100% renewable: The rural electric co-operatives don't want it

In June I  set up a table at the Todd County Fair to promote a conversion to 100% renewable electricity. I received some help from my friends and family staffing the booth for three days. Three friends, and MN350 activists, came from the Twin Cities to help also.

The Todd County Farmers Union also had a table at the Fair. They were the table next door to ours. I chatted a little with one of the guys staffing the table. Then I asked him if he’d support Minnesota transitioning to 100% renewable electricity.

“No. Definitely not,” he said. “Maybe fifty percent but not one-hundred percent.”

I asked him why not. He explained that he was a member of the board of directors of one of the rural electric cooperatives - Stearns Electric, I believe. He said that his co-operative did not support a transition to 100% renewables because it was not possible to get 100% of our electricity from renewables. To support this claim he said that wind and solar electric had failed to produce any electricity in certain areas of Minnesota for several days during a cold spell in the winter of 2018 - 19.

I’ve heard this same claim from several other leaders from Minnesota’s rural electric cooperative. I don’t know if this failure really happened but these cooperative leaders firmly believe it did. It is a central talking point for their opposition to adapting a policy to transition to 100% renewable electricity.

I’ve brought this point to staff and volunteers at MN350 and have been either ignored or lightly brushed off. Those of us who support developing a policy of moving too 100% renewables  would make a grave error if we don’t listen too and adapt to the objections posed by the rural electric cooperative. The transition won’t happen without their support.

Earlier this year I visited with Mike Reese at the University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) at Morris. Mike is the Director of Renewable Energy at  WROC. He told me that WCROC was had achieved around 95% renewable electricity using wind and solar. He said, however, that getting those last few percentage points to 100% was very technically challenging.

Thanks to WCROC

There’s a whole lot of technical problems associated with wringing the last five to ten percent out of a renewable electric system. There are the complexities of working with an old fashioned distribution grid designed for centralized and one way power distribution. There is the problem of storing excess capacity and then accessing it when needed. And, on a regional and national level, there is the problem of moving electricity across the boundaries separating hundreds of different power companies.

I think that the rural electric cooperative directors see those obstacles and, unlike Mike Reese, don’t believe they can be overcome. Or, at  least, they aren’t going to take the risks necessary to over come them. As members of a board of directors they view their role as necessarily be conservative and being protective of their members interests.

The role of organizations like MN350 should, among other things, be to inform themselves as to the technical problems and solutions associated to getting to 100% renewables. Then they should work with the electric cooperative to develop policies and incentives to implement those solutions. 

“The grid is not (fully) ready to utilize renewable energy technology just yet. But there’s no reason it shouldn’t be able to — and many reasons to believe it will soon,” Nate Berg wrote in Ensia magazine (ensia.com) recently.

We all need to work together to get there as soon as possible.

Tim

Central Minnesota Political