Five things you might not know about MCEA's climate work

Addressing the climate crisis is a top priority at MCEA. Our staff are experts in energy planning and have been working for years to push utility companies as well as the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Here are some ways we’ve recently been engaged in that work. 

1. MCEA has been fighting the construction of a fossil-gas plant just across the border from Duluth in Superior, Wisconsin. since 2017. We’ve fought it in court, and when that didn’t work, we found a new tactic to try and stop it: preventing the federal loan its owners need to finance it. So far, our efforts have successfully delayed the project for nearly 6 years. We are committed to keep up the fight until the project is dead. Building a fossil gas plant in the middle of a rapidly accelerating climate crisis is bad for our planet, and bad for ratepayers. 
2. MCEA is supporting efforts to build three new transmission lines in Minnesota that enable, in the words of our leading regulatory attorney Amelia Vohs: “a ton more renewable energy to get built.” Every new wind turbine, solar panel, or battery has to have a corresponding transmission line with room to move the clean energy electrons these projects generate to the cities, towns, and rural communities that will use them. Existing transmission lines are fully committed, making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to build new renewable energy projects at the time we need them most. MCEA is making sure this hurdle is addressed by supporting well-designed, and thoughtfully located transmission lines that will make the renewable energy Minnesota needs and wants, possible.
3. MCEA is a fixture at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), and is always a leading voice alongside our clean energy allies urging commissioners to keep the climate crisis top of mind when reviewing utility companies’ long-range energy plans. Most recently, we filed a comment in the long-range energy planning process underway for Otter Tail Power. Among other considerations laid out in our comment, we are pushing the utility company to terminate its ownership interest in its two remaining coal plants, which are some of the last coal plants serving our state.  
4. Speaking of the PUC, MCEA will be participating in a new docket the commission is kicking off centered around how to define “carbon free” under Minnesota’s new 100 percent carbon free energy law. This work will be critical to combat utility company’s efforts to use legal loopholes and other tricks to get out of 100 percent compliance. 
5. Our staff attorney, Barb Freese, secured a big win in front of the PUC recently, when she helped persuade the council to update the cost of carbon in utility companies’ energy plans to more accurately reflect the damage, and costs, associated with our continued reliance on fossil fuels. Read more about that big win here.