Driving an E.V. Across North Dakota? Thank the Standing Rock Tribe
By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, The New York Times.
Excerpt: This summer, Len Necefer finally planned the road trip he’s been thinking about for nearly a decade: Going coast-to-coast in an electric vehicle, stopping only to charge on tribal lands. As a Navajo citizen and tribal energy expert who used to work in the federal government, he saw it as the ultimate test of how far energy infrastructure had come. Stop by stop, his plans came together until North Dakota, where a dearth of chargers seemed to prevent a Midwest crossing. Then, he spotted it: a level-2 charger at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation. It was more than a lucky break. Over the past three years, Standing Rock has installed chargers across the reservation as part of the Electric Nation project, a regional effort to create an intertribal charging network. By the time the project wraps at the end of November, Standing Rock Nation will operate 13 E.V. chargers, most of them in North Dakota. While there aren’t many E.V.s in town yet, each new charger makes driving one easier than before....The tribe may be widely known for the anti-pipeline movement, Ms. Wasin Zi said, ...“The traditional way is to live with Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, not against her,” she said. The pipeline also helped inspire the regional E.V. project. “As I was protesting, I thought, ‘What if we connected all the tribes in an electric vehicle charging network?’” said Robert Blake, a solar energy developer in Minneapolis. “It would be another form of resistance against fossil fuel infrastructure.” A few years later, Mr. Blake formed Native Sun, a nonprofit group dedicated to renewable energy outreach in tribal nations....