This week in Energy Democracy news: Minnesota’s Governor Mark Dayton vetoes legislation that would have removed oversight for rural cooperatives, saving rural solar, plus a story of how Floridians defeated the controversial solar amendment during last year’s election. Featured Stories: How solar advocates defeated a controversial amendment by Eileen Mignoni, Yale Climate Connections Blog In Santa … Read More
Minnesota’s governor recently vetoed anti-renewables legislation that threatens rural solar development, but the bill’s likely resurgence means the state remains among a growing crop of Midwestern states facing the prospect of heavy-handed limitations on solar growth. The Minnesota legislation would have exempted rural electric cooperatives from all oversight of distributed generation policy by state regulators, putting … Read More
As more community solar is brought to market, however, important questions loom about access and the distribution of benefits.
Finding answers requires an intentional approach from regulators, developers, and utilities alike to ensure that low-income households, and others traditionally shut out of owning renewable generation, have a chance to opt in.
This month, ILSR submitted the following comments to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to inform its discussion of universal access to community solar. They are included below, lightly edited for clarity.… Read More
John Farrell, Director of ILSR’s Energy Democracy Initiative, Stacy Mitchell, Director of Community-Scaled Economies, and David Morris join host Christopher Mitchell to reflect on the role and nature of local policies and politics and the innovative economic structures communities are building.… Read More
On February 13, ILSR’s John Farrell participated in a debate on the value of small-scale distributed generation at the annual meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) in Washington, D.C. with utility-scale renewable energy advocate Brian Potts. We’ve attached the slides from the John’s side of the debate, media coverage of the debate … Read More
This week in Energy Democracy news:
We get a run-down on what Xcel Energy has been doing at the Minnesota state legislature and beyond, how rural Alaska can teach the mainland about renewable energy, and why solar energy on farms is an important new cash crop for farmers.… Read More
Civil Eats is covering the increasingly growing development of solar energy panels being used in non-used farm land and reached out to Karlee Weinmann, our energy researcher, for her perspective on this trend.… Read More
In Minneapolis City Pages, politics reporter Mike Mullen detailed the actions that Xcel Energy took in response to the parody video that we produced thanks to terrible legislation reducing oversight on the electricity giant that would harm Minnesotan ratepayers.… Read More
It seems counter-intuitive that a conservative farming community in southeastern Iowa is home to some of the most expansive solar generation in the U.S. But that’s exactly what’s happening in the area served by Farmers Electric Cooperative, the rural utility whose enterprising leader, Warren McKenna, saw renewables as a gateway to economic vitality. Last summer, ILSR … Read More
