes have been looking for ways to achieve goals outlined in their 2020 climate action plan, which envisions diversifying the tribe’s energy profile and reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.
The ambitious plan marks a turning point for the tribe. Not only will Sun Bear bring jobs and millions of dollars in annual revenues, but it might be just the beginning. There have been talks of building a manufacturing facility on the reservation to produce photovoltaic panels – and panels could be in high demand, as the tribe is already considering a proposal to build an even larger solar farm nearby.
Like other constructed or proposed projects in the region, the appeal of the location is due in part to existing infrastructure.
The WAPA transmission line was built to move power from the Four Corners Power Plant and the San Juan Generating Station. Only two of five units are operating at the former, and the latter has been entirely decommissioned, freeing up some capacity on the lines.
“When you look at the potential for energy generation of a variety of sources in the United States of America, there's incredible capacity on tribal lands,” Clow said. “However, a lot of those places are remote and it’s a long way to the nearest transmission line.”
The federal power lines connect to a transmission grid that spans the Western U.S. “It’s a great advantage,” Clow added.
Chairman Heart is blunt about the need for sustainable revenue for the tribe and the benefit he sees in Sun Bear. The Ute Mountain Utes solicited investors for proposals several years ago after deciding it was time to turn toward green energy.
Wind power was not feasible on the plains and Sleeping Ute mountain has cultural value such that the tribe did not want to build turbines on it. But Canigou’s proposal caught the council’s ear.
“We said ‘This is really beneficial for long term, down the road,’” Heart said. “And it is in the best interest of the tribe.”
The reservation is a small fraction of the land once occupied by the Utes. And in the throes of a historic two-decade drought, the land’s capacity to generate through farming and grazing on the 7,700-acre Farm and Ranch is limited (Heart once pointed out that Utes were never farmers: “(We’re) trying to do what we can in this arid soil reservation that we've been put in,” he said last year.)
“We want to get as much as we can out of the resources – and the land, the way it is right now, we're in a drought,” he said. “Let's utilize it for what the sun does … and that’s solar renewable energy.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
An earlier version of this story included a photo caption that misidentified Shiprock.
