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 manufacturing facility on the reservation that would allow for a more mass-production type of capability. Support from Alternative Gifts International and the Bush Foundation provided funding for 100 solar heaters in 2005 and LSE was created to meet the challenge.

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 panel was developed which can now be assembled 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.

Having installed well over 100 solar heaters on the Pine Ridge reservation, LSE branched out in 2006 to begin installations on the neighboring Rosebud Sioux reservation. In 2007 LSE participated in the Clean Energy Education Partnership conference on Rosebud and oversaw the Little Thunder renewable energy project.

With a proven, reliable technology refined over years of development, LSE has brought demonstration solar heat units to the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, and the Skull Valley reservation in Utah. Eventually LSE will have a sufficiently broad client base to allow it to begin selling the units - Native-owned and Native-made.