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She Grew Up Where the Lights Went Out in January. Now She Powers 400 Homes.
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Leah Bressette grew up on the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin, where winter power outages were so common her grandmother kept three kerosene lamps staged in the kitchen. Fifteen years later, Bressette runs Anishinaabe Energy Solutions, a solar and renewable energy contractor that has installed systems on tribal lands across the Upper Midwest and generated $4.2 million in revenue last year.
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The morning Leah Bressette commissioned the first solar array on the Bad River Reservation, it was eleven degrees outside and the wind off Lake Superior was stripping heat from everything it touched. She stood in the snow behind the tribal community center and watched the system come online — twenty-four panels, a battery bank, enough capacity to run the building through a February blackout without pulling a single watt from the grid. The project had taken fourteen months. There had been three permitting delays, a contractor who walked off the job in October, and a financing gap that Bressette had closed by tapping the last $38,000 in her personal savings. "When the lights stayed on, I just started crying," she says. "I couldn't explain it to anybody who wasn't from here." Bressette is 39 years old and the founder of Anishinaabe Energy Solutions, a renewable energy contractor headquartered in Ashland, Wisconsin. The company installs solar systems, battery storage, and energy-efficiency upgrades for tribal nations, municipalities, farms, and commercial clients across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Last year it generated $4.2 million in revenue. It has 28 employees — more than half of them tribal members or Indigenous community residents — and has installed systems on over 400 homes and buildings across the region. It is one of the largest Native-owned renewable energy companies in the Upper Midwest. Bressette started it at age 31 with a contractor's license, a used pickup truck, and a conviction that the people who needed clean energy most were the last ones anyone was designing it for. --- ## The Lights Bressette grew up on the Bad River Reservation in Ashland County, the third of five children. Her father worked at the paper mill in Park Falls. Her mother was a teacher's aide at the tribal school. They weren't poor by the standards she understood at the time, but energy insecurity was a permanent feature of the household in a way she only recognized as unusual after she left. "Winter, you'd lose power maybe three, four times a season," she says. "Sometimes it was back in a few hours. Sometimes it was two days." The reservation's distribution infrastructure was old, underfunded, and far down the utility company's priority list for repairs. When outages stretched overnight, temperatures inside the house could drop fast enough to burst pipes. Her grandmother kept three kerosene lamps staged in the kitchen. Bressette thought that was normal until she was twelve and stayed at a friend's house in Ashland, the town just north of the reservation, and her friend's mother laughed when Bressette asked where she kept the lamps. The memory never left her. She was good at math and science in a way her teachers kept pointing out — partly, she suspects, because it surprised them. She won a regional science fair in ninth grade with a project on passive solar heating. She got a partial scholarship to Michigan Technological University in Houghton and enrolled in electrical engineering in the fall of 2005. "I had no idea what I was going to do with it," she says. "I just knew it was the direction of the thing I wanted to fix." --- ## The Utility Years Michigan Tech was cold and mostly white and harder than anything Bressette had done before. She struggled her first two semesters and thought about transferring. She didn't. She found a study group, then an advisor who pushed her toward power systems. She graduated in 2009 into the worst job market in a generation and took the first offer she got: a grid planning role at a regional utility serving the western Upper Peninsula. She was good at the job. She understood load forecasting, distribution modeling, interconnection standards. She got promoted twice in four years. By her seventh year she was managing a team of eight and earning $110,000 annually. She was also quietly miserable. "The whole time I worked there, we had exactly one meeting about tribal service territory," she says. "It was about ten minutes. The conclusion was basically: legacy infrastructure, replacement costs are high, not a priority this cycle." She pauses. "Same conclusion every cycle, every year." She started doing her own analysis at night. She pulled USDA Rural Development data, tribal energy audit reports, Department of Energy studies on Native American energy poverty. What she found confirmed what she already knew from growing up: tribal lands in the Upper Midwest had energy costs 20 to 40 percent higher than surrounding areas, reliability metrics substantially worse, and clean energy adoption rates near zero — not because of a lack of interest, but because of a lack of contractors willing to work there and financing structures that had never been designed around tribal ownership models. Nobody was solving it. Nobody in her company was going to solve it. And she had spent seven years learning exactly how the grid worked. In the spring of 2018, she called her mother. "I told her I was going to start a company. She said, 'Okay. What are you going to need?' I said I was going to need some luck. She said, 'I'll light a candle.'" --- ## Year One Bressette got her Wisconsin electrical contractor's license in the fall of 2018 and incorporated Anishinaabe Energy Solutions in November. She had $62,000 in savings, a list of tribal energy coordinators she'd built through years of attending conferences, and a plan to approach the Bad River Tribe first. The tribe's facilities manager — a man named Dennis who had worked in the building for nineteen years — walked her through every structure on the tribal campus. They sat together with an energy audit and a rough financial model. She showed him how a solar-plus-storage system on the community center could cut the building's electricity costs by 55 percent and eliminate outage vulnerability entirely. She showed him how USDA grant funding and federal tribal energy programs could cover 70 percent of the installation cost. "He looked at it for a long time," she says. "Then he said: 'We've had seven consultants come through here and show us slides. Are you going to actually build it?'" She said yes. She spent four months navigating federal funding applications, tribal council approvals, and utility interconnection agreements — a process that would have taken a standard commercial contractor six weeks. Tribal land status complicates nearly every financial instrument that makes clean energy projects viable for non-tribal clients. Ownership structures, trust land designations, and lender unfamiliarity with tribal sovereignty all create friction that Bressette had to solve in real time, project by project, because there was no existing playbook. "I basically built the playbook," she says. "And I had to rebuild it for every state, because Wisconsin law and Minnesota law and Michigan law are all different." She hired her first employee — an electrician named Jerome from the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation — in February 2019. The Bad River community center came online in March. Three other tribal projects followed within six months. Word travels fast in Native communities across the Upper Midwest, and Bressette had something contractors almost never bring to tribal clients: she understood the financing maze, she didn't condescend, and she showed up when she said she would. --- ## The Pivot That Wasn't By year two, Bressette had a small reputation in tribal energy circles. She also had $340,000 in completed projects, two employees, and a company that was cash-flow positive — barely. She was working fourteen-hour days and sleeping on a friend's couch in Ashland to avoid paying rent in Duluth. The question she kept getting asked was whether she would expand to non-tribal commercial clients, where the margins were better and the friction was lower. She resisted the framing. "People kept saying, 'You could scale faster if you went commercial.' Like tribal work was the hard thing I was doing before I got to the real thing." She shakes her head. "It *is* the real thing." But she also understood that a company serving only tribal clients was a company with a ceiling. In 2020, she started selectively taking commercial and municipal jobs — farms, small businesses, county buildings — on terms that let her cross-subsidize the tribal pipeline. A county highway department installation in Washburn financed two tribal home installations. A dairy farm in Bayfield County financed an elder housing project on the reservation. "I started thinking of the commercial work as patronage," she says. "We do the work, we do it well, the money comes back and it goes where it's needed most." It also made the company's revenue defensible. By 2021, Anishinaabe Energy Solutions was doing $1.8 million annually. By 2023, $3.1 million. Last year, $4.2 million. --- ## What It Takes The company's office is a converted garage on the west side of Ashland — exposed brick, a wall of project photos, a whiteboard covered in installation schedules. When Bressette walks through, she greets everyone by name, stops to look at what a technician is testing, asks a question about a supply delivery. She has 28 employees now. Six are on the administrative and project management side; twenty-two are field installation technicians, most of whom she has trained from scratch. Fourteen identify as tribal members or Indigenous community residents. Several had no prior experience in trades when they started. "The trades pipeline on the reservation is basically nothing," she says. "So I built a training program." The program pairs new hires with experienced technicians for their first eight months, with structured competency milestones. Attrition at Anishinaabe is low in an industry where it is typically brutal. Pay starts at $28 an hour for installation techs, above the regional average. Bressette carries health insurance for full-time employees, which she estimates costs roughly $180,000 per year — and has kept her from taking her own salary above $75,000. "That's a choice I make consciously every year," she says. "The company comes first. My team comes second. I come third. That order hasn't changed." --- ## What She Built The 400-systems number is the one that stops people. Four hundred homes and buildings converted to solar or battery storage, a significant share of them in communities where the alternative is unreliable grid power and utility bills that consume 15 to 20 percent of household income. Bressette doesn't romanticize the impact. She talks about it the way she talks about everything — precisely, with specific numbers, without sentiment. "1,247 metric tons of carbon reduced last year. I know that because I track it. Average customer energy cost reduction: 61 percent. Average payback period on tribal projects: 6.1 years." She pauses. "That's what it is. The story is in the numbers." She has a theory about why clean energy has failed to penetrate low-income and rural communities at scale, and it isn't the one most people offer. It isn't cost. It isn't technology. It's that the people building the companies and designing the financing instruments don't live in those communities and have never had to. "The whole industry is built by people whose lights never went out," she says. "They build products for people whose lights never went out. And then they wonder why penetration is 2 percent in tribal territories when it's 18 percent nationally." She has started attending national clean energy conferences. She speaks on panels. She gets asked, sometimes, whether she has thought about raising venture capital and scaling Anishinaabe into a national platform. She answers the same way every time. "Not yet. When I'm ready to scale, I'll scale to the communities that need it most. Not the ones that are already getting served. The VC can come find me when that's what they want to fund." --- ## The Lamps Her grandmother died in 2022. Bressette was at a project site in Minnesota when she got the call. She drove back through the night. At the funeral, her mother pulled her aside and said something she still thinks about. "She told me: 'Your grandmother always said the lights going out was just the dark reminding you to prepare.'" Bressette's voice is level when she tells this, but barely. "I don't know if that's true. I know I didn't want any more kids on the reservation to think kerosene lamps were normal." The three lamps are in her office now, on a shelf above her monitor. She doesn't keep them lit. But she hasn't moved them either. She is, by any measure, still at the beginning. The regional market she has identified — tribal lands, rural communities, low-income areas underserved by traditional clean energy contractors — represents hundreds of millions of dollars in potential installations. She has a waitlist. She has two tribal nations in Minnesota who have been asking for a proposal for eight months. She is moving deliberately. That, she will tell you, is how you build something that lasts. "I didn't leave," she says. "A lot of people like me leave and don't come back. I came back. And I'm going to spend the rest of my working life making this region run on something other than coal and late-night repair calls that never come." Outside, it is starting to snow again. The lights in the office don't flicker.
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The utility companies were never built for us. They were built around us. I didn't start this company to be inspirational. I started it because the work wasn't getting done.
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