Lakota Solar Enterprises (LSE), located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is one of the nation's first 100% Native American owned and operated renewable energy companies.

LSE began as an expansion of TWP's solar heater work on Pine Ridge. After several years of successful small-scale installation, it was time to create a local manufacturing facility capable of producing a greater number of solar heaters in a systematic way.

LSE is headed by Henry Red Cloud, a respected Lakota elder and a fifth-generation descendent of Chief Red Cloud, the last Lakota war chief. Initially Henry and his crew received pre-manufactured solar panels and then built the support structure for the unit and installed the completed unit at each recipient's home. Beginning in 2007, a re-designed solar collector panel was developed, which is now manufactured at the LSE facility as well.

Manufacturing the units on the Reservation has many benefits: LSE provides jobs and job training in an area where both are scarce; money stays on the Reservation where it is desperately needed; and greater cost-effectiveness is realized by cutting reliance on outside sources of material and labor.

IN 2006, having installed well over 100 solar heaters on the Pine Ridge reservation, LSE branched out to begin installations on the neighboring Rosebud Sioux Reservation. In 2007 LSE participated in Rosebud's Clean Energy Education Partnership and oversaw the Little Thunder renewable energy project. So far, more than 300 supplemental solar heating systems have been installed at Pine Ridge, Rosebud and other Great Plains reservations.

With a proven, reliable technology refined over years of development, LSE has installed demonstration solar heat units for  tribal communities in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Utah and Oklahoma. In 2009, LSE began selling solar heating systems to some of these reservations. Tribal members visit the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center at Pine Ridge, where they learn about the theory and practice of solar heating from LSE staff. These newly-certified Solar Technicians then return to assemble and install the heating systems for families in their own communities.