Minnesota

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Though a multi-community approach can bring additional challenges, it can also bring cost savings by creating bigger projects and leveraging the expertise of more experts, says Minnesota solar advocacy group Clean Energy Resource Teams (CERTs).

Faced with the prospect of giving unregulated utilities the right to charge solar customers any fees they wanted, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton took a stand and vetoed a bill that would have done just that.

Bills to remove Minnesota’s electrical co-ops from Public Utilities Commission go before Gov. Mark Dayton today, giving them the power to set their own fee structures without oversight – and target solar customers as a separate rate class.

At the behest of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, Minnesota Power submitted a Value of Solar Tariff plan – and proved (yet again) that as even the best net-metering plan can undervalue what solar means to the grid and ratepayers.

The aggressive, bipartisan legislation to pursue renewable energy in the state follows an Xcel Energy announcement that it put 32 MW of community solar projects online. These plans for renewables come at the same time a bill makes its way through the legislature that would snuff out Minnesota’s solar incentive.

The national solar association is setting up a committee to focus on solar expansion in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin in a move designed to refocus the association on state-level policy battles, which are where most observers believe the future of solar will now be decided.

Standard Solar’s Tony Clifford says yesterday’s veto override of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of the Clean Energy Jobs Act was a great (though not entirely unexpected) start to growing the state’s solar industry, it can’t be the end game. In this essay, he discusses what he thinks the next Maryland solar industry goal should be.

The utility, one of the Midwest’s biggest, now owns the two largest solar project in the region, both located in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

This line of systems will incorporate Dynapower’s recently released Generation 2 MPS product line of behind-the-meter energy storage inverters and Samsung SDI’s recently released E2 battery solution. The initial release of the joint system will be a 250 kW/550 kWh offering, with a 100 kW two-hour system to follow.