From a company news release issued yesterday, Xcel Energy to build Upper Midwest’s largest battery storage site:600 megawatts at Sherco Energy Hub among a series of planned battery, solar projects…
Yesterday, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission gave Xcel Energy approval to run the Prairie Island nuclear plant through the early 2050s. It’s the right move, but state law currently prohibits…
Minnesota Power is hosting several open houses this week where the public can learn more about its proposed 63-mile transmission line. The proposed transmission line would span 63 miles and…
Gov. Walz’s desperate push for the Vice Presidential slot on the Democratic party ticket this November has invited a number of appraisals of his record. The Big Picture The Minnesota…
Professors at two North Dakota institutions of higher education dodged a bullet last year when lawmakers fell just short of passing legislation to reduce protections for tenured faculty. At the…
The modern coach-style tour bus parked in front of a south metro suburban hotel gave little hint as to the epic journey it had just completed. The blue and white…
On Christmas Eve, 2022, millions of American families experienced rolling blackouts as frigid temperatures brought by Winter Storm Elliot caused fuel supply problems for natural gas power plants throughout the…
Great River Energy (GRE), which provides electricity to many of Minnesota’s Rural Electric Co-ops, is attempting to upgrade its 170 megawatt (MW) natural gas peaking plant in Cambridge, Minnesota, so…
It has been two months since the frigid temperatures that accompanied Winter Storm Elliott caused rolling blackouts in several Southern states. Luckily, the portions of southern states that rely on…
American Experiment’s annual award highlights the state’s wasteful spending of taxpayers’ money.
Last week, in a report on low unemployment rates in Upper Midwestern cities, the Star Tribune noted that: The entire state of Minnesota came in at a 2.1% unemployment rate for…
The Star Tribune reported last week that Mankato “has the lowest unemployment rate forany metro in U.S.” So it does, as Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. The Star Tribune…
On Monday and Tuesday this week, I wrote about how the number of people employed in Minnesota has been falling since June. This is bad news. As I noted in…
To protect everyone from the COVID virus, Minnesota state government shut down all the bars, restaurants and theaters, putting already starving artists out of work. But have no fear: the…
Minnesota sits at an energy crossroads. Since enacting the Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA) in 2007, which required that 25percent of the state’s electricity come from wind and solar power…
Rolling blackouts may hit Minnesota this summer because electric companies have closed down too many reliable power plants — think coal, nuclear and natural gas — on the regional electric grid and…
Rolling blackouts may be coming to the Upper Midwest—including Iowa— this summer, according to an analysis from the North American Reliability Council (NERC), a nonprofit international regulatory authority whose mission…
The regional electric grid, the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), recently announced that there is not enough reliable power plant capacity on its system to meet its anticipated peak demand…
In data released for October, Nebraska records the nation’s lowest unemployment rate, at 1.9 percent. Last week, unemployment figures also were released for the state of Minnesota, showing an unemployment…
The cost of everything is going through the roof, and the cost of staying warm this winter is no exception. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that families in the…
Minnesota didn’t raise taxes. But why not lower them?
Coming out of the pandemic, one of the biggest questions in policy research has been whether COVID-19 restrictions hurt or helped our state. One way that this question has been…
For decades, Becker, a little town in Central Minnesota, has been a powerhouse for the electric grid in the Upper Midwest because it is home to the Sherburne County (Sherco)…
In a recent interview with S&P Global, Bob Frenzel, Xcel Energy’s President and COO outlined the company’s vision for the next nine years and it is clear that the government-approved…