| Summary: | 8th Fire Solar Company is owned and operated by the Anishinaabe people. Their office and manufacturing facility are near Pine Point, Minnesota. Honor the Earth, the parent company of 8th Fire, is a non-profit organization aimed at promoting awareness of environmental issues that affect Native Americans. The organization also focuses on the socioeconomic development of tribal communities. 8th Fire sees socioeconomic development as the main driver behind installing their solar thermal panels in tribal communities and training tribal members on their installation and maintenance to promote energy self-sufficiency. 8th Fire partnered with the Rural Renewable Energy Alliance (RREAL) in 2017 to start manufacturing their solar thermal panels for domestic and commercial use (Akiing, 2022). The goal of creating this partnership was to target tribal members as customers and promote solar thermal as a self-sufficient means of home heating. 8th Fire conducts seminars for interested parties, and trainings to educate new installers on their systems. The 8th Fire team is small, and therefore their sales strategy is to locate and educate individuals on their system to know how it works, understand how to maintain it, and even help provide them a business opportunity as well by signing them on as dealers for the company. The need for such a heating system like solar thermal is great in rural reservation land. The potential for solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy is high on such lands. However, insufficient transmission lines and disproportionately high costs of electricity are only a few reasons why “energy security is a major concern in many Native American communities” (US DOE Office of Indian Energy, 2017). 8th Fire notes that solar thermal is an “efficient and clean supplement to the fuel oil or liquid propane” that is common with reservation homes (8th Fire brochure, 2019). Depending on geography and seasonal variance, the expected heating load for a solar thermal system can be a secondary heat source or more ...
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