Growing up in Southern California, Saxon Metzger and his brother Ayda Donne — now 29 and 26 — didn’t think much about their Indigenous heritage in Oklahoma. Their great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt saw her mother murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror, when locals brutally attacked tribal members over oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching the family history.

In the past decade, the brothers began exploring this history, including the fossil-fuel linked violence and exploitation recently showcased in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the country’s highest concentration of abandoned, uncapped oil and gas wells, which continue to leak methane and other dangerous pollutants. 

Now, Metzger and Donne are seeking to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by making sure clean energy does not leave its own legacy of abandonment or disinvestment. 

Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization Metzger founded, aims to provide solar decommissioning workforce training and project management, as well as promote solar installation. 

“Tribal nations, along with many other historically disenfranchised communities, are justifiably skeptical of development that doesn’t fully acknowledge its potential shortcomings, having been bearing the brunt of fossil fuels,” Metzger said. 

Osage Nation Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has officially pledged support for the brothers’ vision. In March, Eighth Generation won a U.S. Department of Energy Community Energy Innovation concept phase prize, meaning a $100,000 grant, mentorship and the chance for more DOE funding. Metzger was also recently awarded a Grid Alternatives Tribal Energy Innovators Fellowship, which comes with $50,000 and mentorship, and he is a finalist for MIT’s Solve Global Challenges Indigenous Communities Fellowship program. 

Family roots 

Metzger studied economics at Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah, then returned to Southern Illinois to help facilitate the deployment of solar in the largely rural, lower-income region. 

He was program director for the nonprofit Solarize Southern Illinois, then worked as a project developer for StraightUp Solar, a residential and commercial solar installer focused on underserved areas in Illinois and Missouri. Metzger got an MBA with an emphasis in sustainability from Wilmington University, then worked for a decommissioning company in California. 

Striking out on his own, he co-founded a company called Polaris Ecosystems that does solar decommissioning project management and consulting. Polaris is under contract to support commercial and utility-scale repowering in California and Texas, Metzger said, declining to give more details because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts. 

The company collaborated with a Georgia solar waste management company called Green Clean Solar, whose founder, Emilie Oxel O’Leary, said she plans to partner with Polaris on more contracts. Her company has found ways to reuse solar packaging and components – for example, using thousands of cardboard boxes from solar delivery as mulch for a tree nursery in Hawaii, where landfill space is especially scarce. 

“Saxon and I find these solutions together. We find sustainability. We bring circularity to our conversations,” she said. “Very few [companies] do what we do. These billion-dollar companies have never stopped and thought about this.” 

Metzger now leads Eighth Generation and Polaris from Chicago, while also teaching a sustainable business class at Wilmington University. 

Donne is in charge of grant-writing for Eighth Generation, while pursuing his doctorate in English literature at New York University, with a focus on Indigenous literature and environmental justice. Donne also collaborates with NYU professor and toxicologist Judith Zelikoff, doing blood and urine testing and health workshops with the Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey, who face serious health threats from a former Ford Motor Company illegal dump that is now a Superfund site. Donne hopes to further intertwine the humanities and STEM sides of academia in pursuit of environmental and energy justice for tribes.  

“My family is very scarred by what happened during the reign of terror. They tried to run” from that legacy, said Donne, who also works as chief librarian at the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma. “But repressing things like that rarely works, rarely protects you for very long. I like to think that Saxon and my work is kind of a departure from that history of denying our identity and running from the pain that’s in our family.” 

On visits to the Osage Nation, the brothers say they’ve recognized the cultural as well as economic importance that fossil fuels still hold for the tribe. They strive to acknowledge and respect this dynamic while promoting clean energy. The tribe currently has no large-scale solar on its land, and this year a federal judge ruled that a controversial wind farm must be removed because it failed to get proper permits a decade ago. The tribe has long opposed the wind farm, which was built on sacred land.    

“We’re trying to plug into the existing things that they’re doing, and not show up and say, ‘Hey, we know what the solution is,’” said Metzger. “This is my tribe, these are my folks, my culture, my people. But I am approaching it with the understanding that to a certain degree, I’m also an outsider from a market that they don’t have access to.” 

Metzger added that when he first visited the Osage Nation, “I didn’t see a single solar panel, on the entirety of the reservation. I looked for it. I was shocked. It was one of the few places I’ve ever seen that there were no Trump flags, and there were no solar panels.” 

Metzger said that it is still likely a long road to installing solar on the reservation, but he’s been encouraged by tribal leaders, and received a letter of support in July from Osage Chief Standing Bear. 

A growing need 

More than half of states have decommissioning policies that require financial assurances be put up in advance, according to a 2023 year-end report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center and DSIRE. Nineteen states have no state-level decommissioning policies at all, the report shows, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“When it comes to assurance policies, you want to make sure landowners won’t be stuck with the bill at the end of the day, a dine-and-dash situation,” said Justin Lindemann, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at North Carolina State University’s Clean Energy Technology Center. “In most states, you have to have these finances in place well before the project decommissions.” 

Solar project contracts and permits typically include a decommissioning estimate. In states with financial assurance requirements, developers are usually required to put up incremental amounts of financing over time for decommissioning, so that there is not a major financial burden tacked on to the project’s startup cost. 

Metzger said that in his experience, estimates can be unrealistically low, a situation that in the near-term can benefit everyone, as the project cost appears lower. 

“The reality is that our industry doesn’t really want to have that conversation” about decommissioning costs and logistics, “because a developer, if they included the full cost of decommissioning, would not sell as many projects,” Metzger said. “No one really wants to hear that the project is going to cost more.” 

Lindemann said he hasn’t seen major problems with low-balled estimates, but there still have been relatively few large-scale decommissions. State laws and policies can try to ensure that estimates are accurate and large enough financial assurances are available. For example, Ohio requires that estimates be revised periodically, and if the estimate has increased, the required bond must be increased too.  

Ideological opponents of solar have stoked fears about solar panels filling up landfills and presenting hazardous waste. Those concerns are often exaggerated, as solar panels are made up primarily of steel and glass and the toxic compounds in the cells present relatively little risk, experts say. Even as solar farms expand exponentially, solar waste will still be much smaller than other waste streams, like construction debris and municipal garbage. 

Nonetheless, responsible and smooth decommissioning is crucial for the industry to thrive, experts agree. 

“We live in a social media environment where bad stories, singular bad examples do spread,” said Lindemann. “We need to make sure that relationships don’t get strained because of a lack of direction regarding deconstruction and decommission. Do people involved in or impacted by a project understand what’s in front of them 20 to 25 years down the line? That level of trust and transparency can be built, and comprehensive directives from states and other entities provide the first step.” 

In 2023, almost 33 GW of solar were installed nationwide, and solar deployment is only expected to keep growing. 

“In order to handle that, it’s important to make sure state and local governments have the right rules in place to handle mass decommissioning,” said Lindemann.  

Many challenges 

Metzger notes there are many costs and logistics to decommissioning that can be easy to overlook: the need to remove fences and drive over fields to haul panels off, lodging for workers, renting equipment like pile drivers, dealing with buried electrical conduit or other hazards. 

“If you look at a site, there isn’t one solution,” Metzger said. “Say you have 20,000 panels, that’s a bunch of metal. How heavy is that? What kind of tractor trailers are you going to need to pull it? What about the labor, how many 40-pound panels can someone lift in an hour?” 

Metzger and Donne are developing a decommissioning workforce training curriculum, and hope to eventually train Osage tribal members and others in various aspects of decommissioning work and project management.  

“We’re thinking about what this is going to look like for our tribe in 100 years,” said Donne. “Are these structural resources available when Saxon and I are long gone?”

That perspective is what inspired the name Eighth Generation, Metzger explains. 

“It’s often cited as an indigenous principle to think of an action through seven generations of impact, and that phrase always reminded me that some problems just won’t show up until the eighth generation,” he said. 

“And it feels like that is what’s happening here, as we’re staring down millions of panels annually needing decommissioning. It’s all solvable problems to an industry that genuinely is making the world a better place. We need to follow through on the promise we made as an industry to be meaningfully different than previous energy systems, and taking care of our legacy assets is a necessary component of that.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story described Eighth Generation Consulting as a nonprofit; it is a for-profit entity that is exploring nonprofit status.

Indigenous solar consultant works to ensure responsible development in communities scarred by fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story is a collaboration between The Frontier and Curbside Chronicle made possible by a grant from the Oklahoma Media Center funded by the Native American Journalists Association.

Amanda Le did what she could to keep her two young kids distracted while they were staying in a motel paid for with coronavirus housing relief money following a rushed move from a home with severe water damage last year.

Le spent weeks searching for an affordable new home with room for her kids that would accept her emergency Section 8 housing voucher. When she found a three-bedroom house in early July 2021, she jumped to pay $525 to cover half of the deposit so the landlord would hold the property. A local nonprofit agreed to pay the rest. 

But when she called the utility company OG&E to turn on electrical service ahead of an Oklahoma City Housing Authority inspection, she discovered the utility deposit would cost $440. Le said OG&E told her it needed the full amount to turn on the power. Without electricity, the home wouldn’t pass the inspection, which is required for Section 8 housing assistance. Le feared she wouldn’t be able to move in.

“I didn’t really know what to say. I was kind of speechless and had to catch my breath for a second,” Le said. “That’s a lot of money.” 

Paying hefty utility deposits can be a barrier to housing, social service providers say. A growing number of Oklahomans need help paying their utility bills post-pandemic and while facing high inflation. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, allows companies to require customers with a history of service cutoffs for nonpayment or more than two late payments in a year to pay a deposit. A recent federal report found such policies can punish poor people already struggling to pay their monthly bills. 

A November 2021 report partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy found most states allow utility companies to require “onerous security deposits” that are frequently as much as two or more average monthly bills. 

“For low-income households, this up-front cash requirement can serve as an impediment to establishing service,” the report found. “Millions of U.S. households lack the income and savings to pay for basic necessities.” 

John Howat, a senior energy analyst with the National Consumer Law Center, and one of the report’s authors, said it’s a public policy concern when people struggle to gain or keep access to utility services. 

“It’s extremely unfair for folks who are experiencing poverty or are on the brink of that,” Howat said. “The deposit is oftentimes determined by the extent to which a household has been late previously in paying a bill. And folks are late for the most part because they can’t afford to pay for all necessities at the end of the month.” 

Statewide, calls to Oklahoma’s 2-1-1 helpline for utility assistance spiked during the pandemic in 2020 and have stayed elevated since, according to HeartLine Inc., which runs the program. Between January and May of 2022, 2-1-1 made an average 3,524 referrals each month to get people utility assistance.

Oklahoma’s Corporation Commission rules allow regulated electric utilities to charge a deposit if a person hasn’t been a residential customer for 12 consecutive months out of the last 18 months, if they have made more than two late payments in a year, if they have had service cut off for nonpayment or if they’ve bounced a check.

OG&E, along with at least five other electric and gas utilities in Oklahoma, calculate deposit prices as up to one-sixth of the customer’s estimated annual bill, according to policies The Frontier obtained from the Corporation Commission. Under OG&E’s policy, if a person moves into a home where the previous tenant used a large amount of electricity, the new tenant’s deposit price would reflect that past usage. An OG&E spokeswoman said historic use and energy consumption are the best ways they have to determine potential upcoming energy usage at a property.

State regulations say utilities may allow customers to pay in installments, but it’s not a requirement. 

OG&E, the largest electric utility in the state servicing 820,000 Oklahomans, and at least two other utilities may also base deposit amounts on a customer’s credit history. The top reason customers are required to pay deposits to OG&E is because of poor credit or a lack of credit, according to the company. OG&E said it doesn’t disclose the number of customers currently behind on their bills. 

PSO, the state’s second largest utility, allows customers to pay deposits on a brief installment plan, but OG&E requires the money upfront. 

Companies may waive deposit requirements for customers with sufficient payment history, according to several companies’ policies, which are approved by the Corporation Commission. 

Dana Murphy, chairwoman of the three-member Corporation Commission, said the agency has a duty to balance the needs of the consumers with the needs of the utility companies.

“I think (deposits are) a burden. I think the question is, is it unfair?” she said. “Because if you have a large percentage of people that don’t make their payments and then all the other customers have to share in that cost, is that fair to everybody else? So I think fairness can’t be looked at from one perspective.”

Sommer Brown, director of utility customer operations for OG&E, said the company prioritizes payment plans when possible for monthly bills. A small social services team works with customers with financial difficulties to find nonprofits that help with payment assistance. The team can also sign people up for other programs to reduce monthly bills through energy conservation. 

“We know we have customers who are in a difficult financial situation, and so we have these partnerships with these agencies to help them pay their bills,” Brown said. “We’re looking at all of our billing policies to see where can we make adjustments and what are other utilities and other companies doing regarding their deposits and avenues to pay.”

The Frontier asked OG&E how much money it spent last year to cover customers who didn’t pay their utility bills, but the company didn’t respond. OG&E reported a net income of $360 million in 2021, according to a press release. 

Oklahoma does have some of the cheapest power in the country, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but the state also has a poverty rate about 3% higher than the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Tenants could also face eviction for violating the terms of a lease after a service cutoff for nonpayment or if they are unable to pay a utility deposit. 

“It’s a catch-22,” said Carly Akard, communications director for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. “Because these are utility companies that are running a business, but at the same time, you don’t want to punish the poor.” 

Saving up enough money to cover the $440 electrical deposit would have taken Le more than a month, she said. With affordable housing in short supply in Oklahoma City, Le knew the home would likely soon be taken if she couldn’t pay. She had already paid half of the rental deposit on the house, and her funds to stay in the hotel were running out. 

She receives some money from an Oklahoma Department of Human Services’ program called LIHEAP, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps over 182,000 Oklahomans pay their electric bills. But, the program and other utility assistance options typically don’t help pay for deposits. Even if it did, income thresholds to qualify for LIHEAP are low and wouldn’t capture the number of Oklahomans that likely need help. 

Utility assistance is one of the top needs Oklahomans have, but outside of the state’s metros, it can be hard to find utility assistance at all, said Beth Burke, HeartLine’s 2-1-1 director. Most nonprofits focus on helping people pay existing utility bills rather than deposits. 

In Oklahoma City, nonprofit agencies like Neighborhood Services Organization offer housing programs where the agency makes utility deposits and payments on behalf of clients. Stacey Ninness, president of the agency, is looking to expand beyond its current roughly 60 units to remove deposits as a barrier to housing for more individuals. 

Catholic Charities helps people pay utility bills and deposits on a case-by-case basis, but it doesn’t have enough money to help everyone who needs it, Akard said. 

“It’s awful to turn people away,” she said. “The demand is more than we can bear.” 

The Homeless Alliance, an Oklahoma City nonprofit, helped Le pay her $440 OG&E deposit so the home could pass inspection and she could move in. Le said she felt blessed to have had the assistance as she watched her kids look around their new rooms, playing hide and seek. 

“It was a huge weight off,” she said. 

In the last two years, the Homeless Alliance has paid more than 200 electrical deposits and service initiation fees for people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. More than 60 of those payments were over $200, according to Homeless Alliance data.

Nonprofits may have agreements with utility companies where the agency can promise to pay the deposit amount and get a person moved in with electricity a few days or weeks before the deposit is actually paid, said Meghan Mueller, associate director of the Homeless Alliance.  Individuals typically cannot do this and must have the full amount upfront.

Utility bills will continue to rise as temperatures become hotter due to climate change, and OG&E customers are already paying a rate increase after the company reached a $30 million settlement with state regulators earlier this year. That’s in addition to bill increases customers will pay over the next two decades to help OG&E recover costs from the 2021 winter storm.  

As prices rise, more people could fall behind on their bills or have service cut off because of nonpayment, meaning a deposit would be required to turn service back on in the future. Customers must also pay balances back before service is restored. 

“It’s expensive to be poor,” Mueller said.

The Frontier is a nonprofit newsroom that produces fearless journalism with impact in Oklahoma. Read more at www.readfrontier.org.

A $440 utility deposit almost kept her from finding a home is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.