title: How to Raise the Bar for Community Solar in Minnesota — (Bonus) Episode 255 of Local Energy Rules
author: Local Energy Rules
publication: Local Energy Rules
published: 2025-11-19T18:14:56
sourceurl: https://media.blubrry.com/localenergyrules/content.blubrry.com/localenergy_rules/2025-11-ler255-Rybak-MN-community-solar.mp3
word_count: 5736
I think there's a lot more that we could do to make it easy to get community solar on the grid in ways that would be really important for policymakers to focus on next. Hey, you've stumbled on some bonus content for my two-day nine interview podcast recording marathon at the Gateway to Solar Conference in October 2025. Consider donating to ILSR to keep conversations like this flowing. Now, here's my conversation with Charlie Ryback from Cooperative Energy Futures. Are we discussed what we've learned from the improvements made to Minnesota's community solar program and how we can do more to encourage cooperative ownership models? Charlie, welcome to Lock 100's Your Rules. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. I've listened to this podcast for a while, so it's really, really fun to be behind the microphone. Awesome. Well, I'm so pleased to have you here, because there's really, in my opinion, no better organization to talk about community solar as one that develops it in a way that I think is best in alignment with what we want to see in the world, which is community solar, really, and service grading community benefits. I want to talk about Minnesota's community solar program specifically. It's obviously been a nation leader. We have almost a gig a lot of capacity on the grid. It's gone through some interesting ups and downs in the past few years in terms of policymaking. Without getting into the weeds of that yet, I just want to say knowing that Minnesota has gone through some of these iterations and some lessons learned. What do you think that we've learned to do well with community solar? We were really early developing community solar within Minnesota's new system, and I think early on, we really prioritized how can we build this in a way that benefits the people that need it most, renters, people that don't own a roof, people that may not be able to afford a lot of the fancy expensive renewable energy devices in their home. I think over time, especially with the new community solar system, there are many more incentives that have aligned the program with that kind of goal, which has always been one of cooperative energy futures biggest values is how do we focus the resources on the people that need it most? And I think really at the beginning of the program, Minnesota did a great job of just saying community solar is good. We're going to incentivize it. Let's make it easy to build. And I think since then, we've continued to do a pretty good job, but other states have caught up to us. And so we've gone from really being in at arguably the national leader to a national leader. And I think there's a lot more that we could do to make it easy to get community solar on the grid in ways that would be really important for policy makers to focus on next. I think it's helpful to give that context too, because the way that you described what cooperative energy futures wants to do, I think is what most policy makers are thinking about when they think about developing community solar policy is that they're not saying let's just create another route for people who can already afford to do solar to do solar. But how are we giving choices to people who don't currently have them effectively? They don't own their roof, their roof is shady, et cetera, giving them that. So I think that's really helpful to understand how the mission of your organization is really in alignment. When the program in Minnesota is first created almost a decade ago now, and before the recent changes in the 2023 legislature, I guess what I would describe it as, and I'm curious if this aligns up with your concept of as well, that it was yes able to serve those purposes, but it was really very open-ended in terms of, hey, anybody who wants to subscribe can subscribe, anybody who wants to build and own these projects can build and own them. So it grew really quickly because it was very open, which was awesome. We got a lot of new capacity, but it arguably could have done better at least at serving some of those populations that we imagined really wanting to serve who didn't have those choices previously. I think that's exactly right, and I mean, all community solar is good to a certain extent, and a lot of it is a lot better than others, and so I almost don't want to go too far down a road of, oh, this is the bad type of community solar because it's distributed, it can be very good, but I do think that you're right that policymakers have looked at this as a tool for how can we deal in the rest of the community into a clean energy future? And I think that's the really exciting thing about the changes made in 2023 is the legislature really sat down and said, okay, how do we further incentivize this program to say let's really focus on the people who can't put solar on their roof, can't afford to do a lot. And I think when we're looking at some of the electric bill increases that are coming our way, really vulnerable populations are the ones who are going to be harmed the most by this, and having a program that is targeted towards helping those people the most, I think is not just important, but it's going to be really essential for the next three, four years in particular. So let's talk a little bit about the changes that were made. Some people are talking about this as community solar 2.0. I think that was the title of the panel that you were just on talking at the conference here about community solar. So what are the changes that the legislature made? And let's all amend my previous statement and say maybe not to fix things, but to simply make the program stronger in terms of its orientation, just serving the most vulnerable folks with community solar. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think the way that I've thought about some of the changes are the smartest companies launch a product, try it out, and then come back and refine it. I think that's really what the legislature did. They put together a really good program and then they saw how it was working. And they said, here's some ways that we can make it even stronger. And then they made those changes. And I think that process is really good. And is one that policymakers should embrace, you know, you don't always get things exactly 100% of the way right first time, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a success. And I think the community solar programs are a great example of that. Some of the big changes that were made, there were more income caps put on the people that could subscribe to the projects. So the benefits are more nearly focused on working class people, which we thought was a really good change. We pushed for that change. There were big changes made to the size of projects you could build. So instead of building one megawatt projects, we can now build up to five megawatt projects, which just mean we can help so many more people be it's much more economically feasible for us to build projects. And, you know, I think we have really good partnerships with folks that own farmland. And for a lot of farmers, they still want to have crops on their land. They want to keep the family farm in the family. And they want to balance that out by having a steady predictable revenue source and cleaning up the grid at the same time. And so for them, if they want to put five megawatts on their land and have the benefits go back to the community, third community solar, they should be able to do that. I think that's a great change. So those were a couple of the really big changes that we see as making a big difference. And then aside from that, just having really good build credit rates for folks and really delivering huge benefits to people at 150% of area median income at the state level, which again, we were really excited about and we're already seeing really exciting changes that are going to really target these benefits of the people that we think need the most. I want to ask you about something about kind of like where the projects were developed. I just want to note before we go any further into the weeds that the State Department of Commerce did a nice study of the sort of community solar 2.0 pointing out that on net, this is going to be a big significant benefit to Minnesota and its economy and to consumers. I know we get into the weed sometimes with community solar or even rooftop solar and people are like, oh, is it worth it? Is it worth it? This has been analyzed pretty conclusively by the Department of Commerce. So I think one of the things it's really exciting about this program is that even though the rules are somewhat new, we already know that the design of it is such that everybody benefits. If you're a participant and you're going to get benefits, you're going to get build credits. If you're not a participant, we get cheaper energy on the grid close to where we use it. It's a win-win win. The study that was done, I think it's somewhere between two and two and a half times as many benefits as there are costs that to me is an obvious win for everyone. We have a lot of folks that with our new community solar gardens, we've worked with a bunch of mobile home parks, for example, that have really high energy bills, are really energy burdened and aren't living in places where they can put any renewables on their roof. So instead of just exposing those people to A to the elements and B to whatever rate increases come along, there's actually now a tool to protect them and to say, you know, there are a bunch of people that are making a lot of money off the renewable energy economy right now. You should be benefiting as well, which I think was something that is really exciting to us. And I think people also need to know that developers bear a lot of costs as a part of this. So one of the big things that rarely comes up with the legislature and people are talking about this program is the developers actually pay for distribution grid upgrades when we have to build projects that we are the ones who are bearing the cost of further developing the grid. And I think that is a huge benefit across the board that rarely gets talked about is if you allow people to go out and build these projects, A, you can deliver the benefits to people that need them and B, developers are the ones who are actually on the hook for costs of just making our grid able to handle more load and more modern. We are the ones who are actually paying for that as well. So that's another way that there are common benefits that are borne by us rather than being spread across ratepayers. That kind of leads me to my next question, or at least I'm going to take advantage of this discussion about kind of upgraded infrastructure. One of the things that I noted about the 1.0 version of community solar and Minnesota, and I think this is true of most other programs is that the compensation rates aren't really differentiated by where you put the project. And so you have this incentive to find the easy to develop places, you know, and that's a complex formula, right? It's available capacity on the grid, it's available land, somebody who's willing to lease it to you or to be a part owner of the project, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of different considerations. One of the things that people talk about when they talk about solar and community solar is this opportunity to use the built environment, right? We have parking lots, we have parking ramps. Cooper and Richie Futures is one of the few developers that I know of that is doing built environment projects, but I know some having to talk to Timothy, the general manager that that can be more expensive to build projects in that way. Do you think that was a missed opportunity in 2.0? Do you think there's a 3.0 opportunity? I mean, I just full disclosure, I'm a subscriber to Cooper to make features midtown project, which is one of the few that are on the built environment, which I think is very exciting, but thank you. You know, we have most of the people who live in the Twin Cities metropolitan area and who thereby are the like the majority of folks start back cell energy, which is where this community solar program operates are living in cities and are living in the built environment. It's a real shame that we haven't seen more opportunity to tap that. I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, I think with the changes that are coming to just load growth, broadly speaking, I think that very soon we need to be looking at every single available opportunity to put more resources, especially distributed resources, especially community owned distributed resources on the grid. And with our Alina hospital project, Abbott North Western Hospital right in the center of Minneapolis, they were building a brand new parking ramp. We needed some incentives to be able to build a community solar there. They also bore the cost of a canopy that sat on top of the parking ramp. And as a result, we're delivering reduced bill savings to something like 130 households, most of which are in the direct community right around the project. We're really excited about that. Most of that we did because that is the type of thing that we believe in. There weren't a lot of financial incentives for us to do that. And I think adding financial incentives and saying, you know, if there are resources being built in your community, you should benefit more by having those subscriptions focused on the area where the projects are being built is a great idea. And it's something that is I think pretty foreign to the way that we've structured our whole utility system is that the places that the resources get built are often not the ones that benefit from it. And I think there's an interesting split right where a lot of folks who live right in the cities have not typically benefited from the program because the projects had to be built further away from where they live. Now you're able to subscribe anyone. I think that's great. But I also think that the areas right around where the projects are being built should really benefit from those projects. We do that because we believe in that as part of our mission. But I do think that there is a there's a 3.0 where maybe further benefits could go to the people that are in the areas where these are being built so that resources that are being built in a community are benefiting people in that community. That's something that makes a lot of sense to me. And it seems too that there when you talk about creating incentives maybe in a 3.0 version to support that kind of development that there's a rationale behind it too from a grid perspective of if you are to say as you pointed out earlier that as a developer paying the upgrade costs for the grid in some other place, maybe there's existing capacity in the distribution system. Maybe there is a reason that a utility could say, Hey, instead of the substation upgrade that we would otherwise have to build will encourage somebody to develop a community solar project in this place. Maybe in addition, we haven't seen because the design of the program doesn't really talk about it. But how could we include energy storage, for example, which could provide resilience benefits, which could be grid supporting, etc. I guess sometimes I think about these programs and they go so well at addressing this issue of access to solar. But we have this next level up of making them as useful as possible to the grid system. Utilities haven't traditionally been that interested in figuring out how to make a community solar work in fact in our circumstances. We often find them lobbying to try to kill the program entirely. So I don't know, I'm very interested in that next level. Yeah, and I think we think and talk a lot about battery storage and what it could do. Just thinking about grid resiliency, we have these resources that are sitting on the grid. We would love to be able to have the incentives to make battery storage work. I think it makes all the sense in the world to pair battery storage with community solar. But until we have some sort of rate structure or incentive structure that allows for that, it's very difficult to finance that. And we would love to be able to build that. But we would just need I think a little bit better incentives to get there. And I think no matter what kind of future you want, we're going to have to build lots of transmission and distribution. But every mile of that that we don't have to build is such a massive cost saving. Not to mention the fact that it is very hard to push through in a regulatory environment, you know, people and municipalities, counties, states, often fight against things like this. So if we don't have distributed programs like this, we don't have incentives like that. If we don't have incentives for battery storage, we're just going to have to build more and more and more wires, which is really expensive and is going to drive up the cost of everybody's rates a lot. So the more we can do this stuff, the more that we can cite it close to where people are actually using the energy, the more those costs will avoid. And I think we may be able to do a little bit of constantly for people who are going to be facing these really big electric bill increases no matter what. That's a mention when you talk about those larger scale investments they take forever. Long time permitting development process can, you know, take 10 years or more. I always, when I get a chance to talk to anyone from cooperative energy futures, love to point out again, the word cooperative in there, love you to share a little bit about how it differs from sort of traditional relationships between customers and community solar developers, not try to knock on that, but just about sort of the sort of next level up that you provide for folks. And then what I'm really interested in you giving this perspective on after that is what can we do in terms of state policy to encourage these ownership structures that really intentionally give people more say in what happens with their energy dollars, but also potentially, you know, getting more back for themselves. Yeah, great question. Very excited to talk about us being a cooperative. I didn't have a bunch of experience with cooperatives until I joined cooperative energy futures. So it's been really interesting to just learn about the myriad benefits that come from being owned by your members. You know, I like to sort of joke, but not really joke, you know, that our, quote, customers are members and our subscribers to our projects. And if I'm not doing my job well, they could fire me. And that is like a very cool structure to have. And beyond that, you know, I think when we have assets that are accumulating in value, when we have projects that are creating cash for the organization, that is money that ends up back with our members and our membership. You know, we're doing a lot of really deep membership engagement work right now to really say to folks, as we continue to grow as we continue to have more community solar projects, more projects on the grid, what should we do? You know, how should we use that money? Should we invest it, build a lot more projects? Should we bring down people's bills? What do you want? I think we're trying to go from being member-owned to really like member-directed and really try to arrive in a place where we say to our membership, you are actually in the driver seat here. How can we equip you with the tools to like help us make those big decisions? And that is something that is so foreign to people because, you know, you move into a new apartment, you turn the light switch on, somebody tells you who you pay your bill to, that is people's typical experience with the system, right? There's no choice. There's no real price transparency. And what we really try to do is say, here's why we're making decisions, here's how we're making decisions. As we start to grow and accumulate more capital, you get to tell us what we want to do. And I think that's a really exciting thing about cooperatives. I think the legislature and state policymakers could and should do way more to encourage organizations like this. Minnesota has a wonderful number of non-profits, but I think people really fall back on that as a default option a lot of times, a way to benefit the community. And I think really looking at cooperatives as being this organization that is community-rooted, community-grounded, builds power within its membership and also presents, you know, an alternative to being investor-owned and we go out and we have to work with banks and raise capital and things like that. So we operate a lot like a private company does, except that instead of our benefits, the benefits from our organization, the profits from our organization flowing to a couple of people that flows to all of our members. And when you think about us as being an organization that primarily does community soul-run, we do energy efficiency, we have affordable housing solar, we're getting into district heating, but really now being in a community solar program where most of where at least half the benefits have to flow to income, qualified working class people, that is who is at the root of our membership and really incentivizing more organizations to empower people like that, especially in this utility-based system where those people typically don't have much or any power. I think it's really exciting and I think there are a bunch of different industries that it could work great in, you know, child care's one. I know paper moon is a cooperative that is in the child care space and I think there are all these places that people are facing huge cost increases, people are feeling like they don't have a lot of economic power or a place to really be able to push back against some of the huge cost increase that people are facing and I think the cooperatives and the cooperative movement offers a really interesting opportunity for people to, you know, bunch of different industries begin to build more power that way. I think it's very interesting when you look at the history too of cooperatives, you know, we, especially in the Upper Midwest, the progressive era, early 1900s, late 1800s, you had monopolization of railroads, you had farmers basically looking at situations where the prices that they could get for their crops were controlled by these distant entities that controlled their access to the rails, to the green elevators, cooperatives arose up during those times because farmers were recognized, hey, we're not going to have a chance to actually survive because there's all this extraction happening from our community by these owners of these key elements of infrastructure. So you got cooperatives designed around agriculture to support them to make sure more of the money stayed in the community. There's an interesting energy parallel with farmer owned ethanol plants. And this is actually where I want to bring up this idea and kind of come back to the idea of state policy. So in the 90s and let me just say this with the context that we have now 20 years later of this, we all know that like electrification is the way that we should be going when it comes to transportation rather than make growing a lot of corn and putting it into ethanol and putting it into vehicles, right? But at the time, it was kind of the one alternative you all we had. And what Minnesota did that I think was fascinating is they said, we will give you an incentive to produce ethanol in the state of Minnesota, but only for like the first 10 million gallons a year. So it was a relatively small facility. So a big facility could still get an incentive, but it would be a drop in the bucket. It didn't really matter, but it would support a lot of smaller facilities really well. And it actually helps stand up a lot of these cooperatively owned ethanol plants. So corn farmers who are always subject to the whims of commodity prices and as you kind of articulate it earlier, right? They're looking for some guaranteed revenue. Solar community solar can offer that to them now. So the state really deliberately set out and said, you know, maybe not explicitly, you have to be cooperatively owned, but are there ways that we can support the skies and scale that can be complimentary to cooperative ownership? Yeah, I do. So I'm just kind of curious and you might be throwing this at you sort of blank. So like, you don't feel like you have to have amazing great ideas. Let's do it. But I'm just kind of curious. What do you think? I assume that we're in agreement with the state should do more to encourage cooperative ownership, given the returns that it gives. Curious if you've had any thoughts about how the state could do that for community solar. I think there are lots of ways that policy makers could make our lives easier. And I only say that thinking about it in the cooperative energy futures lens because I think there are lots of ways that that would make other people's lives easier as well. And I think really where cooperatives get really interesting and exciting. And you know, the ethanol example that you listed as a great one is where there are people that are facing a market that clearly does not work in their favor, but they maybe are organized. They know each other and they say, wait a second, we should be the ones that are gaining the benefits off of this. They provide really interesting opportunities for people to do that. And I think the community solar program is a great sort of foundation for this because it really takes a type of solar that is that is really geared towards delivering broad-based community benefits. And cooperative movement being an economic system that delivers broad-based community benefits and marries them together. And I think one person going out and having to raise money to build a community solar farm, or garden is a difficult task, but a bunch of neighbors sort of banding together to work on something is a much easier one. And then you look at all the different parts of the process having to work within the utility system. You really want a number of people together working to stand something like that up. So that's what we've tried to do. I think there are a bunch of other opportunities for more folks to do it. We're working with groups across the country to try to create new cooperatives where they are. And I think that's the future of this stuff is not one cooperative energy futures as an international conglomerate. It's a bunch of different cooperative energy futures around the country, even around the state of Minnesota, standing up and organizing in their communities and saying, we have a system that isn't working for us and we want to create a way for us and our neighbors to benefit off of it. Charlie, what do you have in the pipeline for community solar right now from cooperative energy futures? How many projects are you looking at developing how many megawatts? And also, what is that likely to add up to in terms of how many more members you're going to be bringing into that cooperative structure? So today we have close to 13 megawatts of gardens that are either operator or will be operating within a month from now or maybe depending on when this podcast goes up by the time this podcast is live. And we are probably looking at through the end of the year somewhere between 20 to 40 new megawatts of leases. Then we have sort of a race against time to figure out the tax credit situation with the expiration of the investment tax credit on the horizon. So there are a bunch of different things we're going to have to figure out there. One of the big bottlenecks to knowing exactly how many projects we have in the pipeline is the system for getting connected with the utility is very difficult, is pretty opaque and it can be quite expensive. The legislature has taken steps to address that, which we're really excited about, but a lot of the cost sharing work that the legislature's done, which I'm very excited about, is not going to actually go live, I think, in time for us to be able to use it for exactly this round of projects we have to figure out the next couple of months. So I'm not sure exactly how many megawatts we're going to end up with, but if we're able to develop another 13 megawatts, that would double our capacity and that would probably mean another something like 1300 households that are able to benefit from this, which would be really exciting. And for example, to double that, you're looking at 2500 to 3000 households that will benefit from this, which is really exciting and it's still not enough. So we are trying to do more to build those projects than as I mentioned before, we have an affordable housing solar program, we're working directly with residents in affordable housing units and having ways for them to save 30 to 40% on their bills and pay nothing upfront, which we're really excited about. We have an energy efficiency program that's going live that's once again, I think, intended to say to folks that can't afford a heat pump or might not be able to afford window seals and things like that that would actually not just save the money on their bills, but also reduce the amount of load on the grid, which is fantastic. We're trying to figure out ways to bring that on and then we have this district heating program that's coming live that I know we've been talking with you a lot about, because you've done really smart thinking about this is how do you structure that in a way that can be cooperatively owned, the benefits can be shared widely and I think you put all those things together and we're just trying to find more and more ways to say when community members come together, when they want to save money, when they want to build power and when they want to clean up the grid, we have a bunch of different tools to do it and we're really excited about all four of those, but I think the big one is going to be the community solar. It's going to come online next. I'm glad you mentioned the district heating I am doing. I'm calling it like a walk along podcast. I'm hoping to talk to Apollo over at your shop every three to six months or so to kind of follow along in the development process because one of the things I have found with a lot of these innovative models for clean energy development is that you find out the case study happens a year or more after the project is developed and you've forgotten a lot of things about the struggles that you went through. So I'm interested to see how that might play out. Anyway, Charlie, it was great to talk to you. Great to have you on. Now you get to listen to your own voice on the podcast, not just listen to my voice. So I really delighted that you took the time. I can't wait. Thank you so much for having me and thanks for all the great work that you do. Thanks for listening to one of my nine mini podcasts from the 2025 Gateway to Solar Conference with Charlie Ryback from Cooperative Energy Futures. We'll have links on the show page to episode 202 celebrating 10 years of community solar in Minnesota, episode 57 about CES first Cooperative Project in Minneapolis and episode 127 about the effort to build a national network of community-owned community solar project developers. Even these mini versions of local energy rules are produced by myself and Ingrid Burson with editing provided by Audio Engineer Jew Burshbock. And as always, we're talking about taking on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.