Fighting for equitable solar policy at the legislature

Note: this blog post recounts the story behind the Community Solar Access bill, a law passed in the 2023 legislative session to make community solar more accessible to Minnesotans. To read the Just Solar Coalition’s updates on the details of the bill, click here.

A crowd, accompanied by US Senator Tina Smith, celebrates the building of a community solar garden on North High in Minneapolis, spearheaded by Just Solar Coalition members.

This year’s legislative session saw enormous wins for climate and environmental justice, from solar on schools to cumulative impacts legislation to a “green bank” that helps communities finance clean energy and decarbonization projects — policies for which Just Solar Coalition members have been advocating and organizing for years. 

One win to be celebrated among this impressive list is the Community Solar Access bill (HF 2310), which greatly increases the accessibility of community solar and the associated reductions in energy prices to the Minnesotans who need it most. The product of five years of legislative work, the bill marks a major win for the Just Solar Coalition’s vision of 100% access to renewable energy and ensuring underserved communities benefit materially from the energy transition.

I had the pleasure of talking with Pouya Najmaie, who led the equity and access provisions on the Community Solar Access bill, about his work advocating on behalf of the Just Solar coalition at the legislature to pass the Community Solar Access bill. Pouya is the Policy and Regulatory director at Cooperative Energy Futures. The story of the Community Solar Access bill highlights what it takes to pass progressive legislation that actually challenges power to center the people most marginalized by our energy system.

A community solar garden on the roof of the Shiloh Temple in North Minneapolis developed by Cooperative Energy Futures

“Community solar” is a development model for solar energy that aims to bring benefits of solar energy to those who have been left out by traditional rooftop solar development—people who rent, homeowners who have shaded roofs or who can’t afford the up-front cost of putting solar on their own home, or simply those who don’t have the time or wherewithal to install and maintain their own panels. These people can “subscribe” to a larger remote solar array—a “community solar garden”—that provides electricity to the grid, and be compensated by a utility with a credit on their electric bill for the electricity the solar garden generates.

Community solar gardens, or CSGs, are the bread and butter of the Just Solar Coalition because of their ability to benefit these people who have been left out of Minnesota’s solar energy revolution. Cooperative Energy Futures is a community solar developer, with eight CSGs already developed around the state and six more currently in the development stage. (Read more about CSGs and the Just Solar Coalition’s work building equitable solar projects here!)

Minnesota’s community solar program was established in 2013, requiring Xcel Energy, the state’s largest investor-owned utility and power provider for the state of Minnesota, to interconnect community solar projects to their grid and compensate subscribers with bill credits. The program has been lauded as one of the most successful programs in the country, stimulating the deployment of solar energy throughout the state: As of 2021 Minnesota had the second-most installed solar capacity in the country (only surpassed by Florida), and community solar accounts for 60% of all solar energy in Minnesota.

However, prior to 2023, the program had significant problems: certain rate-design elements incentivized community solar developers to only seek out businesses to subscribe to their solar gardens rather than residents. This meant that the program was not directly benefiting those who stood to benefit the most from community solar—residents who needed to save money on their utility bills. Only 15% of the capacity of all community solar gardens in the state was subscribed to residential customers; “community solar” was community-based in name alone when looking at the program as a whole.

There was another major problem: Xcel Energy, whose financial interests conflict with community solar, was in charge of administering the program. Thanks to the “regulatory compact,” a Minnesota law that allows corporate utilities like Xcel to enjoy monopolies over their service territory, utilities are allowed to recoup a guaranteed rate of return on their investments in energy infrastructure by charging their customers. The community solar program created a zero sum game, where CSGs owned by third parties take up grid capacity that Xcel could be using to build their own infrastructure to make money off of. In essence, the community solar program invites third parties to become competitors of Xcel and challenge their monopoly market share.

Even though the program required Xcel to connect third party-owned CSG projects to the grid, the company was using its power as the administrator to try to block out these projects with long administrative delays. “It was like the fox guarding the hen house,” explained Pouya. With over 120 complaints filed regarding these delays, the Public Utilities Commission (the state regulator of investor-owned utilities) fined the company $1 million in 2021.

The Minnesota Legislature in session.

As the problems with the community solar program were becoming apparent, Cooperative Energy Futures approached Representative Jamie Long, then vice chair of the energy committee in the Minnesota House of Representatives, to draft the first iteration of the Community Solar Access bill in 2018. Among other things, the bill would shift administration away from Xcel and compensate residential subscribers—and in particular low-to-moderate income subscribers—much higher, both incentivizing more low-to-moderate income residential customers to subscribe to CSGs and developers to purposely seek these people out to subscribe.

While Rep. Long provided key support for the bill in the House, and would continue to do so over the next five years as he became Energy Committee Chair, the bill did not go anywhere due to lack of support in the Senate. Many legislators were too willing to treat the utility as a “neutral arbiter” of information regarding energy issues with the public’s best interest in mind, Pouya said. In fact, Xcel is the farthest thing from neutral: “Utilities are literally by law required to take their shareholders’ best interest in mind,” he explained, “and if they don't, they can get sued by their shareholders for taking the public interest.” For years, the Community Solar Access bill stalled due to lack of support in the Senate.

Then the November 2022 midterm elections rolled around. Minnesotans elected DFL majorities in the state House and Senate, and re-elected the DFL incumbent to the Governorship. Champions of the Community Solar Access bill were appointed to major leadership positions: Rep. Jamie Long became House Majority Leader and Rep. Melissa Hortman retained her  Speaker of the House position, the second and first most powerful positions in the house respectively. “We had the stars very well lined up in the House,” Pouya said. “It was go time at that point.”

Even with these favorable political conditions, Pouya, Rep. Long, and Rep. Hortman faced significant hurdles in passing the bill. Many of us do not fully comprehend the insider baseball that is the process of creating the laws we live under. In this process, where the sentences being written literally have the power to affect lives and decide the fate of millions of dollars of resources, there are many different warring interests at the literal table lobbying to see that the decisions go their way. In this situation, the ability to have sway and influence with legislators in positions of power is critical—and the imbalance of power between the different groups at the table can be massive.

One manifestation of this is the amount of resources a group can put into lobbying. “Xcel has 100 or so full-time lobbyists at the Capital, so when they mobilize, they mobilize,” explained Pouya. “They thought this was an actual real threat to their business model and their shareholders, so they put a lot of resources into that. Each of them can give out of their own pocket $2,500 to every legislator. That’s $250,000 they can give to every legislator as a war chest, or primary them with it.” While this sounds like a lot of money, such an expense is fish food for a company that made $1.74 billion in profits last year. 

However, some legislators were genuinely committed to grassroots voices, and the fact that Pouya represented the Just Solar Coalition—a coalition of grassroots environmental organizations, workforce developers, faith leaders, and organizers focused on expanding access to clean energy to everyone—lent him credibility with legislators. “That gave me an ‘in’ to look at every single new draft of the bill and be able to give comments on it. And, as I noticed, going through there, almost all my comments were heeded,” explained Pouya. “It was a really advantageous position to be in, and I wouldn't have been in that position without legislators like Majority Leader Long and House Energy Chair Patty Acomb truly caring about the grassroots position, and the legitimate backing of the grassroots provided through the Just Solar Coalition.” 

Still, between Pouya and the Just Solar Coalition, Xcel, and several other warring interests, the bill was extremely contentious—with still no resolution two weeks before the end of the legislative session. Since the bill had come to an impasse in each chamber’s energy committee, House and Senate leadership took hold of negotiations. 

This brought the legislative wrangling right down to the wire. “I was calling the Senate committee administrator and talking to him about all kinds of alternative deals and side deals,” recounts Pouya. Finally House and Senate leadership reached a final deal to the Community Solar Access bill—the very last bill to be resolved out of around 50 other bills packaged together into an energy and environment omnibus bill. Along with the rest of the omnibus bill, the Community Solar Access bill was signed into law on May 24, 2023, the end of a 5-year saga.

In exploring the significance of this bill, it’s helpful to step back and consider the bigger picture: As the energy system transitions away from fossil fuels, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape our energy system for generations to come. As fossil fuel plants are retired and renewable energy is built out, the details matter about what this new renewable energy system will look like. The win with the Community Solar Access bill helps to iron out one very important detail: who will be able to benefit from the renewable energy transition. With new requirements and incentives, the bill opens the door for the widespread deployment of community solar gardens throughout much of the state that actually center low-to-moderate income Minnesotans.

Another detail is the question of who will be able to own the technology and infrastructure of the future. “We would like to see a system that is owned not by shareholders or by large entities beholden to a small number of shareholders, but by communities themselves,” explained Pouya. “The more it's owned by communities, the more benefit will go back to the actual communities.” With community ownership and control, communities have the power to reinvest profits back into improving service or return profits to community members—options that are not afforded to them in the corporate-owned and controlled monopoly utility system, where profits are going to shareholders.

The question of who has the power to determine what our energy systems look like and who benefits from them is another crucial detail. “When you concentrate economic power, you also concentrate political power,” explained Pouya. “That's the way in our current system: That's how you get votes. That's how you affect legislation. That's how you get things to go your way.” This is how players like Xcel turn economic power into political power: with the resources to put 100 lobbyists at the Minnesota capitol and give away large amounts of money, shaping the decisions that will shape our energy system for generations to come.

By breaking up this power and dispersing it throughout communities by democratizing the ownership of our energy systems, we can wrest control over our futures from the hands of corporations.

The Just Solar Coalition is doing the work to ensure justice and equity are embodied in the renewable energy transition, and achieving results through wins like the Community Solar Access bill.

Just Solar Coalition member Cooperative Energy Futures is a cooperatively-owned solar energy developer. Follow their work and get involved here.

This blog post was authored by Nicholai Jost-Epp, summer 2023 intern with the Just Solar Coalition.