Native entrepreneur builds EV charges across Midwest

This story is part of our series on Native economic development, “Beyond the Bet.”

Gas in Minnesota and around the region is hovering around four dollars a gallon, which often puts a fill-up well north of $50. At the charging station on the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community south of the Twin Cities, entrepreneur Bob Blake said charging an electric vehicle runs about fifteen bucks.

Blake, a member of Red Lake Nation, said the idea for a network of tribally owned EV stations came to him during a pipeline protest in North Dakota a decade ago.

“There was a helicopter coming down and there was all this sand in our faces,” Blake said of the protest. “And I thought to myself, there’s got to be a better way to do this.”

The chargers belong to the tribe. Blake’s nonprofit, Native Sun Community Power Development, built them and signed them over. It has done the same at 80 charging stations on tribal land across the Midwest, each one owned by the tribal nation where it sits. A developer would normally hold an asset like that and sell the power for decades. Blake does not, which means the revenue stays in rural Native communities. He calls the project Electric Nation.

“If the fossil fuel companies are going to continue to build pipelines through tribal nations’ homelands, then what we’re going to do is we’re going to build an electric vehicle charging station network pipeline through our communities,” Blake said. “They may win the battle, but we’re going to win the war.”

Blake is a little surprised that the project got as big as it did.

“Someone said, ‘Bob, your little nonprofit did an infrastructure project,’ and I was thinking about it, and I was like, ‘Wow, we did do an infrastructure project,’” Blake said. “But that was never the intention.”

Blake said tribal communities don’t see the same investments that other communities do.

“It really makes us be more genius, in the way that we have to figure out capital stacks and tax structures and investment vehicles,” he said. “It makes the Native entrepreneur think about two different worlds, because we have to bridge them to put together our endeavors.”

Adam Crepelle is a law professor at Loyola University Chicago who studies the barriers to economic development in Indian Country. Those barriers can include things such as jurisdictional uncertainty, dual taxation, and issues with federal land leasing. He said in the dominant American economy, entrepreneurs often start a business by borrowing against something they own, usually a house and the land it’s built on.

“Whereas if you’re in Indian Country and you have trust land, that cannot be repossessed because the federal government owns trust land,” Crepelle said. “So, that eliminates that source of capital, essentially.”

Blake has used federal grant dollars to fund his projects. Since the start, he said people often see him as just the solar guy. He views it a little differently. He said developing renewable energy is part of his responsibility to his home community at Red Lake Nation. He said his own community, like other tribal nations, continues to struggle with high unemployment and geographic isolation.

“If I can fight poverty with renewable energy and distributed energy resources, then I can make my community healthier,” Blake said.

Last fall the Trump administration canceled federal money Blake’s nonprofit had been awarded for the second phase of his Electric Nation project. Blake, along with grantees in seven other states, sued the U.S. Department of Energy. Officials there admitted in court that grants were cut based on how states voted in the 2024 presidential election. The funding was restored this summer.

Crepelle said the economic benefits to tribal nations are felt beyond reservation boundaries.

“Whenever tribes do well, it helps the surrounding state,” he said. “It creates jobs for non-Indians too, and it’s no good for the state to have a big pocket of poverty. So, whenever tribes win economically, it helps everyone.”

Blake’s nonprofit has already started installing more chargers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

This story comes from the Upper Midwest Newsroom, a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.