In this episode, we speak with Suzanne Singer, Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables, an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization that empowers Indigenous families to achieve energy independence by expanding renewable energy capacity and affordable access to off-grid power.
In this episode, we speak with Suzanne Singer, Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables, an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization that empowers Indigenous families to achieve energy independence by expanding renewable energy capacity and affordable access to off-grid power.
It may be surprising to learn that by some estimates, up to one third of U.S. households suffer from some form of energy poverty, meaning that they find it difficult to afford the energy they need to heat and cool their homes and provide basic lighting, cooking, device charging, and entertainment. Energy poverty is a particular challenge for Indigenous communities, many of which are rural in nature and continue to rely on expensive and carbon-intensive diesel, kerosene, and other fossil resources for the limited electricity access they do enjoy. So, in this episode, we take a deep dive into this issue with Suzanne Singer, the Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables.
Growing up, Suzanne’s grandparents, members of the Navajo Nation, lacked access to electricity and running water. This, in part, inspired her to establish her organization, which is specifically focused on installing off-grid solar PV systems and batteries for community members of the Navajo and Hopi Nations. In addition to the origins, mission, and operations of her nonprofit, we also discuss Suzanne’s career transition from the prestigious National Research Laboratories to mission-driven entrepreneurship and the particular challenges faced by Indigenous women leaders.
We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
Note: The Hannon Armstrong Foundation provided a grant to support the efforts of Native Renewables.
Links:
Suzanne Singer: Within the Navajo Nation alone, the latest estimate is somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 families do not have access to grid-tied electricity. You can just imagine if it costs between $40,000 and $80,000 per mile to extend a utility line, and the families have to pay for it, it gets really expensive really quickly. One of the exciting things we hope we get to work on a lot more is off-grid solar, using that as a mechanism to be able to provide power to families, because it's not connected to the grid, but it is able to be supplied to areas that are really rural.[CR1]
Chad Reed: Welcome to Climate Positive, a podcast produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions. I'm Chad Reed.
Hilary Langer:I’m Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I’m Gil Jenkins.
Chad: In this series, we host candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving our climate positive future. In this episode, we speak with Suzanne Singer, Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables.
It was surprising to me to learn that by some estimates up to one third of us households suffer from some form of energy poverty, meaning that they find it difficult to afford the energy they need to heat and cool their homes and provide basic lighting, cooking, device charging, and entertainment. Energy poverty is a particular challenge for indigenous communities, many of which are rural in nature and continue to rely on expensive and carbon intensive diesel, kerosene, and other fossil resources for the limited electricity access they do enjoy. So in this episode, we take a deep dive into this issue with Suzanne Singer, the Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables, an indigenous-led nonprofit focused on empowering indigenous communities to tackle energy poverty.
Growing up Suzanne's grandparents members of the Navajo Nation lacked access to electricity and running water. This in part inspired her to establish her nonprofit, which is specifically focused on installing off-grid solar PV systems and batteries for community members of the Navajo and Hopi nations. In addition to the origins, mission, and operations of our non-profit, we also discussed Suzanne's career transition from the prestigious National Research Laboratories to mission-driven entrepreneurship and the challenges faced by indigenous women leaders. I'll also note that the Hannon Armstrong Foundation has provided a grant to support the efforts of Native Renewables.
I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
Chad: Suzanne, many thanks for joining us today here at Climate Positive.
Suzanne: Yes, thanks for having me.
Chad: Excellent. Well, we always begin our episodes with a discussion of our guests’ individual journey into the climate space. You are a member of the Navajo Nation, and your community’s territory is about the size of the state of West Virginia, I believe, but with a population that is 1/10th that of West Virginia. So a dispersed rural community located across actually multiple states, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Could you tell us about what your life was like growing up within the Nation?
Suzanne: I actually grew up in a border town called Flagstaff, Arizona, it's about 45 minutes from the border of the Navajo Nation. I spent a lot of summertime out of my grandparents' home both living there. Growing up, neither had electricity, didn't have running water, I thought that was totally normal as a kid, that everybody knew what it was like to not have electricity or running water.
But some of the things that happened as a young person shaped what it is that I do. For example, I got in trouble for using water to build a toy pool out in the sand dunes for some toys. I definitely got in a lot of trouble for that, so that guides my water conservation values. Also, having that experience of being without electricity made me value energy efficiency. We only had so many hours of kerosene lantern time that I could do homework or other things. I really had to crunch everything in, and I think that made me value, how much energy we use to this day.
Chad: Thank you for sharing that. You then pursued mechanical engineering degrees, first at the University of Arizona, and then at the University of California, Berkeley (Go Bears!) where you got your Ph.D. What motivated you to pursue the STEM field more broadly, the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field.
Suzanne: I really enjoyed doing math, so I was a math nerd growing up. I was able to take some science classes when I was in elementary school, and I think being around my parents, they were a big influence. My mom, she worked at the US Geological Survey for many years, and she put together maps of different planets and the moon. Having that influence of her work, life and her colleagues definitely had an impact. Also, my father is an engineer and loves reading. Man, I don't know anyone who really likes to go to the library and learn how things work more than my dad.
Seeing that, and him buy me toys and tinkering around, that had a big influence. Growing up, I had a hard time deciding between math or something else. I decided to pick engineering math when I first got to University of Arizona. After that, I got to a certain point in math, where I didn't want to do it anymore. That level of math. I was able to do an internship in mechanical engineering in the heat transfer lab. That really changed my whole perspective and desire of what type of work I wanted to do. Then I decided to pursue mechanical engineering.
Chad: I think we all know that the STEM field and particularly engineering is very male-dominated. Did you face any particular challenges as an indigenous woman in this educational arena?
Suzanne: Yes, I think especially in graduate school, one of the hard things is not really seeing faces like yourself in your program. Our class, we actually had a lot of women in the year that I started school, but there was not a lot of indigenous people who are also getting their PhD program at the same time. Coming from a world where I grew up with lots of native friends and Navajo friends were always around to having none, I think was really shocking and striking.
I think the other big challenge too as a native person is having that really tight family and being able to be around for family, support family. Going through school, I had to make a lot of sacrifices to succeed in school, which is really, really tough. It's like, do you go home to support your family or do you stay and take your final exam? It's like these trade-offs that I think can be really trying for Native people when they're faced with these challenges.
Chad: Absolutely, yes, that sounds difficult. You did make it to the end of your Ph.D. program at Berkeley, and then you became an intern with the Sandia National Laboratories Tribal Energy Program, which fostered your current passion for renewable energy generation, energy independence, especially for Native American tribes. Then you became a postdoc and a staff engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where you supported a vast array of energy security projects. First question is, what was the process like getting to work for a US National Research Laboratory? What drew you to that sort of organization in particular with your mechanical engineering background?
Suzanne: I was a member at the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Through that organization, I actually was able to meet some folks who worked at National Labs in their career fair. Just seeing these people year after year, I started to remember them and was curious more about what it is that they do. I was fortunate when I was in graduate school to go visit Lawrence Livermore National Lab and take a thermal computational software training program and start to get a taste of what it is that some of these researchers do at the National Labs.
It was really interesting. There's a lot of cool research happening at the labs, very early stage of what's going on and you may never ever hear about it. I think that was the most exciting thing is just learning what people were doing.
Chad: Can you talk about the most interesting project you worked on?
Suzanne: Probably my favorite project was one that I was able to get funded myself. That's another aspect of the lab is, if you want to do research that you want to do, a lot of times you have to create your own budget, projects, proposals, and get funded to do the work you want to do. I was able to work in the energy systems area. We would analyze in a very high level essentially what your resources are, where they go through the energy chain, and then be able to make Sankey diagrams or flow diagrams out of those.
For example, you could have solar, coal, wind, natural gas. Those will all go to different sectors like the residential, industrial, commercial, or transportation sector. From there, there's thermodynamic efficiencies that you have. You have some that is useful energy that we actually convert to things that we use and then there are the waste energy which sometimes can't be helped as the loss of the thermodynamics. I think some of the interesting pieces that you can pull from those diagrams is which sectors are the most inefficient and how are people trying to address that and improve it.
My favorite project within that space was trying to build an energy diagram for the Navajo Nation. It is incredibly tough when you go to a world that has all the data you can ask for to an environment where you have very limited data and you have to make a lot of assumptions. That I think is really hard and just being very forthcoming about what your assumptions are and how large your margins of error can be because you have to make assumptions when you don't have the information you need.
I think that was the most challenging project to do just because of the lack of data but it was really interesting. When presenting it to people at conferences, it's sad because people look at it. For Navajo at least, they're like, "Oh my gosh. I know coal is a big exporter and I know a lot of it doesn't come back to our community but it's striking to see it in a visual."
Chad: Absolutely. You were dealing with a lot of uncertainty in that role. About five years ago, you left the labs and you became a businesswoman, and you teamed up with Wahleah Johns to co-found the organization you now lead, Native Renewables. What motivated you to take the leap from researcher to entrepreneur?
Suzanne: One of the programs I was fortunate to be able to be a part of while at the National Lab was the I-Corps program. The Department of Energy now has an Energy I-Corps which is modeled after the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program. The goal was to be able to help researchers in the National Lab system use their technology and make it commercial, some kind of commercial product. I didn't have the technology but I was the entrepreneur lead for a scientist at the lab. I just spent a lot of time learning about her research and how it would possibly be able to transform the environment that she worked in.
As we were doing that, we had to build a pitch deck. We had to think about the economics of everything. We made a lot of phone calls to different commercial sectors, different types of customers, really trying to understand if there was a need, what the need was, what the niche was for this technology, was it viable, and did it make economic sense was really a huge one. I think thinking about the money piece to science was a huge shift in my mind. That is also the start of my entrepreneurial journey. After that or I guess concurrently through that, I had met Wahleah at a conference, the Navajo Energy Summit which was in Flagstaff one year and it turns out, we both lived in Oakland, literally one neighborhood away from each other.
We spent some time talking, getting to know each other, but a lot of our conversations kept going back to, isn't it frustrating that our communities don't have power that so many people and our relatives don't have electricity? I think because she had experience running nonprofits before, and I had the technical experience, she was just like, "Dude, let's just start an organization. Let's try to figure this out because this is unacceptable that this is still happening."
Chad: I think most of us in the US really only have a cursory understanding that a billion people, mostly in the developing world suffer from energy poverty. Which means they either lack access to electrification altogether, or they spend a significant amount of their income on access to very basic electricity services. While many of us may not be aware of it all is that by some estimates, up to a third of US households find it difficult to afford the energy they need to heat and cool their homes and provide basic heating, lighting, and cooking, et cetera. Could you talk to us a little bit about how this issue is specifically concentrated among the indigenous population in the US?
Suzanne: Within the Navajo Nation alone, I think the latest estimate is somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 families do not have access to grid-tied electricity. The Hopi nation which lies within the Navajo Nation, there's also families that don't have access to electricity. It's a very layered hard question of why it is the way it is. Some of the economic things that we know of is it's expensive to extend power lines in the rural nature of the family. For example, my grandma, her next neighbor was miles away. You can just imagine if it costs between $40,000 and $80,000 per mile to extend a utility line, and the families have to pay for it, it gets really expensive really quickly.
That becomes a barrier for families to get power. I think one of the exciting things we hope we get to work on a lot more is off-grid solar is using that as a mechanism to be able to provide power to families, because it's not connected to the grid, but it is able to be supplied to areas that are really rural.
Chad: You talked about some of the solutions to this problem. One we could extend the existing grid to this very large rural community, but that, as you noted, would be rather expensive, prohibitively so in most cases. The second maybe we could build a midsize community or what are called commercial-industrial solar projects located in these communities, but you'd also need some at least small microgrid build out probably for that. Also, probably pretty expensive. I think your organization has focused on whether it's rooftop or ground-mounted solar panels, and in many cases, batteries on-site at individuals' homes and businesses.
Can you tell us about why you focus specifically on that solution over others?
Suzanne: I think it's the most economic for us to be able to do that. What it is that we do is we provide for most families that we work with the ground-mount system. It's roughly 2.4 kilowatts of PV solar photovoltaic, with battery storage. A lot of times, we're using sealed lead-acid types of batteries. Some of the reasons we do that, like roof mount we tried to stay away from one of the challenges of working in the environments we do is the condition of the home. The worst cases, there's been families who were not able to make improvements on their homes for many years because of legal reasons. That creates a challenge for us in terms of the structural integrity of the home.
Most of the time, we don't even mess with the roof. We work with residential families. We haven't gotten to the point where we're exploring microgrid solutions. Part of it is trying to figure out how you best work with multiple families. Best case scenario, they all love each other and they agree to how they are sharing power. We haven't got to the point where we're exploring that with a group of families or within a community. We're really focusing on, thinking about the equity of everything, trying to focus on the families who are probably going to be the last to ever get power in terms of grid-type power.
Or the families who are hardest to reach just because the roads are terrible or geographically it's really hard to get to. That allows other entities that are able to work with other communities or areas that are easier for them to continue doing their work while we focus on those that might be the hardest to reach.
Chad: How do you find these hard to reach members of your community? Do they come to you, do you receive referrals from others? How does this process typically work?
Suzanne: We sometimes will work directly with the community leadership for them to make recommendations on who they think is the most at need. For example, families that have medical needs, they need power to maybe a CPAP machine or something like that. Sometimes it's a large family where they have children that have needs for education. In those cases, we'll work directly with community leadership to get guidance on where to go. We also have families coming directly to us, they sign up on our website, and we do our best to reach them and other times, it's referrals. Families we've already helped out, they'll tell like word of mouth, so and so Native renewables was able to install this for us, so you should reach out to them.
There's definitely no shortage of families that we get to work with, like the really hard part, though, is not being able to help everybody ASAP. There's only so much funding we have to support people. A lot of times people are low income, and they can't afford to make large capital expenses to get the systems in place. Although we're working on some financing efforts, there's not a lot of options for financing as well for the families.
Chad: I want to talk about that financing piece a little later. First, when you're on-site, you get a customer, you've gone on-site to look at their home, how do you evaluate their existing electricity consumption, and their potential electricity consumption? How do you use that to then size the systems that you're going to build for them?
Suzanne: We actually have a standard size system that we provide, the intent of that was to be able to have it power a full-size refrigerator, nothing extravagant, but also not a dorm size refrigerator, some lights, and some electronics. Whether that be tablets, or laptops, or cell phones, satellite dishes, those kinds of things. Our goal was to size it that we could meet what we thought were some critical needs for families.
We don't do custom sizes at this point, maybe in the future, but that was the ultimate goal was make it big enough they can have food storage and electricity, but also make it as affordable as possible for us to install because we have a standardized size, we have an idea of what our maximum allowable energy usage is for the system to be sustainable. Our customer care person or one of our education leaders will go and will talk with the family and get an idea like, "Hey, if you had power, what would you use?" Or maybe they used to have power and they just need batteries.
"If you use that power, what did you use? How long did you use it for?" When we get a chance to go on-site, often we get to see what these appliances or electronics are. We share them, we might take a picture of the labels that tells us the wattage or the current of the device. That helps us start to think about what is their total kilowatt-hours that they're using over a given day. Once we do that calculation, we'll go back to them and say, "Hey, you're doing great, you can use most of all this stuff, and you should be able to charge your batteries."
A lot of times, they'll be way over, and this is the hard conversation too is like, "Okay, well, if you have to get rid of stuff, what do you want to get rid of?" Some of the hard ones we had actually this past week was, we replaced batteries for a family that had a system already, and it's less than half the size of what we normally install, but they wanted both the refrigerator and a freezer. We were like, "Oh, this system is not going to power both," and trying to help them think through creative solutions. Those kinds of things it's really heartbreaking but you're like, "But I really want your system to last as long as it can, and that does require some sacrifice."
Chad: When you're out there on-site, both during the initial assessment and the eventual install, I'm sure there are a lot of challenges you face going to these very rural homes that the areas may not have cell phone service, I imagine or internet service, quality of the roads might be bad. How do these very rural areas impact your ability to actually do the installations?
Suzanne: It can make it really challenging. The infrastructure sometimes is not there. Roads sometimes can be so bad. For example, a family we went to visit, they were two miles down the road. It took us over half an hour to an hour to get there, just because we had to drive super slow. The roads are sometimes are really rocky. Sometimes the roads get washed out, so we have to turn around and go a different route. These can definitely add up over your day and you're tired and it makes it really tough.
Beforehand, we have to plan out meeting locations, we have lists of where all the local hospitals are in case anything happens, we get GPS coordinates ready, and we pretty much assume that we won't have internet or cell phone access where it is that we're going. Sometimes it would help, but it's not a deal-breaker is like, "Oh, hey, did anybody bring that manual with that one number on it?" That would be nice to have internet, but it's not a deal-breaker. Sometimes communicating with families is tough. For example, one family we would just have to leave them messages, and then when they would get within cell phone range, they would respond.
It wasn't like we could reach them in real-time we had to just plan, assume it was going to take at least two days for them to respond because they had to get within a place they could check their cell phones. Yes, it's having to do all that planning and sometimes our plans do not work out as we think they're going to, but that makes it all really tough. When we have folks that help us as well that ultimately they would have a four by four vehicle, they're getting in and out of places as needed, get gas whenever you can, and food whenever you can, because who knows when you're going to come across those resources depending on where we have to travel.
Chad: You did mention batteries earlier. While there's enormous solar potential in the Southwest, especially where the Navajo and Hopi Nations are located, obviously, the sun doesn't shine all the time. If a customer simply has a few solar panels but doesn't have access to any grid-tied electricity, they can only use electricity from the panels when the sun is shining unless, of course, they have a battery to store extra energy from when the sun is shining to use it when it's not. Do you see most of your customers opt for these battery solutions? You do use lead-acid batteries I think you mentioned rather than lithium-ion ones. How does that process typically work?
Suzanne: We pretty much include batteries in all of our installs, the goal being to provide three days of autonomy if the clouds come overhead is the way it's been designed. We do mostly the sealed lead-acid because of the cost of things and at least the upfront costs. I think long-term, they may be more expensive than lithium, but we are just starting. Actually, this past week we did a few installs with some lithium batteries and we want to pilot them and see how they do in their environment. Some of the things we have to take into consideration is the battery temperature. Are they picky about the temperatures they operate in or charge in, and if so, what is the environment the batteries are in?
Does it allow for it to stay within those temperatures, and if not, how do we have to adapt to that? Or do we have to just decide on a different battery altogether? It's been fun this past week learning about different types of equipment we can use and implementing them. The other nice thing is it's lighter we don't have to use as many of them. There is trade-offs with both systems and I think, hopefully, we can start to get more streamlined and refined and make it easier on ourselves to do things, but not quite there yet.
Chad: When your customers do get electricity perhaps for the very first time in their lives, what do you see that they were the most excited to do? Have you had any very rewarding reactions that stuck with you in all your various installs?
Suzanne: Yes, there's a few. It always gets me when they turn on the light and they start tearing up and we're just like, "Oh, don't cry because I'm going to start crying." Some fun ones are we had one install, a young family, the kids were excited to watch movies. I think they were using generators and they could only had enough gas to watch half of the movie so that was their first question when we were doing the install, "Can I watch a movie with this?" Those have been really, really cool. I think some other folks just really simple things sometimes [unintelligible 00:24:16] like, "Oh, puzzles, we do puzzles and we want to have really bright lights. We used to just have a single light here now we have it all over the house and we can- or we don't have to follow the sunlight to be able to do our puzzles." I think those are the cutest stories I'll say that I can think of.
Chad: I know you also provide education to customers on how to use their new systems and maintain them for the long term. What are the biggest misconceptions you typically have to address or what are some of the most common trainings or lessons that you have to provide to customers?
Suzanne: The biggest ones are what you should not do with it because the storage is limited, the size is limited. A lot of times, which is a bummer because I know people really want heating in the home, but heating consumes a lot of power very quickly. Sometimes we'll tell families like, "Hey, if you can, please don't use a space heater." I feel like that's a common use that families would like to have available to them. The other bummer is, it's like in the wintertime, so when you have less sun also and batteries don't charge as quickly. I think those kinds of things are tough.
The other things I think are just helping them understand, if you allow your batteries to charge up, they will last longer, as opposed to if you keep continually drain them and never let them charge. Worst case, I think we've seen like a year or two. For other families, it's like 10 or 12, varying by the type of technology. I think that's probably the most critical thing that we talk about with them.
The other challenge that we have sometimes is families who have had solar before but were never told these guiding rules of how to use off-grid solar. They'll go out and buy a brand new washing machine or a new electric heater which is never going to be powered by the solar system. They've developed this idea that solar doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work, it's limited, but they didn't get the knowledge or the education of how it does work so that they could avoid making those kind of costly, I don't want to say mistakes, but those costly things that they've done.
Chad: How do you price the systems? I think you mentioned previously that some folks may get them for free. Others lease them with some sort of financing option. How do you solve for that for the customers?
Suzanne: Sometimes as a nonprofit, we do have grants sometimes that will come in. Any systems that we donate, we donate it with a purpose of training the installers. I won't say it's more for the installers, but heavily for getting that experience, that hands-on training for the installers is one way we justify providing a system to a family for free. Oftentimes, those families have a critical need, or maybe have done some amazing work in the community, and people just, they nominate them. I think they're the most amazing people ever.
I will say trying to decide who gets it is really hard because we have so many families that need it and deserve it. We are exploring some financing options so that we can open it up to more families, and not just however many we can fundraise for. Hopefully, that'll get completed by the end of the year, ready to go. I'm excited about some of our next steps. We've made some progress on that. The challenging part, the scary part for me, personally, is how many systems are we ready to commit to-- Let's say it's a 10-year financing agreement, how many families are we willing to commit to over 10 years? We're just starting the process. It freaks me out, but it's also really exciting.
Chad: Growth is a good problem to have it in some respect, isn't it?
[laughter]
Suzanne: Yes, absolutely.
Chad: I believe it was about a year ago that you converted Native Renewables to a nonprofit organization. What drove you to make this change, and how does that fit with your larger growth strategy going forward?
Suzanne: We started off with a fiscal sponsor who was a nonprofit organization. They were based in California. We started the organization in Oakland, in the Bay Area. In 2019, I quit my job at the lab and moved to Flagstaff to work on Native Renewables full-time. In 2020, we decided, "Hey, we should just have our own entity because, one, we're not based in California anymore, two, we want to have more control over our fundraising and how we have our own processes set up and just to empower ourselves to run our own organization." That was one of the big reasons why we decided to start our own 501(c)(3). I think some other things, we were limited by what kind of fundraising we could do under the umbrella of a different nonprofit. Switching over has also helped us with that issue as well.
Chad: In other conversations, you've discussed the four values embedded in Native Renewables, your nonprofit organization. What are these values, how did you develop them, and how do they help you connect your work to the traditional culture of the communities which you serve?
Suzanne: This is an exercise we did when we first started very early on. I think what's been awesome is whenever we have tough decisions, we come back to these values to help decide what to do and are just using our decision-making process. One of the values we have is engagement. Part of that is having good communication within our organization with our partners, trying to be collaborative, sharing best practices and learning from each other, providing good education to the families that we work with, and also having that respect for each other, our partners and the families that we work in.
That includes maintaining their confidentiality or privacy as they prefer another one we have, we call tribal sustainability that was both sustainability within the business, but also within our work. Having renewable energy in itself, ideally being sustainable, the systems being sustainable, helping the families sustain their power for many years, and also thinking culturally, the idea of like Hozho or that harmony and balance that we have in the homes, trying to bring back that cultural piece to our values as well, but also helping our own people be sustainable in the way that if we can train them and ideally have them start training others and building that cycle of knowledge or passing on that knowledge within our own communities is really important.
The third one, we had a regenerative culture. That's thinking about how we include our cultural values within our organization, how we maintain those cultural stories. Wahleah’s parents were awesome enough. They made a coloring book for us. It was both an English and in Navajo and start to describe some of the activities related around the sun that were really important to Navajo people. I was trying to bring that knowledge, also keep that in mind when we're doing our work as well. The other thing we recognized is language is really important. Sometimes we have only Navajo speaking families that are out there, and it's great to have both fluent Navajo and Hopi speakers on our team that can communicate with those families.
We don't have to have our translator. For example, sometimes having a translator is great, but if they don't understand the technical background, it's hard for them to explain that terminology or how those processes work. That's been great having those people on our team as well. The last piece we had was a thriving company for us to be able to grow, to have trust within ourselves and within the families that we work with and building a support structure of partners who are really supportive of what it is that we're doing and that includes Hannon Armstrong now.
Chad: Yes, a proud partner. On the topic of local job creation, workforce training is a very critical part of your program. Can you tell us how you train members of the local community to do this work and maybe how your organization can also help bring back talent, indigenous folks who maybe left for other opportunities, bring them back in the community to contribute to the sustainability of the community going forward.
Suzanne: I'll say I'm a story of someone who left for about 20 years and came back to community. One thing I love about what we do is that it really supports the families that we care about and the things that are important to us. I think being passionate about that mission is what keeps me here and doing this work. I could be in a much more lucrative job and somewhere else fancy, but I actually really love what it is that I'm doing. When we first started doing workforce training, we actually did our pilot project in one of the chapters, the chapter of Hard Rock in Arizona. It was a roughly seven week program. We had 10 participants spending anywhere from two to four days with us every week, doing both classroom training background, photovoltaics and then getting into hands on training, like really simple, "Hey, how to strip a wire," all the way to put together your own little solar unit.
You have to test that your light bulb and your fixture that you made all work, and it's all powered by the battery we provided. I think that was the first project where we invested in the folks of our community and we had people apply. I think what made it unique was it was in the community. A lot of times folks have to travel off the reservation to take classes. We provided people with this travel stipend and we worked with a partner in Tó Nizhóní Ání and they help provide the meals to folks so that we all got fed during the training. The food was so good, but the goal after that first experience was to have more of those all around the reservation.
I think we had planned at least two of them in 2020, and COVID hit. We had to completely shift our plans and so in 2021, we had a great partner, Remote Energy that worked with us to implement a virtual training program for off-grid. We had, I think, six participants finish that first training program. Then they spent a little bit of time with us doing hands-on stuff and as long as they did that well, and they were enjoying it, we invited them back to do another hands-on session and do a mock build of our own system. We called them cohort two and what was really cool about that is we had cohort one who has more experience, they've already done 10 or 11 installs in the field.
They were training the second cohort and so I think that teaching the teacher model is really cool and I missed that day and I really wish I saw it, but I think that's been really valuable is just seeing how other people are, how they care about what it is that they're teaching and they're teaching others and hopefully, they enjoy teaching as well as installing but at least of the first five that we were working with in 2020, one of them is now full-time staff and the other four are part-time staff, the next group of trainees we’ll see we're hopefully we will fundraise enough to be able to bring them onboard, but for now we're still training them on some different equipment and how to do site visits and that sort of stuff.
Chad: A couple of years ago, the president of the Navajo Nation encouragingly signed a proclamation in support of renewable energy, but policy, as it does in many places, remains a significant obstacle to scaling the types of solutions organizations like yours are deploying. As you work to grow and expand your efforts in other organizations like yours, look to reach indigenous populations with renewable net-zero solutions, what policy changes do you think will be the most impactful within indigenous governing bodies or local communities? Are there any organizations that are particularly effective in helping to drive these very necessary changes?
Suzanne: Policy externally, some of the big key takeaways are, I guess, anytime doing project with tribal nations is getting consensus and some organizations will even take a step further in saying consensus doesn't mean you can talk with three people in the community and call that consensus. Like you actually have to talk with a large population in the community. I think another is for folks coming in and there is some entities within the tribal governments that exist to help this, but external contractors coming in, some of the best ones they will employ local people, native people. I wish more of them would take that a step further and hire on folks full time instead of hiring them for the temporary job. I would love to see a whole native crew doing things like utility-scale solar.
I'm sure there's people who are striving to do that as well, but I think that would be amazing. In terms of state policy, I rely on the work ofTó Nizhóní Áníand like Nicole Horseherdercare works with New Mexico, those folks who are working it on trying to get more solar-friendly projects or clean energy projects but also some of the work that they do is trying to work in the just transition or an equitable transition from coal to renewable energy. Those are some groups that I get help with sometimes when trying to think about policy efforts. Some other interesting things I think are the different states that, so Navajo for example, is within Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona and they all have very wildly different renewable portfolio standards and all wildly different policy. As a nation, I'm really curious to see how we move forward in our policy and refining it. Are we going to start defining our own standards? Are we going to try to align with one of those states?
I don't know, but I think it'll be interesting. I think the other important thing that I love to see, I think because of my data-driven career aspects is have metrics that actually have numbers to them, not just kind of lofty. It'd be great if we increased blah, blah, blah. Like that really means nothing. You couldn't do one tiny little bit of effort and not make a huge impact. The other thing, I don't know a ton about, but I know a lot of people are concerned with is like the double or triple taxation that happens within projects on tribal land. I think that's something that's being discussed and hopefully will get resolved as well. One amazing thing if we could get credits for the work that we do would be amazing but as far as I know, not possible as a nonprofit entity. Thinking about other creative ways that we can have positive impacts or benefits or things the community gets out of these projects that impact their areas.
Chad: How can our listeners contribute to you if they want to support your mission?
Suzanne: I think one is just sharing what you learned that there's lots of families that don't have access to power. A lot of it by no fault of their own. If you are wanting to donate to us on our website, we have a link, nativerenewables.org. If you want to support in that way. This year, some of that funds has been able to go to replacing batteries for families or inputting electrical infrastructure to homes that don't exist. That gives you an idea of what we use some of that funding for. Then I guess just, yes, if you hear of any cool opportunities, send them our way. We've had random people email us, "Hey, you should apply for this grant," and amazing things have happened.
We are grateful for those kinds of folks as well and good partners. We're always looking for good partners. I would ask, please do your minimal homework know where Navajo Nation is and help us understand how we could be good partners. I think sometimes we get emails saying, "Hey, we can partner," and we have no context and we're really, really strapped for time. We're a small team, limited resources. It'll help us sift through some of that stuff really quickly and emails is always really, really helpful.
Chad: I can imagine. We have a tradition here at Climate Positive where we like to ask our guests a series of rapid-fire lightning round questions. Since these are candid conversations with a climate theme, we call this the hot seat. Fill in the blank for the following statements. The most important advice I have ever followed is.
Suzanne: Knowing that sometimes as an indigenous woman you'll have to work harder than everyone else to get to the same place.
Chad: The best feedback I ever rejected is.
Suzanne: You should really talk to this person because they want to give you money.
Chad: People who know me best say my best quality is.
Suzanne: I'll say when I'm not tired and I'm not busy, I'm a good listener.
Chad: Success is.
Suzanne: Being able to do what you're passionate about.
Chad: California or Arizona?
Suzanne: Oh, man. I'm going to say Arizona just because when I hear Arizona, I've been a Wildcat fan since I was a teenager. That's the reason.
Chad: I was a big fan of the basketball team in the late '90s when I was in high school. They're still very good, year after year. The most meaningful Navajo concept you wish more folks were aware of is.
Suzanne: Well, one is part of what we talk about a lot is the concept of Hozho- the beauty, the harmony, the peace because that ties to our work and that's something we really want people to have in their home. I think just having access to electricity makes it so much easier to be able to have that.
Chad: Finally last one, to me, climate positive means?
Suzanne: To me, climate positive means being aware of what impact you have, whether that be on my missions or your impact to your environment, and trying to think of ways to improve or reduce your impact.
Chad: I think that's a great answer. Well, thank you very much, Suzanne. This has been a really great and insightful conversation and it's always great to chat with you.
Suzanne: Great. Thank you for having me on.
Chad: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong and David Benjamin Sound. If you like what you heard today, please share the show with friend and leave us a comment and a rating on our show page.
You can send us show and guest suggestions by tweeting at us @HannonArmstrong or reach us via email at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com
I'm Chad Reed
And this is Climate Positive.