Enel Wind Farm Defeated by Osage Nation in Oklahoma

A U.S. federal court ruled in favor of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after it sued Enel Group for violating its tribal sovereignty. Enel was ordered to remove a massive 84-turbine wind farm that it built without obtaining mining permission, in order to profit from the renewable energy boom. 

Handed down in December 2023, the ruling came after a 12-year-long court battle by the Osage.

“This is a win not only for the Osage Minerals Council; this is a win for Indian Country,” Everett Waller, the chair of the Osage Minerals Council, told Tulsa World newspaper.

Enel Group, the former Italian state oil company, was privatized in 1999 and developed a number of international subsidiaries. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Enel made a shift towards renewable energy in order to position itself as a “green” powerhouse.

In 2010, Osage Wind LLC, the company’s North American subsidiary, obtained a lease for 8,400 acres of land in Osage County in order to build a wind farm. Subsequently the company excavated the land to put up the 84 turbines that generate enough energy to supply 53,000 households with power. This farm generates $1 million in profit for Enel every month.

However, Enel did not bother to obtain permission from the Osage to dig down into the leased land to install the turbines. So, even though Enel had the legal permits to put up turbines, it was in violation of the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, under which the Osage Minerals Council has exclusive rights to govern and extract the mineral resources on their land, including surface rock.

“The wind energy companies ignored the sovereignty of the Osage Nation,” Wilson Pipestem, a representative of the Osage Minerals Council, told the U.S. National Public Radio. 

In 2011, the Council sued the Enel Group. In the court filing, the Council noted that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs informed Enel on multiple occasions that it needed to obtain a mining permit from the tribe, but the company “actively” avoided this requirement.  

In many ways, this disregard for Osage sovereignty is part of a centuries-old tradition. In the 1890s, the U.S. government sold off drilling rights to a large oil reservoir discovered on Osage land to big oil companies like Exxon and Getty despite Osage land claims. After the passage of the 1906 Allotment Act, numerous Osage were murdered by a group of white settlers in what has been called a “reign of terror” in order to steal their oil drilling rights. (This story was recently told in the Hollywood film: Killers of the Flower Moon) More recently, the Koch brothers ran a scam in the 1980s and 1990s against the Osage and other Indigenous tribes, falsifying receipts to massively underpay the tribes for their crude oil, according to a U.S. Senate investigation.

“We’re tired of this. We’ve been tired of this,” Geoffrey Standing Bear, Osage Nation Principal Chief, told The Energy Mix, an online climate newsletter, that Enel’s actions brought up painful reminders of these past violations. “My father’s generation was tired of it, my grandfather and great grandparents.”

Nor is this the first time that Enel has been accused of violating the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous communities. In Colombia’s La Guajira desert, Enel Green Energy began construction of a wind farm without the Wayúu people’s consent. (Ultimately, the Wayúu were successful in kicking Enel out.) Enel has also built wind farms near their land of the Pankararu and other Indigenous peoples in Brazil, stirring conflict. In the Zona Reina region of Guatemala, Indigenous communities have accused Enel of attempting to manipulate families into abandoning innovative local hydroelectric dams in order to increase business for the company’s dam projects.

After the court ruled in favor of the Osage Mineral Council, the plaintiffs asked the court to order Enel to pay damages to the Osage amounting to $37.7 million. Enel countered that it only owed $68,993 - the market value of the rocks that it excavated to erect the turbines.

But the biggest dispute is over the removal of the turbines, which Enel estimates could cost as much as $300 million.

Waller and Standing Bear are adamant that they want the physical removal of the wind farm in order to discourage others from ignoring tribal law. 

However the Osage tribal leaders also admit there are other motivating factors – for example, Waller told reporter Robert Bryce that the tribe believes that the land could contain valuable minerals like lithium and oil.

Experts say that tribal plans to use their lands for fossil fuel extraction is not uncommon, as a way to secure “sovereignty by the barrel” in the words of Daniel Raimi, a lecturer at the University of Michigan and an expert on the energy transition, and Alana Davicino, an analyst with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In an article on Science Direct, they wrote that this is a reaction to “a long history of injustices that have left tribes with dramatically reduced population, less land, an extremely complex land tenure system, and a fraught relationship with federal bureaucracy…especially as it pertains to land use and ownership.”  

At the same time, many members of Indigenous communities in North America don’t support fossil fuel extraction. “Many traditionalists bitterly oppose energy companies wanting to exploit their lands,” writes Daniel Fixico, a historian of Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Creek, and Seminole descent, in his book The Invasion of Indian Country In the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources. “Many Indians charge that tribal leaders are not only abusing their land but also their people and their culture by cooperating with energy companies.”

As of October 2024, a final decision on the settlement has not been handed down by the federal judge. According to a September 27 report provided to the judge by the plaintiffs, Enel is still pushing back against the proposed price tag and sticking to its original estimate.