The most direct benefit to Minnesotans.
Ramping up rooftop and community solar
01 — Least-cost Path to a Clean Energy Future
Electricity produced from rooftop and community solar has a similar total cost to utility-scale solar and provides even better overall value through local job-creation and reliability benefits. In fact, the lowest-cost way for the U.S. to dramatically reduce emissions by 2050 is for about a fifth of our power to be provided by rooftop and local solar power rather than big utility-scale projects. It would save us nearly half a trillion dollars and save all utility customers money whether they’re producing their own energy from the sun or not. In Minnesota, solar on rooftops and in smaller-scale community solar projects can produce nearly a quarter of our state’s energy needs. Today, rooftop and community solar in Minnesota provide under 3% of our state’s power overall, so both have a lot of room to grow.
02 — Jobs Powerhouse
Rooftop solar projects create more jobs than utility-scale solar projects — as much as 30 times more jobs — and in a wide array of locations since projects happen in every type of community and neighborhood.
03 — R&R (Resilient and Reliable)
It’s particularly good for electricity reliability when solar is widely dispersed. If it is centralized, a problem at one site can knock out a lot of electricity generation at once. And when distributed solar is combined with batteries in microgrids and in ‘virtual power plants’ where batteries in many homes are connected together, that’s capacity that can keep the power on even if a wildfire or storm takes out transmission lines.
04 — Sharing the Gains from the Clean Energy Revolution
It shouldn’t just be giant utilities and the wealthy who get to benefit as owners and producers in the clean energy tech transformation — that freedom, choice, and access to energy self-generation and its direct economic benefit should be available to all. Well-designed rooftop and community solar programs do just that: they enable a household living on a lower income to choose to generate clean energy for the grid and access the economic benefits. Not everyone needs a rooftop that’s good for solar — community solar projects provide access to all.
Minnesota is a clean energy leader, but doing right by Minnesotans in our clean energy transition means ensuring rooftop and community solar aren’t blocked by investor-owned corporate utilities that want solar construction for themselves. While utility-scale power generation construction steers a lot of Minnesotans’ money to utility shareholders, rooftop and community solar puts clean energy investment into people’s pockets — creating more local jobs and producing power just as affordably. Action is needed in the 2023 state legislative session to ensure that rooftop and community solar can keep going strong, too — so all Minnesota communities, from Minneapolis to Ely, can have the choice to participate and benefit in our clean energy transition.
Big utility self-interest is in the way
Big utilities and their shareholders profit a lot when they build power plants or power lines — a guaranteed 10 percent profit every year at bill-payer expense. So they’ve used a number of tactics to stop or slow rooftop and community solar that they don’t profit from. Most notably, when they talk about price, big utilities have omitted the costs of delivering power from large energy projects to customers. When that omission is corrected, rooftop, community solar, and utility-scale solar power prices are all about the same for customers. They’re all cost-effective compared to fossil fuels and are all part of our clean energy solution.
Action is needed by the state legislature. Minnesota’s clean energy transition needs a combination of utility-scale and local renewables — our climate, equity and resilience challenges won’t be solved if big utilities control all construction and block rooftop and community solar growth.