Northeast Iowa’s Winneshiek Energy District Shows How Communities Can Capture Local Energy Dollars – Episode 35 of Local Energy Rules Podcast

And essentially where we’ve come to, we’ve only been around as an organization for about six years now, since we started 2009. And just in that time we have certainly seen, at least in the energy world, the conversation debate shift almost entirely from whether the future is renewables. A lot of people out there may think, Well, we’re still, you know, we’re never gonna get there. We’re never gonna get within the energy world. And certainly within our world, even in northeast Iowa, it’s a done deal. The future of energy is renewable energy. The main questions that remain are how fast will we get there and will it be fast enough? Especially on the climate side and who will own it because the utilities are woken up again really quickly in the last few years. A few of ’em were aware of this a while back, but most of them have been a little bit slow to the table.

And they’re realizing that their customers and their communities and local places everywhere are realizing that they would like to take some ownership of this opportunity, of this resource, of this need. And so with, especially with distributed solar technology, that’s now an option. It’s an economical option for customers and communities and the dollars and cents are huge. So, you know, in terms of why it matters, that energy, our energy world, especially the electrical grid, is gonna transform almost entirely probably in the next generation, a couple decades, two, three decades, for what it’s been for the last century. And in that transition, communities and customers have a tremendous economic opportunity to own much of those assets and resources and keep dollars local and just one little example are here, small rural county and northeast Iowa Winneshiek probably we spend about a hundred million dollars a year on energy.

Nobody knows exactly cuz we can’t get the numbers, but that’s a lot of money and most of it leaves right out the power and gas lines and right out the fertilizer purchases. So, you know, to the degree those dollars can be kept local in recirculating a local economy, that’s one of the biggest pieces of the local economy. And it may be the biggest piece in terms of opportunities for local economic churn and development. So at the same time as we’re all working for a healthier world in a better and a better climate, we’re also working for local economies.

And it’s not easy. There’s good reasons why people don’t do it. Traditionally, it’s been done, it’s been understood of energy auditing. Many people have had an energy audit, most unfortunately that have had an energy audit, haven’t actually implemented any major changes from it. It’s just the way the industry is has evolved over the years. So what we try to do is a, is a much broader level of energy analysis and typical audit. We try to include the efficiency and renewables opportunities. We look carefully at the economics and then we try and help people make those changes. And we’ve done this with hundreds of homes and businesses and now farms increasingly here in northeast Iowa. And to conversion rates of, you know, 50 to 95% in terms of projects that actually get done. So that work is a little bit costly and it’s a little bit intense. But we’re seeing really great results there. So of course the other side of what we do is a lot of the engagement, outreach, education, engagement, awareness and working directly on projects with partners like local governments, helping folks understand, hey, y’all could build a solar array. Here’s how it works, here’s how third party ownership works. Here are how all the incentives work and essentially being the catalyst that drives change at the local level.

We really, I actually see a couple, a real divergence potentially of the utility business models, however, because on the one hand you have the investor-owned utilities and their goal is to generate profits for investors. If by almost definition those profits come out of the local communities, and that’s what we’re trying to keep in the local communities. On the other hand, we have the co-op and municipal utilities, which are by definition existing for the good of their customer owners, which is local. So it’s the city or it’s the rural residents that own rural electric co-op. And those organizations are there to only for the good of their communities and their customers to provide the energy needed. And so, you know, though they’ve all seen themselves and in most cases are still seeing themselves as one industry and speaking with one voice and lobbying and politically, I think that’s starting to change because the co-ops, the customer-owned utilities are seeing the demands and responding to the demands of their members and their local governments and their communities. And the investor own utilities are essentially still a little bit between a rock and a hard place saying, Well, yes, we would like to work with communities and we would like to respond to customers, but that potentially takes a hit to our bottom line. So there’s some real challenges there.

We’re in the middle of negotiations as well saying, well, okay, essentially if large scale community solar isn’t an option, which is in most states is essentially a state policy step that needs to be taken like in Minnesota. Okay, Instead of a community solar project, open to all of your customers locally. Let’s talk with the local, large, local public entities because they represent the rest of us. The local government, the city, the county or local hospital, community college with the arts college are all involved in a collaborative. We’ve been working on here essentially saying, Alliant, let’s build a big, big solar array, relatively big as in megawatts kilowatts, somewhere where it fits your grid and where it’s not in the middle of town. And essentially let your largest local customers build and own pieces of that and credit their bill just as if they would if they built arrays on their rooftops, which they could do now in some places.

But that would essentially provide potential real benefits to the grid in large amounts of solar being out here in Alliant’s distribution grid where the peak power has some match and, and some real value in the frequency and voltage regulation. And it would also allow the local governments to make those fiduciary investments that are good for their citizens and their customers. Well, that hasn’t gone anywhere yet either. So you can try, you can try to talk to utility. Another route that you have is to try to talk to your regulators, which we’re also doing here in Iowa. We’re pretty active in the Iowa Utilities board cases as well as talking to policy makers. Because so much of this utility world is regulated at the state level, the federal, there’s a fair amount of federal impact, but the state regulators make the rules in most cases for their utilities.

So you talk to your state utility regulator, you talk to your policy makers and see if you can’t work on that community solar and net metering and other policies. The other, another thing you can do, which is maybe a little bit more extreme, but certainly it’s been done in Iowa by more communities than just by anywhere in the country on a per capita basis, is pursue the municipalization option. Because again, those utilities that are owned and serve, serve only their own customers locally, municipal utilities and co-ops. They’re gonna eventually, sooner or later be working in the best interest of their customers and, and moving towards a hundred percent renewables probably faster than the rest of the utility model. So Decorah, our county seat town here just passed, Tuesday, two days ago on election day, the beginnings of a fiber broadband utility with 93% of the vote, 93% voted in favor of creating a broadband utility here in Decorah and 7% voted apparently not to. That’s a pretty powerful statement of localism, of local needs, meeting local desires and local action to meet those needs. So on the energy side and electrical side, well, the same thing can happen and hopefully the utilities will end rapidly change, the energy world will increasingly and more and more rapidly work with their customers. But if not, we have to do what we can for our communities.

Of course it takes energy to build that organization here in Decorah. We’re pretty confident we have more solar per capita than any other town in Iowa now and possibly any other town in the Midwest. It’s really rolling along. And again, it’s not easy to build those organizations to try something new that’s not just a subset of, say, a city government or a county government or something else, but it pays dividends. And part of what we’re really excited about now is that we’re talking with neighboring counties and startup groups nearby and far away about starting an energy district and a network of energy districts. And we think that’ll really create increasing movement awareness, power and everything else. So we’ll share resources, which to share some services, but everyone needs that local mouthpiece and catalyst for change.