Green Energy, Tribal Rights: Getting Hydropower Right

Most companies get this wrong: clean energy isn’t automatically just energy. Who owns the land, who controls the water, and who lives with the risks determines whether a green technology project is truly sustainable.

That’s the real story behind the Navajo Nation’s decision to reject a pumped-storage hydropower project on Black Mesa—and why federal officials are now trying to make sure tribes can’t say no next time. For anyone working in green technology, climate policy, or energy investing, this is more than an Indigenous rights story; it’s a preview of how the next decade of clean infrastructure fights will play out.

This matters because the energy transition can’t afford endless court battles, local opposition, and project cancellations. If you care about scaling renewables, you should care about tribal consent just as much as transmission lines and tax credits.

In this post, I’ll walk through what happened on Navajo land, how the Department of Energy is pushing to change the rules, and what a smarter, consent-based model for green technology actually looks like.

What really happened on Navajo land—and why it matters for green tech

The Black Mesa case shows how not to build a green energy project.

A hydropower developer, Nature and People First, proposed pumped-storage projects on Black Mesa in northern Arizona. On paper, pumped storage looks like a climate win: two reservoirs at different elevations, water pumped uphill when there’s surplus solar or wind, and released downhill through turbines when demand spikes. It’s giant, long-duration energy storage—a key tool for decarbonizing grids.

But location changes everything.

• Black Mesa sits on Navajo Nation land.
• The aquifer beneath it has already been heavily depleted by decades of coal mining.
• Local Diné communities still haul water because nearby wells and springs were impacted.

For residents who lived through Peabody Coal’s operations, the promise of “green jobs” tied to more large-scale groundwater pumping was a red flag, not a lifeline.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had recently adopted a new policy: no hydropower licenses on tribal land without that tribe’s support. The Navajo Nation opposed the projects, so FERC denied the permits—both for Nature and People First and for a second developer, Rye Development.

Here’s the thing about that decision: it wasn’t just a tribal victory. It was a signal that clean energy can’t be built the way fossil fuels were—by treating Indigenous lands as sacrifice zones.

For serious players in green technology, that’s not a problem; it’s a design constraint. And once you treat it as a constraint, you can innovate around it.

How the DOE is trying to weaken tribal veto power

Now the conflict has shifted from Arizona’s mesas to Washington’s rulebooks.

In October, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked FERC to reverse its tribal-consent policy. His argument was blunt: giving tribes effective veto power over hydropower projects on their land creates “unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure.” He framed it as a competitiveness issue—if the United States wants to dominate global energy markets, it shouldn’t let tribes block projects.

Wright didn’t just ask politely. He used a rarely invoked authority under the Federal Power Act to push FERC to make a final decision by December 18 and compressed the public comment period down to just two weeks instead of the usual 30–60 days. That’s lightning-fast for a major policy reversal.

So what’s at stake in that seemingly technical change?

• If FERC backs down, tribal consent becomes advisory, not decisive.
• Hydropower developers could return to places like Black Mesa, even over local objections.
• The default model for big green infrastructure would move closer to “decide in DC, defend on the ground” instead of “consent from the ground up.”

More than 20 tribes and tribal organizations, along with environmental groups and some elected officials, have already pushed back. As Cowlitz Indian Tribe Chairman William Iyall put it, “Tribes are stewards of the land and associated resources, and understand best how to manage and preserve those resources, as they have done for centuries.”

I agree with that framing. If you’re building long-lived, capital-intensive, climate-critical infrastructure, the last people you should be sidelining are those with the deepest, longest relationship to the place.

Why “green” is not enough: lessons from Black Mesa

The Black Mesa story is a clear example of why environmental justice isn’t a side issue in green technology—it’s a core risk factor.

A long history of extraction

In the 1960s, Peabody Coal carved up Black Mesa between the Hopi and Navajo and began large-scale mining. The company massively pumped groundwater from the Navajo aquifer, exceeding legal limits and compromising access to drinking water. Wells faltered. Springs declined. Families who used to rely on nearby water started hauling it in trucks.

As Nicole Horseherder, executive director of the Diné-led water rights group Tó Nizhóní Ání (TNA), recalled, “They were now starting to have to haul all their water needs in this way. That really changed the lifestyle of the people on Black Mesa.”

When the mines finally closed, communities shifted toward protecting water and rebuilding a sustainable local economy.

Then a new company arrived selling hydropower.

The sales pitch vs. lived reality

According to local organizers, Nature and People First’s founder pitched the project as a win-win:

• 1,000 jobs during construction
• 100 permanent jobs
• New access to potable water for residents

On a slide deck, that sounds like responsible development. On the ground, it sounded like a replay of the same pattern: big promises, deep extraction, and long-term water risks.

As Diné organizer Adrian Herder put it, the pitch “seemed like this individual was tugging at people’s heartstrings, saying things that people wanted to hear,” without grappling with the region’s history.

The result: Navajo leadership and local advocates said no. Under FERC’s current policy, that “no” actually meant something.

From a green technology perspective, this is the crucial lesson:

A project can be technically clean but socially dirty.

If you build green infrastructure on top of historic trauma, water insecurity, and broken promises, you don’t have a resilient project—you have a lawsuit waiting to happen.

What a consent-based model for green technology looks like

There’s a better way to approach green infrastructure on tribal lands, and it starts with one principle: free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) is a design requirement, not an optional checkbox.

For developers, utilities, and investors working in the clean energy space, that translates into a concrete playbook.

1. Start with water and land, not megawatts

In arid regions like the Southwest, water is the limiting factor, not acreage or sunlight. Pumped-storage hydropower that relies on already-stressed aquifers is a non-starter for many communities—tribal or not.

Better questions to ask at the scoping stage:

• Can we design closed-loop systems that don’t tap fragile groundwater?
• Are there brownfield sites—former industrial zones, retired mines—where pumped storage or solar can repurpose damaged land instead of touching culturally critical sites?
• Are there other storage options (thermal storage, battery arrays, demand response) that meet the same grid need with less local impact?

2. Bring tribes in as partners, not obstacles

Tribal nations aren’t just “stakeholders.” They’re governments with their own economic, environmental, and cultural priorities.

Developers who treat tribes as equal partners tend to:

• Co-design project benefits (revenue sharing, training, ownership stakes)
• Respect non-negotiables (sacred sites, key water sources, traditional uses)
• Build long-term working relationships that outlast a single project

It’s slower up front, but you trade speed for durability. A project built with a tribal government is far less likely to face years of opposition, PR damage, or political risk.

3. Use technology to shrink the footprint, not just raise capacity

AI and digital tools can help reduce the land, water, and cultural footprint of green technology.

Examples that actually move the needle:

• AI siting models that combine solar/wind resource maps with tribal cultural layers, water stress indexes, and biodiversity data to filter out high-conflict zones before the first investor pitch.
• Grid optimization software that squeezes more flexibility out of existing lines and generation, reducing the pressure to build in sensitive areas just to meet peak demand.
• Scenario modeling that quantifies social risk—delays, legal actions, community opposition—as a financial variable, not a vague PR concern.

The reality? It’s simpler than it looks: your project risk model should treat community opposition like any other hard constraint.

4. Bake justice into your KPIs

If your green technology strategy reports only on:

• tonnes of CO₂ avoided
• MWh of clean power generated
• project IRR

…you’re missing half the story.

For projects that touch tribal lands or frontline communities, add metrics like:

• households gaining permanent, safe access to water or energy
• percentage of project ownership or net revenue held by the tribal nation
• number of local workers trained and retained beyond the construction phase
• community satisfaction and trust scores over time

What gets measured gets managed. When justice metrics sit alongside energy and financial metrics, teams behave differently.

What this means for the future of green technology

The fight over Navajo hydropower and tribal veto power is a preview of the next wave of green infrastructure politics, not an outlier.

As transmission lines, hydrogen hubs, wind farms, and mines for critical minerals expand, they’ll run straight through Indigenous territories and rural communities. Companies and policymakers face a choice:

• Try to weaken consent rules and push projects through, or
• Treat tribal sovereignty and community power as non-negotiable, and innovate within those boundaries.

From where I sit, the second path is the only one that scales. The first might look faster on a Gantt chart, but it collapses under the weight of lawsuits, protests, and political backlash.

Horseherder is skeptical that federal agencies will suddenly wake up to this reality. She expects attempts to erode what’s left of good-faith relationships: “The only thing I’m optimistic about is that Indigenous people know that they need to continue to fight.”

For people working in green technology, this is the moment to pick a side: extractive green growth or consent-based climate solutions.

If you’re building products, projects, or investment theses in this space, ask yourself:

• Are we treating tribal nations as full partners with real power to say no?
• Are our models embedding water, land, and justice constraints from day one?
• Would our project still make sense if local consent were required—not just recommended?

There’s a better way to grow green technology: one where hydropower, solar, and storage projects don’t just decarbonize the grid, but also strengthen the communities who host them. That’s the version of the energy transition that actually lasts.