Baker, Minnesota
CNN
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The smoking chimneys of the ageing Sherco coal power plant stand above gleaming solar panels spread across thousands of acres of farmland.
The polluting coal plant is about to close, to be decommissioned within the next five years. It has generated billions of dollars' worth of electricity over its 50-year lifetime, but the most valuable part of it is the plug – how it connects to the grid that powers our homes.
Rather than let a fossil fuel plant go to waste as it shuts down, Xcel Energy will leave it plugged in, creating the largest solar project in the upper Midwest, and one of the largest in the entire country, connected directly to the grid.
Rewiring the so-called interconnection system amounts to eliminating seven years of bureaucracy and red tape to distribute this power to consumers.
Experts say the secret to solving America's clean energy dilemma is this: The amount of power produced from clean energy ready to be connected to the grid far exceeds the total amount of power currently on the grid. Years of delays pose an existential threat to the prospects of building many projects.
“This will allow us to move much more quickly,” said Ryan Long, Xcel Energy’s Minnesota president, calling reusing the plant’s infrastructure “a real key to our strategy here.”
Researchers at the University of California Berkeley found that the US could double the capacity of its electric grid overnight by adding renewable energy projects to old fossil fuel power plants, whether they are coal, gas or oil. And the projects can be added to existing plants, not just those that are shutting down.
“This should be one of our main strategies going forward, because we already have a lot of existing assets, a lot of grid infrastructure, and we don't want to just throw it away,” said Umed Paliwal, a senior scientist at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study.
Building a project like Sherco Solar right now is much faster than connecting it to the electric grid. That's because adding new sources of energy to the grid requires making space, which requires lengthy engineering studies and uncertain project timelines. The boom in cheap, clean energy is now running up against this complex, regional bureaucracy.
Rob Gramlich, chief executive officer of consulting firm Grid Strategies LLC, compares connecting renewable projects to existing interconnection sites to using Fast Passes to avoid long lines at Disney.
“Everybody wants to get in a line, and then someone has a Disney pass to jump out of the line,” Gramlich said. “Jumping around in the interconnection queue is a sensitive topic that's hard to talk about. But the reality is that it exists.”
The answer to promoting clean energy may lie in some of America’s most polluting power plants.
Sherco has been Minnesota’s largest coal-fired power plant since it was built in the 1970s and ’80s — and its biggest polluter. Its smokestacks emitted about 10.5 million tons of planet-warming pollution in 2022 alone, equivalent to the emissions put out by more than 2 million cars in a year.
But as the Berkeley researchers found, plants like Sherco that are either slowly shutting down or are still operating are good candidates for incorporating renewable energy into their infrastructure.
“No fossil fuel power plant is running every hour of the day,” said Sonia Agarwal, CEO of clean energy think tank Energy Innovation and a former White House climate official. “The rest of the hours — that big plug, this really valuable resource that everybody has been waiting for for years — it’s just sitting there, not being used.”
Aggarwal and Paliwal argue that this approach gives utilities the best of both worlds; they can build wind and solar farms nearby, putting clean energy on the grid during hours when coal or gas plants aren’t producing power, and they don’t need to shut down the plants entirely.
Doing so has several benefits. It helps save jobs at plants that might otherwise be in danger of closing and helps boost the local tax base around the plant. In Minnesota, Excel is promising not to lay off workers at the Sherco coal plant.
“We really need them to stay in those coal plants until the end of their (plant's) life because they provide critical reliability and energy for our communities,” Long said. “When the time is right, we'll get them a job at Xcel Energy and retrain them and prepare them for success in that role.”
This will also result in savings for electricity consumers, as the plants will reduce the use of coal and use wind and solar power, which are much cheaper sources of energy.
The Berkeley study considered several factors to determine good candidates for interconnection: whether the thermal power plant had land suitable for wind and solar power; how much energy could be generated by the sun or wind; and how much renewable energy could be fed into the plant’s interconnection system.
The answer to the last question? A lot.
Paliwal and his colleagues found that by 2032, 1,000 gigawatts of new clean energy could be installed near power plants that meet all three criteria. And these are the big numbers the US needs; energy analysts believe this is due to rising demand from data centers, AI and people powering homes and cars.
Several power plants in Illinois are trying something similar, and in Virginia, a new solar panel is being interconnected to a nearby gas plant.
For Pete Wikoff, deputy commissioner of energy resources for the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the Sherco solar farm represents an opportunity to produce energy locally.
“We're a good wind and solar state,” Wikoff said. “All the fossil fuels we burn, we import. We're making wind and solar electricity here.”
It's also a big step for Minnesota's climate and clean energy goals. Under the leadership of its Democratic governor and 2024 vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the state is aggressively pursuing a plan to decarbonize its power sector — achieving 100% clean electricity by 2040.
“This is the main driver of how we decarbonize the rest of the economy,” Wyckoff said. “Our goal is to clean up the entire economy by 2050. And I think we can get there.”