|
November is National Native American Heritage Month. It is a time to celebrate the histories and contribution of Native American communities. KEEP recently caught up with Isaiah Ness, a Wisconsin entrepreneur whose company, Sun Bear Industries, partners with tribal communities on energy projects. Prior to co-founding Sun Bear, Ness co-founded two residential and commercial solar companies and consulted for another. He is a board member of REWEW Wisconsin and Cedar Growth.
What was your educational experience like?
I’m from Appleton, Wisconsin, and I went to Kimberly High School. When I got to high school, I became very, very business focused. I took some entrepreneurship and business classes as a freshman and just kind of fell in love with it.
I've also been a huge outdoor advocate my entire life. Growing up, playing sports outside - golfing, hunting, fishing - is some of the stuff I liked to do. Taking care of the environment was always important to me. I wanted to figure out how I could combine the love that I was having for business with the outdoors and nature and everything there.
I went to college in Milwaukee with this concept of leaving with the most stacked business resume. So I started with pursuing basically a triple major with accounting, finance and economics. Then through the internship process, I met with some large financial institutions for potential jobs. I saw that there was investment into the energy sector that was kind of a new concept for me. But I also saw a lot of people that were just not my type of person. It was a very bland culture. One of the things we focus on at Sun Bear and with the tribes in particular is culture.
How did you start working with tribes?
After college I found myself in a pretty good spot with our residential and commercial solar company. We were doing a lot of projects. But again, I found myself kind of reverting to what I didn't like about the corporate space. The last residential project I did at my previous company was for a family friend that was an Oneida member that does large scale tribal energy development. He was like, “Hey, would you ever want to do this for tribes?”. This was right at the time where I was debating how I could continue in solar but do something else, and I was like, “I would love to do that”. Basically the whole concept for Sun Bear Industries was built off of that conversation.
What does Sun Bear Industries do?
We take things like energy, housing, critical infrastructure and turn them into strategies for economic development. Meaning it's one thing to build and deploy an energy system, it's another thing to take ownership in it, to have it reduce a liability or an expense within your community, but also to reinvest dollars into the community so you're furthering your economic resiliency. It's a concept that I'm sure everyone is tired of hearing me say by now, but this concept of a virtuous cycle, how do you implant a dollar into the community and have it cycle as many times as you possibly can
We want to make sure that if the tribe is going to build solar projects that on the back end, they have the people to maintain, monitor, and operate those systems. A big component for us is really giving the tribe the resources and the tools so they can meet their energy goals and meet their economic goals as well.
Why is a virtuous cycle important?
The big thing for me is energy equity. You and I cannot develop a microgrid and own that microgrid and own power infrastructure. With tribal sovereignty, with some of the resources that the communities have, it's one of the only avenues for balancing the scale a little bit. I don't know if it'll ever be completely balanced, but the utility market as a whole is a very monopolistic structure. You have large companies that own nearly everything. And it can ultimately end up with you feeling at the very bottom. I think that's the concept that we really focus on with tribes. Somebody needs to have a voice at these tables, not only for tribal communities but for public welfare. We want to see equity in the sense that consumer voices are heard and there are fair decisions being made relative to what the people of Wisconsin need.
What are the challenges and opportunities for your company currently?
I would say the toughest part is all the stuff that's been going on with the Inflation Reduction Act. Obviously, if you were a community that was planning on any sort of grant dollars to build anything a lot of that has gone away. But the big opportunity lies in that resiliency component. We might not have some of the financial incentives that we thought we were going to have before, but if we can still make the numbers work, we're building the most resilient project possible. We're in a very unique space and time where we're figuring out what that balance is.
What advice would you give to a K-12 student that’s thinking about their future?
I would say the biggest part is figuring out what it is that you are passionate about and then figuring out how you can tie your passion into the future. That's what I've found success in. If you have passion for something, it makes even the not so fun parts of work more enjoyable. There's never going to be a profession or a job where every single day is perfectly fun or enjoyable. It's just unrealistic for life. But I think if you have passion for something, that will supersede a lot of the negative and it'll make the negative a little bit easier to deal with. And then combine the passion with something that's happening in the future, whether it's a trend, whether it's something that's going to be incorporated in this society, or whether it's something that's going to shape the course of humankind. The future is pretty much the only thing that we have to work towards. We can't rewrite history as much as we would love to in a lot of areas. And so if you can combine those two elements, I think you can find success really in anything.
| 
