Minnesota's Clean Electricity Standard became state law in 2023 and requires electric utilities to provide 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040.
Interim targets: Investor-owned electric utilities are required to be 80% carbon-free by 2030 (60% for other electric utilities). All electric utilities must be 90% carbon-free by 2035, and 100% carbon-free by 2040.
How ill Minnesota achieve this target?
- Adding clean energy resources: adding more clean energy sources reduces Minnesota’s reliance on fossil fuel and expands the state’s homegrown sources of energy, such as wind and solar. State law standards include:
- Renewable Electricity Standard: Requires 25% of retail electricity sold in the state from renewable resources by 2025; 55% by 2035.
- Solar Electricity Standard: Requires 1.5% of public utility retail electricity sales to be generated by solar energy by 2020, 10% by 2030.
- Preference for renewable energy in utility resource planning.
- Renewable energy goal for total energy use: Requires 25% of total energy for heating, industrial, transportation, and electricity from renewable resources.
- Expanding clean firm resources: the 2040 law will require expanded deployment of clean firm resources. Clean firm resources include things like virtual power plants, long duration energy storage, hydropower, nuclear, and even carbon capture and storage. Minnesota will need to add many hundreds of megawatts of new short and long duration storage projects to help balance the intermittent, low-cost electricity generated from wind and solar.
- Spurring adoption of grid enhancing technologies: investments in smart grid technology are being deployed to enhance grid monitoring, control, and reliability, so more energy can be transported from where the energy is generated to where the energy is used. In addition to efforts to add new transmission lines, these types of projects can be implemented more quickly and at lower cost to ratepayers, adding value to the electric grid.
- Advancing energy efficiency (of course!) and expanding demand management opportunities: efforts to reduce usage and shift the timing of usage all help Minnesota achieve this target. For example:
- The ECO Program at Commerce routinely saves over a million megawatts per year of electricity through energy efficiency and conservation.
- The Weatherization Assistance Program provides income-qualified homeowners with upgrades to their home to improve energy efficiency and safety.
- Energy benchmarking and efforts such as SB2030 to improve building efficiencies.