State Solutions for Local Energy Action — (Bonus) Episode 256 of Local Energy Rules

Katie Jones:
We need to build buy-in and allowing for cities to try things out as it works for them is a way to, over time, iterate, practice things, get out the kinks, and then build buy-in for whatever this next new iteration of our energy system is going to be.

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John Farrell:
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 Minnesota State representative Katie Jones, where we discuss the efforts by cities to advance clean energy and equitably address climate change and how legislatures can pave the way.

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John Farrell:
Katie, thanks so much for joining me on Local Energy Rules.

Katie Jones:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

John Farrell:
I’m really excited to talk to you because you have this lovely intersection professionally between spending time helping a city think about how it can reach its climate goals, and now you’re in the state legislature where you’re helping the state think about how to reach its climate goals. Minneapolis has, just for a quick background for folks, this really interesting clean energy partnership. It’s something that I’ve written about and podcasted about before, so you can learn more about it on our website. You can also just Google Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership, get a little background there. Katie and I both served on the Energy Vision Advisory Committee to this, which is a citizen advisory committee that gives advice to the city and to the utilities. I guess I’m just curious, from your perspective, having served there, what did you see as sort of the biggest barriers for the city to meet its clean energy goals? What were standing in the way of the city getting to where it needed to go?

Katie Jones:
Yeah, so as we know the city wants clean energy and they want it on an accelerated timeline, and that’s not necessarily what the utility timelines are. The issue from the city perspective is that the utility model is not serving those needs and unfortunately the city’s main point of leverage is a really hard thing to wield and that thing is as we know municipalization and there are lots of conversations around that 12 years ago, and I’m sure that was part of your earlier podcast, but since then we’ve really seen how that is such a barrier as something to wield, as something to leverage. In Boulder, they tried municipalization, there was a lot of legal stuff and it was a lot of time and money and ultimately they were not able to do it. And the other big barrier is that the city is reticent to really use that as a tool because they would have to buy the infrastructure and that would be really expensive and they would really need a lot of political support to be able to do that.
So I think just generally there’s this structural issue that makes it so that the city doesn’t quite have the power to move things besides just holding meetings, having that public arena, that is what at least the Clean Energy Partnership provides. At least you do have regular milestones and measurements in time on how progress is happening, and I think what has been useful so far is to show what isn’t happening on the timeline and on the scale and it’s I think helping to make the case of why we need to start looking at what are structural ways to make things different. The other thing I wanted to point out is that they’re really nice people on EVAC and on the Clean Energy Partnership and I think just the dynamic is like we’re Minnesotans, we like to get along and generally so it’s hard to critique in a really way that is fully moving the needle.
The other piece is that there was a lack of time to devote to specific issues and I think there was this tension between people who were interested in generation or just commercial energy efficiency or in a residential energy efficiency and industrial was, I think something was lacking in terms of the expertise that was on EVAC. And so all of those things are different subjects and have really different needs in terms of strategies and so I think Clean Energy Partnership is a good platform to elevate the issues. It’s not exactly the thing that is going to fully change the dynamic.

John Farrell:
I guess I’m curious if you agree with this, but my sense is, and you sort of alluded to this about the structural, so the sort of most dramatic option is Minneapolis would say, okay, we’re going to just take over the utility system then now we have a city run utility and we can do whatever we want with it in terms of trying to meet our climate goals, make those investment decisions ourselves. The tension always seemed to be for me too that here we are in this forum and it’s really, like you said, it’s sort of like this polite exchange between the city and the utilities about what they can do to be collaborative, but at the same time, the utility is sort of saying, well, we already have a plan for what we’re going to do. We filed that with the Public Utilities Commission. That work is sort of largely decided there’s not necessarily a lot of flexibility in terms of what we’re going to be able to do.
I still find that frustrating. I’m still on EVAC. We still just had a meeting where we got our kind of updated on the annual plan and it was like, wow. The one thing I want to point out actually from that, that’s interesting. I think to your point, the things the city has in its control, which are the city enterprise, so the city buildings’ energy use, the city building greenhouse gas emissions, those are on target because the city has control over them and can make the decisions about them. Everything else that is like community-wide emissions, clean energy deployment, et cetera, is behind or not on track. And I think that’s kind of an interesting illustration I guess, of the powers that folks have or don’t have.

Katie Jones:
I think that’s a good point, and we do have examples where municipalization is not the end all be all. I’ve worked with cities in Minnesota that are municipalized, they’ve got strong climate goals and yet they’re really struggling to make inroads on clean energy. So it really takes that kind of perfect storm of having the right amount of control and the people motivated to work in that clean energy direction.

John Farrell:
I really appreciate that. I often say ownership is not determinative of your climate success, although it certainly feels like you can at least do something different, you know, can do something different if you were to change ownership, but obviously it’s not a deciding factor.
I want to ask you, you have this great perspective now having been in the legislature, you have experience professionally on energy issues. I guess I’m kind of curious if you have started to develop some sense of what are things that the legislature could do that might make it easier for cities that are trying to do something about climate and clean energy? Is it about money? Is it about policy change? I know there’s bills about solar permitting. You talked about structural factors. I don’t know if there’s something else that you’ve been thinking about, but now that you have this new perspective, has it given you any insight into how the states might help cities better pursue clean energy goals?

Katie Jones:
Yeah, I think there are a number of ways that the state can move the needle. One, I’m sure it’s been talked about before, solar permitting, making it easier and more streamlined across all cities so that solar providers have just one standard way of accessing permitting and all of those types of things through various cities. That just lowers the barrier to entry.
I’ll also say something that we’re already seeing because of the state are new pilots into new technology. So geothermal is a big one, microgrids is another. So we have microgrids over in St. Thomas. We’ve got geothermal project at the Heights in St. Paul. There’s also one at the Como Zoo in St. Paul, and I think those have both been enabled through funding from the state. I’ll also say some of this state policy around NGIA is also enabling another geothermal project. So I think we just need to continue to evolve not only the research and demonstration pieces, but also start to think about how do we continue to evolve ECO and NGIA. We’ve now had ECO for a few years.

John Farrell:
Could you just explain those two things?

Katie Jones:
Yes. So NGIA is the Natural Gas Innovation Act. I was not in the legislature when that was passed, but it is really legislation to encourage and actually require the natural gas utilities to decarbonize in a regulated way. And the other piece is ECO, which are the utility energy efficiency programs more or less. ECO did evolve to allow for electrification and I think there are still further kind of iterations in that direction that we can think about.

John Farrell:
Let me ask you about the permitting first. One of the things I found really interesting, so ILSR did some permitting research on a contract or a group that is advocating for permitting reform and we took it on because I was really curious just to sort of learn more about what solar installers are experiencing with municipal permitting. The thing I thought was really interesting is that when we interviewed installers for that, they said things like, well, this is just the cost of doing business. Cities have their rules and we just go ahead and we figure it out. We’ve got our own database and explains what to do in different places. And I had really expected them to be, I don’t know, more pissed off about what it took to do permitting. My takeaway from it was, and this is sort of funny coming from someone who’s the Institute for Local Software Self-Reliance, we like local control and local decision making. I was like, I don’t know if cities should be making permitting decisions anymore because the problem I perceived after doing this wasn’t that cities have bad permitting processes. Some of them are expedited and sped up in certain ways, even try to follow some best practices, but it was the fact that they’re all different every single city. Even if Minneapolis is doing something great on permitting and that you can do it online and it can be approved really quickly, St. Paul will be doing something slightly different and maybe they just have a different way that you pay or a different way that you do the application. I don’t know if you have any reflections on that because you’re going to be thinking about permitting legislation or you’re going to be lobbied certainly about permitting legislation. But if you’ve had any additional thoughts on that, and I want to ask you more broadly about the policy process.

Katie Jones:
Yeah, so on the solar permitting front, the state did provide funding to kind of pilot standardized way that cities could opt in into this new standard and I think we do need to see that play out a bit to get that buy-in. So much of this policy work is to get buy-in from people because if you don’t have a critical mass, you can’t get anything passed.

John Farrell:
This is a perfect segue then. I was curious, now that you’ve been in the legislature, I believe you would’ve worked on policy advocacy before, so you had known something about the policy process. I guess I’m just kind of curious for people who maybe are a little less familiar, do you have advice for them about, Hey, I think I have a great policy idea. How do I get that buy-in? What is it the legislator is looking for in terms of information, in terms of a sense of who cares about the issues? What do you screen for now in your role of having to try to make these decisions about what you want to support, what you think is in the public interest? What can people bring to you to make that process easier?

Katie Jones:
Yeah, I think it really depends on which legislator you’re talking to. Of course. Who has the biggest influencer sway, especially for the DFL party. Keep in mind we are the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and so what are the two key parts to that party is farmers and labor. And so I think it’s important one that any advocate is looking to build coalition because the bigger your group, the broader your group and the more that you’re taking into account what the DFL stands for, the more likely that one a policy will be listened to. Two, there will be lots of members of those various groups lobbying right now, the 67 DFLers that are currently in the House and we kind of need to hear from constituents and especially from those groups that are a core constituency of our party.

John Farrell:
I don’t have any other questions for you. Is there anything else that you were thinking of though coming to this little mini podcast that you were interested in talking about?

Katie Jones:
Yeah, the one other piece in terms of state solutions that I wanted to raise was looking nationwide, what are some of the innovations that are happening out there? And if you look at Michigan, they have a utility permission structure that is allowing for Ann Arbor to create this sustainable energy utility. It’s kind of a municipal utility kind of running in parallel to the existing IOU that has permission to operate there. And so that is a state structure, that’s a state law that enables that. And so I think that’s an opportunity for us to think about, again, we need to build buy-in and allowing for cities to try things out as it works for them is a way to, over time, iterate, practice things, get out the kinks, and then build buy-in for whatever this next new iteration of our energy system is going to be.

John Farrell:
Just out of curiosity, have you had people already approach you about state legislation in Minnesota doing the sustainable energy utility?

Katie Jones:
They have not.

John Farrell:
Alright, well, an opportunity awaits. Katie, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Katie Jones:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

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John Farrell:
Thanks for listening to one of my nine mini podcasts from the 2025 Gateway to Solar Conference with Minnesota representative Katie.
On the show page, look for links to ILSR’s Community Power Scorecard where we annually grade each state on its progress toward energy democracy on policies from utility accountability to community solar.

Even these mini versions of Local Energy Rules are produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. 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.