 But this is a different thing, not a single speaker. We're going to do this as a team of wanted as a fireside chat and to facilitate that we have not only one but two young people who have worked on tribal issues here at Stanford to both introduce our very prestigious speaker on that subject today and participate in the fireside chat. And they are Summer Shaw, who is a, are you a grad student? Yeah, I'm a JD MBA at Stanford. I can introduce myself if that's better. Thanks very much. And Kimberly Yazzie, who is a postdoc in biology working with Professor Chris Field, who is right up here conveniently in the front row. So they've graciously agreed to run the fireside chat. I'm really excited about this and I hope you like it. And thanks again, Tom. Take it away. Great. Well, welcome. So what a wonderful occasion it is to be here with you on Indigenous Peoples Day celebrating Native American culture and the many different Indigenous contributions to society and the world. So my name is Kim Yazzie. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Adores School of Sustainability. I work on climate solutions. And I've worked on a variety of projects, including building out a GIS-based decision support tool for citing utility-scale solar in tribal communities. And this one project is a quick reduction with the Navajo Mission. I've also been in cross-sector engagement and have had the great honor this past year working with Sandra on identifying optimal pathways for energy development in tribal communities. And one paper that we're working on is pointing to some of the tribes, what tribes, what some of the issues tribes are facing accessing clean energy funding, the funding programs available through the Biden-Harris administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, and that bipartisan infrastructure law. So you're very happy to have Sandra with us here today. And hi, my name is Summer Shaw. I'm a JD MBA at Stanford. I'm also the co-president of the GSB Energy Club this year. I started my career in consulting at McKinsey where I worked with large utilities and manufacturers, transitioned to Google X, their Moonshot Factory to work on clean tech moonshots, and then worked in government, first in state government in the state of New York on climate policy there, and then at the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office. I first became interested in tribal issues at the Loan Programs Office because the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program, to my shock, has not given a single loan out to date despite having over $20 billion in available funding. And that led down this rabbit hole of questions as to what the sorts of barriers were for accessing this type of financing. So when I got back to Stanford, I started conducting a independent research project with Professor Gregory Oblowski from the Law School on exactly that question. How do you finance renewable energy projects on tribal lands? Great, it gives me the great pleasure to introduce Sandra. Sandra Begay is the daughter of a Navajo tribal leader and a public health nurse, a member of the Navajo Nation and has been a civil structural engineer for 33 years. She leads technical efforts to assist Native American tribes with their renewable energy developments as a principal member of the technical staff and researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sandra is a Stanford alumna who earned a master of science, structural engineering degree after working earlier at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. In 2000, Sandra was inducted into the Stanford University Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame. She currently serves on the inaugural advisory council for the School of Sustainability, bringing the only indigenous voice to the table. Please join me in welcoming Sandra. Thank you. So maybe to kick things off, where are tribes seeking renewable energy development and why? Well, some of the larger tribes that have land available are deciding that that might be an advantage for them to see if they can either build mostly solar at this point right now, solar farms on their lands. And if they don't have enough energy appetite to consume all that energy, it's very advantageous to sell that on the grid. And so they would go into a power purchase agreement with a private entity or utility or someone who is accessing the electrons through the transmission lines. What's exciting about having the opportunity for tribes on tribal lands is that it's another way to hopefully bring not only economic development but possibly capacity building within the tribe to not only maybe learn how to install the solar because these are large projects get that training and maybe they can go to another large scale solar facility and then do that building and eventually make their way back home as an electrician certified in solar installations. But also when you do a massive construction project, as many of you know, you're bringing in dollars that are utilized within the community to not only use the money to pay for spaces that they rent or have their trailer come in, they're gonna be there for many months to get that solar installation. So they're spending their dollars, they gotta be fed, they can either buy groceries or they go to restaurants. So there's just an influx of money once you do a large construction project such as a photovoltaics solar farm. Why isn't it advantaged now in a sense why tribes, why renewable energy? You know, the policies of the United States have really transitioned in the short term to go from more fossil, traditional base fuel to green renewables. And so if you can take the opportunity in the momentum which is here now, it would help them to not only a sustainable economy but maybe rebuild it in a sense. And I'll give you the example of Navajo Nation from my tribe. We've been decades, maybe 50, 60 years reliant on coal mining and the operation of the coal generating facilities near Navajo Nation. So that would be in the Lake Powell area and then near Farmington, New Mexico. So with those coal generating stations closing down, those jobs are lost. Now, can we transition those jobs to renewable jobs? That's the question of the day because there's different type of attributes that you have for maintaining a coal plant and building up a solar farm. But the other is can you maintain that kind of economy long term when you bring in solar projects such as that? So that's what people are addressing today as they put in large scale facilities. Another example I'll tell you is the Moapa tribe out of Nevada near Las Vegas. Very small tribe in number, small land base. They had decided they were going in full with PV solar and giving a majority of their land, high percentage of their land for photovoltaics. And they've been a leader as a small tribe in photovoltaics for quite a number of years and they've allocated even more land that's available to put in even more photovoltaics. And you can imagine with Las Vegas down the street from them, they can see the need and appetite for creating more green power through solar farms. So that's part of why the tribes are so interested in putting in PV farms in specific. Can you speak to why this is an exciting time for renewable energy development? So one tribal leader when they first announced the bipartisan infrastructure law and the amount of money that was gonna be given out by the federal government. He reflected, I was at a trade show talking with tribes all about different energy projects. He said, you have to realize this is a once in a generation type of funding knowing that this doesn't come around every day and this may be here for a while but it may go south if Congress which is not functioning right now can't pass a budget. These projects will run out of money in a year or two unless they're renewed. So the iron, as they say, the iron is hot. The money is already allocated for these projects. Can the tribes get in their proposals fast enough to describe to the federal government the different agencies that are offering the money to be able to get access to that money and get started on their projects? So there's a lot of different pockets of the federal government that are giving incentives from the Department of Energy of course, Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and maybe Rural Agriculture as a part of the funding that's happening and this is for communities in need. So right now if you dive into the BIL you'll notice there's a stipulation particularly with these funds that says every project must have 40% spent to give the community some benefit and so that maybe should be on your radar. How are these communities defining a benefit for themselves? Because that's a high percentage and it's called EJ40, Environmental Justice 40. How do you get that benefit back to the community? It could be a rural community, it could be a city, it could be a county, it could be a tribe but that benefit in whatever attributes are defined is it monetary, is it just dollars or is it cleaning up the environment? Is there another type of calculation we can do cars off the road, clean energy metrics that we've seen and there's maps right now available for people to look at some examples of what they mean by the community benefit. So that's what makes it so interesting right now is the communities know what they need it's just how do you relay that in terms that the federal government understands because you're putting in an application in black and white and you may know you're impoverished you might know all these things but you have to articulate it you have to put it in black and white we have 80% unemployment. Many tribal nations know these statistics but yet they have to convey that to the federal government in their application so that's a great need right now for them to understand why do you have to keep talking about these statistics about our communities because you have a panel of experts that are gonna read through that proposal and understand whether it's viable or not. They can't assume anything about that tribe unless they see it in black and white. They may have a historical perspective they may think these tribes are into gaming they don't need the money. Those opinions don't matter when you're looking at the review of these proposals. And then the federal officials select those tribes and then they negotiate what is actually gonna happen based on the proposal and being chosen as a community. So it's very interesting all of this is happening as we speak. Any day now the new DOE office of clean energy demonstration. The acronym is OSED brand new office it's got at least $2 billion to give out in grants. They went through one round and they had concept papers and I like this part about the federal government give us a concept we'll give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You either keep going or give up that idea for now and find a different funding agency or make it more viable by your application. If it goes on to full proposal that could mean lucrative money. So for example, the Navajo Nation is trying to get funding about how do you put in clean energy on former coal mine lands. And that's a very specific funding opportunity that Navajo Nation is competing with West Virginia, Pennsylvania, other places that have coal based businesses that are now transitioning to a different type of energy source. And so can the tribes be competitive in this realm of funding? I don't know, we'll have to wait and see who's decided of who gets the money or not. It's really interesting that you bring up all the different pots of federal funding. What are some of the barriers that tribes face in accessing the funding that's available? Sure, so one of the ways that I know more about the Southwest in specifics, I'll mention this. You have to have enough transmission or a corridor of transmission open to get your plant, your electrons into the system, right? So because the coal plants in the Southwest have shut down two major coal plants, the transmission is available. It's like a highway. Now this highway is open for more, not cars, but electrons to get on there, to get from here to there. The specific example I can give you, I was working for the city of Albuquerque for about a year. This was during the Trump administration when clean energy was not a cool thing to be doing. And so I did something different for about a year. Well, lo and behold, the city of Albuquerque asked for bids to put solar up to help the city become 100% renewable at a point in time. And they actually got a very competitive low bid from the Hickory Apache tribe, which is between Albuquerque and Farmington, New Mexico, sort of in the middle of the state. That would not be possible if that transmission had not opened up. And so we're looking for pockets where there may have been coal plants or other generation that's not gonna be continuing to be able to throw in the green electrons, the solar farms, maybe a wind farm, can use that corridor to get that electron out to the companies that need it or desire it or willing to buy it. The hindrance and barrier may be a tribe in the middle of the United States like the Dakotas. And you might have read a story about this. They have very lucrative wind power. They do not have an electricity appetite to use that power. They don't have an industry that will use up these electrons. So therefore they want to export it or sell it. But there is no availability in their transmission. So what do you do? You get in a line with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC has a queue of people in line that has been around like decades and you pay to be in that line. So you have companies that have paid to be in that queue when they may never put in a renewable project. And so something has to be done. That's where the tribes are meeting with the federal government. And FERC saying, we may have to find the money maybe through a DOE guaranteed loan, but we're willing to put money to get in that queue. But if there's no room, we can't do this project. And are these companies serious about putting in? If not, push them out of the queue. That has to take an action on FERC to push them out of the queue. So that's a barrier beyond the tribe's capacity to make those decisions, but they can tell the government, here's the barrier that we have. Can you in some way get that queue cleaned up? The others that people say they don't have enough funding to get in the queue because it costs millions of dollars to wait for that project. Well, some of the gaming enterprises on certain tribes may have access to that capital, or they're gonna have to partner with a major renewable developer to say, the potential is here, you've seen the land, the sun is shining, it's very prevalent. We wanna get in that corridor to get our electrons there and they will then partner and maybe put the money to get in the queue. So it can get very complicated because you have these systems that you have to do with that are very old, our electrical grid is very old and having it not have any room is a real issue for tribes, particularly when you're in a windy area and you don't use the power, you need to sell it to California, Nevada, Phoenix, Tucson and push it towards the West so that you can sell that for the attributes or the actual electrons that you're selling. What are your suggestions to commit to addressing the climate crisis or how do you practice climate mitigation? Sure, so all of us probably should figure out how can we individually or personally mitigate the climate crisis? So there are calculators out there through internet searches, how do you quantify how much electricity you use? What kind of car do you drive? How do you live your life personally? So I made a pledge not to use too many paper plates so I have plenty of dishes, so I have to use those dishes and use the dishwasher or wash them, but it saves like you've seen on campus with your recycling, I practiced that at home. I chose to drive a hybrid car, I have a Chevy Volt, when they first came out, they don't make them anymore but I've heard some literature criticism and articles about plug-in hybrids. It's not really EV, you're using fossil fuels. Well, I actually have that syndrome where people are worried about their electric car. My corridor would be from Albuquerque to my dad's house in Gallup, New Mexico. Are there charging stations here and there? Not really, and if there are some, like at Walmart in Grants, New Mexico, halfway between, it's a slow charging system. Do I really wanna drive an hour and then wait for three hours in Grants till my car charge is up to get another hour to get to my dad's house? No, that's why this hybrid was a great option for me. I can use all the battery charge that I have for the day and I can buy a tank of gas to get back and forward. So that's my immediate action to be able to mitigate is looking at something that really meets my needs of where is my path? How am I gonna use this vehicle? When I'm in the city of Albuquerque, I'm always on my electric car. I don't use gas at all. Unless I'm on the freeway and I've got a speed around a big truck, I'll turn on the gas. But that's the knowledge that we have to have to be able to do what our institutions are doing, like the recycling, like turning off the lights. And I talked about this earlier today. Changing light bulbs, people like to make jokes about that, but it is, makes real savings. A tribe in Wisconsin, there was a funding opportunity from Indian Energy, DOE, that said, if you can prove to us, you're gonna save 30% of your energy for the whole tribe will give you the money to do your action. And what did they do for the whole tribe to change out every light bulb in their parking garage at their casino and resort? Saved the tribe 30%. So never tell me, as somebody who's in this field, oh, light bulbs are silly, you don't need to do that. No, it adds up. LED lights are the things that are helping to save, especially in our own pocket books. And so I've changed out all my light bulbs. I'm trying to get the right. They have so many new cool fixtures. It's kind of nice to have options because before there was only a few selected that you could do. Now you have a lot of options. And you'll see that in institutions where they're changing out a lot of the light fixtures. They're monitoring the HVAC, heating, ventilation, air conditioning of a building. They're looking at traffic where they may turn off some of the airflow if a classroom is not filled. They have building controls. They have campus controls that help monitor that. But at a personal level, you watch that temperature of your apartment or the place that you live because it costs you money when you use too much air conditioning. It's gonna cost you money if you put the heat on too long. You see that in your wallet. So you're trying to mitigate that because we know that climate change is here. And I said this more, I said it again, climate change is not a philosophy. It's a real fact. If you went out this summer, this spring, different parts of the country, you would know 120 degrees in Phoenix, multiple days in a row. It's unheard of for them. They're used to 100 degrees, but not 120. San Francisco had a heat wave. You also had these torrential rains that's coming. I just don't understand people that don't think climate change is real. It's like, do you ever go outside? Have you noticed? Do you know what season it is? Do you know what it is? As far as what's happening in the world with all these changes across the globe, it's not a philosophy. It's a scientific fact. And we've learned, and we're stern learning through your research, how do you mitigate? How can we change this around? And I have to say, I've got to commit to what I believe and what I practice by giving you those examples of what I do personally on a day-to-day level to be able to do my own mitigation. And it's not just to save money. It's because I know the cause. I know for the school of sustainability, it's saving the planet. And my mantra is saving humanity too. We don't want people to get hurt because of climate changing, crisis that are happening. That's great. It seems like you've had the opportunity to work with lots of different tribal communities. From your experience working with these different communities, what are some success factors that help to ensure the successful deployment of renewable energy in these communities? So those of us who are doing the work right now don't always have the luxury of sitting down and writing a paper. And that's where my internship comes in, right? I've had 50 interns over 21 years. And part of their research work is to document on behalf of a tribe, what are they doing in their projects that make them successful? So I challenged one of my graduate students who just got her degree in energy policy from the University of Minnesota. I said, Sarah, you know, our sponsor doesn't have time to write the paper. I don't have time to write the paper. But if you do this for a part of your thesis and graduate work, it's a great subject. It'll be successful. So what she did is she collected data from all of the Department of Energy's Indian projects over time and was able to take all that data and figure out what were some success factors. And it's all based on the data collection. Energy, strategic energy planning for a community is extremely important. If you can gather consensus-based strategies to get to an energy vision, that'll help you beyond one person taking this on, beyond a tribal leader, beyond a consultant that comes in and sells you on this idea. If it's built in with a collaborative method, it will stay for a long period of time. And I've seen the tribes that I've helped. It was eight years straight that we were doing this planning all across the country. And now it's nice to be able to see them like last year and this year, the small village of Hussala putting in more renewable energy projects in that tiny village because they have the momentum. They have the elder that's really passionate about it. And it started from one solar project in Alaska, right? So half the year it's cold and there is no sun, but it still makes an advantage for them when there is sunshine to put in renewable energy. And they have that passion that they were able to get their school up and running again where they had lost a lot of the students because families couldn't find a job in that village. So they moved to another village or to the bigger cities in Alaska. And then that village didn't have enough children to keep their school open. So they took that energy plan and said we have a strategy to bring our kids back home. If we can do energy efficiency within our buildings, if we can put solar in, if we do all of these successful projects, the families will come back because somebody needs to operate these systems. And maybe that's a person that will come back and bring your kids. Sure enough, I don't know, it's been 15 years now, their village is doing very well. The school is back open. So where there's a vision, there's buy-in, you'll see the success of the project. I think the other beyond strategic energy planning is finding that champion. It could be a staff member. I prefer to work with tribal staff because they're there for their career they're there for longevity. If you work with a specific tribal leader, their tenure is the four years they've been elected, six years sometimes. And it's hard because change is difficult to kind of keep staff motivated. That was that leader's initiative. I'm a new leader. I don't want to do what that person did. I want to do my own thing. If the staff has bought into it, they're going to keep the momentum of those projects. I think the other factor is doing their homework. Having an engineering study of where they might want to put it is the land flat enough to put in solar? Do they have a way of transmitting it out or are they just developing it for themselves and using that energy? If you have those plans incentivized with funding, then the individual person who champions the idea can say, yes, this is a good thing for us and I'll help get this momentum going and they maybe only get to the first part of it and the next part has to be somebody else that takes it to the construction end. Over time, like I said, I've been at it for 30 years. It's really pleasantly surprising that these projects that have had a plan are coming to have these projects. The funniest story is I'll tell you. My boss kind of knows what I'm doing but then again he doesn't. That's fine with me. I'm busy. I'm doing work. So I'm out at Mescalero Apache and we had a strategic energy plan. We actually got a 90-day plan done. One of the steps in the 90-day plan says we need to announce to the world that we're gonna have solar energy at Mescalero Apache. We're going solar. We're gonna go renewables. And so they called National Public Radio, NPR, did a story. Mescalero Apache's going solar. They're gonna put in these installations. So my boss, like three days later when I get back to work, he says, you know what I heard? Mescalero Apache's going solar. Did you know that's exciting? Isn't that a part of your work? I said, Tony, yes, sir, I was there. Facilitated the dialogue that ended up with the PR announcement. I said, it was all intentional and good. I'm glad you heard the story because you can believe me when I said we did this. And it's a miracle when you see that in a story that says they did this and they did that. It's like they had a plan. They stuck to the plan. The other unique tribe that you really should watch because they're on the cutting edge of doing a lot of things. Sustainability, emergency management is the Blue Lake Rancheria in Northern California. So not too far away. Great at partnering. They're partnering with Hullbold State, PG&E, their county, the city nearby. And they made the Wall Street Journal on New Year's Day. I think it was Wall Street Journal. Picture of them, where their convenience store, their hotel was all lit up and the rest of that northern part of California was black. And that was their intent. They wanted to be the emergency shelter for the community when the power went out. And they were. That was the only place you could gas within 100 miles. You couldn't get food that was in a refrigerated nature like the convenience store. And the vulnerable people were able to stay at the hotel. Let's say you had a relative on oxygen. You need electricity. They brought them in and put them in that shelter, which was a hotel, but it was really built to be as a shelter for people in emergency situations. Now they're talking about how do they do rest of their building with that sustainability in mind and be the leader nationally of not just tribal installations, but all climate mitigations. They want to be the leader in sustainability, not of tribes, but all communities. And so keep your eye on that particular community because they're pushing the bounds. Every time I read about them, they're doing something new. I've visited them at least two or three times and I'm just impressed with the level of commitment that they have to get these projects done and they market themselves. We're a green hotel. Our gas station is green. We're doing these initiatives in the community. They are good at telling what they've done so they can be successful and see the results. Well, one last question then before we switch to Q&A. If there's one thing that you want everyone here to take away from this conversation, what is it? Happy Indigenous People's Day. I want you to remember that. Please, please remember that. It's taken me 30 plus years to come back to Stanford. It's a deliberate way for me to heal. I want you to know that if you've not had a good experience or if you have some issues you're working through and challenges, I will say by experience and usefulness of my degree, I wouldn't be here today without all that hard-nosed, difficult situation I was in graduate school. And I've said this to the students earlier today. I said part of that is turning the challenging part of graduate school at that moment in time where I suffered the earthquake, right? 1989, I was in that earthquake. First semester quarter, studying earthquake engineering. I could have hightailed it out of here. No way, I'm not doing this. I'm gonna go be a Bureau of Indian Affairs, civil engineer, and build roads. I don't need this, I don't need this responsibility. But yet I had to go back to my Navajo philosophy of we have to be in beauty with the Earth. We have to work with the Earth. We have to keep her beautiful. We have to live in a beautiful way that that's what changed my mind. I am not in control of nature. It is beyond all of us to do that, but I can learn the best and this was the best place to be. And I will tell you that I'm now ready to say that out loud to people in a public audience because I was not able to do that for quite a while. And so what do you take away? Be happy, it's Indigenous People's Day. I'm so glad to be here. Part of this journey is having fun, like talking to you about what I do because it's just so much of interesting work and it benefits tribal people and Indigenous people in a way that I've never seen before in my whole career. And so that's what's so exciting. But thank you for that question. Thank you. So now I think we'll turn to audience Q and A. Any questions? Thank you very much. Who owns the land that these solar facilities are being put on and where does the revenue from that go? It depends on each tribe, but most tribes have the land held in trust by the federal government for that tribe. That's the way they've defined Indian reservations. So nobody really owns the land. It's in charge of the government to use the land as they see best. So what's problematic about Navajo Nation because if you look at maps, and I've chided my colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Lab, I said, you're putting out these maps and you put Navajo Nation there and it looks like it's all the land is available for solar. We can do gigawatts. We can power the whole United States three times on Navajo. I said, uh-uh, no. Navajo has a plan for every acre of land and most of it is by family given to them for grazing, which is livestock, which is traditionally what we've had on Navajo. And to have that family give up that right is very difficult and arduous. Other tribes may have that same challenge is how do you gain the land back that was given to a family to manage and say stop doing what you're doing. We want to use the land for solar. And we don't ever do what's an imminent domain. We don't just take over the land. That's a no-no in tribal lands. That's a conversation with the big corridor of people who want transmission. Then you're negotiating. But for Navajo in many tribes, you have to negotiate the use of that land from a individual family. And for Navajo, the first solar farm that was developed is thanks to one grandma, right? We have a whole lot of Navajos, the biggest tribe in number. A little bit bigger than Cherokee, we always say. We, out of all those people, it came down to one grandma to say, do you understand what we want to do the tribal utility? We want to use that land for solar. And you can't use it until the solar farm is gone like 30, 40 years from now. And she agreed. And what she observed is that corridor is really not that useful because the wind blows constantly in that area. It blows all the seeds. There's no vegetation for their animals to eat the vegetation. So she recognized it could be used for a different purpose, not for livestock, but for solar. So 25 megawatts became real because of her decision. She passed away the next solar farm. They went back to the same family. Can we use this other parcel of land for 25 more megawatts? And the family said, if grandma said so, we're gonna do that towards the future. You can do that there. And then, so there's one, two, there's a third facility in Southern Utah that was just commissioned in August. And they had to do the same thing. Community members, are you gonna allow this land to be used for solar? And there are benefits to agreeing, but it's up to that kind of negotiation. The Moapa tribe, as I said, has very few tribal members. They don't need all of that land for their purposes to live. And therefore, as a tribe, they decided to give majority of their land for solar because they didn't really need it for individual members. And they have made a good power purchase agreement with the entities around them. So they're doing very well. So I'm curious about electric vehicle charging as well. You were talking about how there doesn't seem to be a lot of charging network. What are the issues related to that? Is it cost, or is it the transmission lines and the fact that there just isn't power there to be utilized? Both, both. So there's a lot of initiatives in the bipartisan infrastructure law that is supporting EV infrastructure. So what you need to do is you can't just put an EV charger anywhere. You have to have a transformer nearby because you have to have high voltage available in order to get that car if you want a fast charging station. We have one in New Mexico on tribal lands, but it's always broken. And it was a early stage partnership where a private vendor said, let me put this charging, I'll take some revenue, if you put it at your tribal gas station. Well, and behold, partners not following through in the charging station is not working. So you have those issues of using technology, but they might not be tried and true. More experimental R&D type of projects. You know, we have to take that chance and that risk, but if I were going between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Santa Domingo is halfway through. It takes only an hour. And if I'm that desperate for my charging to get done, I go to the fast charging thing and get it done in five minutes. But if it's broken and I'm in the last of my electrons, I'm just stuck. I have my little cord in the trunk and I'm at the gas station looking for a port and I'll be there half of the day just trying to get to Santa Fe. Doesn't make sense, right? So our infrastructure is being built. It's not ready today. Will it be ready next year? Probably not. You know, there's an auto worker strike on, right? So they're starting to affect the battery charging facilities. They're the next station that's on strike. So we're kind of getting stuck in certain things. The biggest one is Congress, right? We're stuck there. We're stuck with strikes, which may or may not be beneficial, but yet it's affecting us in the supply chain. And then is our infrastructure for EV charging there yet? Not yet. I am a little bit more surprised and happy. There's a charging station at Tuba City, Arizona on the west part of Navajo. There's a charging station at off of Route 66 I-40 at Laguna Pueblo. It's a slow charging, but it's available. I'm just always searching for who's doing what next so that this network can be built and that may be part of the grants that they need to go after. Part of the tribes are also trying to lure us as EV owners to go see them if I can charge my car. Sure, I'll go there and be able to charge my car. So that's another piece to the EV infrastructure is it needs to evolve a little bit more. And I would love to see more lithium recycled for the batteries. So I took the risk of the Chevy Volt with its technology using lithium batteries. Are they gonna recycle that when I turn in my car? I hope because that's the next stage. The other, will I get a fully electric vehicle right now? Probably not because there's tribes in Nevada that are upset that a lithium mine's going in and it's gonna be built in their area. And right now they haven't reassured me as a consumer that they've negotiated with the tribe enough that it's gonna work out or not. So there's certain controversies and I'm so aware of these things that I start making decisions based on if the tribe's irritated with something, I'm not gonna do it because I'm supporting what they do. And if they have an issue with it, then I'm gonna back off of one of my technical decisions that I could make, such as lithium batteries. Hi, thank you so much for speaking today. I just wanted to ask like, when was it in your life that you really decided like this was the way that you wanted to serve your community and the earth? Very early on and I will tell you, please listen to children, young people, your children, your relatives, your nieces and nephews. We do not need to dampen their thoughts of innovation. They're crazy ideas. Please don't tell them, oh, that's a crazy idea. We don't need that. We got a whole world out here that's gonna tell them that, right? We've all had that. Oh, that's a crazy idea. Everybody's experienced that. We don't need that. So in sixth grade, my teachers didn't say that to me. I was very aware of my circumstance, being in a boarding school, had to take a shower every day, had long black hair, and I was miserable because it was cold outside and we had to march from our dorm to the cafeteria. Rather than dwell on the circumstance which I didn't like, I kept thinking, what can I do to improve this? So that's where engineers are born, right? Think outside of the box, figure out a different solution. Don't be challenged by the negative. Think about the positive. I had been to Disneyland earlier that year. I saw a monorail. That was my answer. I want a monorail because I don't wanna walk in the dark and I don't wanna be in the cold. And that was part of the ideas I told my teachers and they didn't say that was a crazy idea. They said, oh, really great. Did you know that you'll have to become an engineer to do that? Oh, what is that? That's where you get that inquiry at such a young age. Nobody called me precocious because I read that somebody, when I told the story, they wrote it. She was a precocious young lane. I thought, I don't know what that means. Precocious, I'm not precocious. I'm just think outside the box. And part of that is, as we can help younger people than we are, because we've made decisions to be here today, to be going through this academic journey, this quarter, there's others who's never even thought about the journey we're on. So if you can share that story and experience to those younger than us, we can help them to understand it's very important. I don't buy anybody's argument about college not being important. Academic careers are not important. It's lend itself very well to my life. I have four nieces, which are my cousin's daughters, as Navajo would bring them closer, so my nieces, four engineers in my family. Did I sit down with them and take that arm and twist it? No. They, which is very observant of what I do and heard about my work that they said, I could do this. Got two civil engineers, one mechanical, one electrical. So by choice, they're all doing really well in the fields that they've studied. And hopefully when they think about their kids, they may be a STEM career there because we still need people of color and women of color in these fields because we're still underrepresented. For example, I'm one of 13,000 US engineers that are native women in engineering. And so when I have opportunities like today, it's very unique. Is it an anomaly? Sure, I've heard that before. You're very different. Yes, I am very different. And that's because I'm one out of 13,000. Opportunities have happened in my career to be able to take these unique opportunities, going from civil structural to renewable energy. If you went by discipline, no, that would not happen. You just allow electrical engineers to work with the electrons. I don't touch electrons. I help the deals that are shaped. I help trying to find the funding. I help promote these projects that people want to hear about because they've never heard about it. I help them engineer a plan for 10 years, two years, 90 days, and that's where part of it is having that innovative spirit of how do you take these things and make sense out of it for other people. That's I think hopefully the passion you're learning about me is I love to hear all these things and I start putting things together. But I always remind people, when you're working with rural communities or people with need, tribes, please learn to listen, listen intently. Because I can come in with all my ideas, my sources of funding, but if they don't have it in their vision that they wanna do that, it's never gonna work. I can't sell them on that. They have to really want that and then I try to find the resources for them. And so part of that is the answer of as a young person never being discouraged at that age. I've had much experience being discouraged as an adult, but that hasn't held me back. That's where we talk about being resilient. How do you learn to be sustainable? Be resilient. Make it through those hurdles. Make it through the times that are tough. Because we're all needed to do this because we can't save the planet by in and of ourselves. We need all of us to do that. And particularly a school of sustainability. It's like that's their goal. So when the dean asked me to be a part of the group, I hesitated a moment, but then I said yes. It's part of my healing. My experience is there. Talk about it, but now here I am today. I've had a very good journey in life because of that hard experience. I've turned it into a positive. And now the dean says, come join me. He says, sure. Yes. This will be the last question of the day. Hi, thank you for sharing all that you have with us. My question was, do you know of any native projects that encourage us to learn from the lands and the plants and the animals? For example, ones that might incorporate something like biomimicry? So many tribes, if not all, because of the way that they have lived with the land before there was infrastructure, before there was government, there are many tribes that set technology on its path. So if you go look at Mesa Verde Chaco Canyon, there were ancient people that lived there, that lived in the cliffs. I see these pictures about a ladder up to the Mesa Verde place. That homeland security, you just take that ladder and put it back in, you know anybody in. Part of that is that nature of indigenous knowledge that we talk about, that we see how it's in tune with the environment. So the only way I can answer your question of thinking about that is there was a project at the Oneida tribe that was using plants but it was more from waste to energy. So it was using coffee grounds, anything that could be put like more compost but put it into like a bio-digester to be able to trade that in for the mechanics of it for steam that then can generate electricity. But there were a lot of hurdles, regulatory hurdles that it was in Green Bay, Wisconsin that didn't line up right. Maybe they can do that again, but they had to partner with the city of Green Bay, they were gonna put in this bio-digester waste to heat project. And it went forward only so far when the administration of the city changed in Green Bay and they said, we don't want this kind of project. We don't want waste to energy. It's ugly, you know they had a lot of reasons but they axed the project. And when they axed it, the tribe didn't have another buyer like the city to give that energy to. So that just died on its own. So there's so many critical pieces to the path that a project gets done and it doesn't always depend on the tribe and their desire. It's partnering, having the cooperation of others around that when personnel changes, leadership changes, sometimes it's so fine tuned that they can ground a project where it has never gotten off the ground again. And that's kind of sad but if they hadn't tried it we wouldn't learn from it, right? So you gotta give credit to those who are more entrepreneurial, innovative, take a risk. Even if they're not successful, can we learn from it? Sure. On that optimistic note, which I love, thank you very much Sandra for sharing both your personal and professional story with us. I find both of them incredibly inspiring. I think the combination of the two really brings everything both sides to life. So thank you very much and thanks very much to Summer, Kristin and Holmes for bringing you to us today. Thank you very much for sharing this time with us. You're welcome. You're welcome.