Written by George Crocker, Community Power board member          

Many cities and towns, including Minneapolis, have “Franchise Agreements” with power companies that allow them to use public roadways and other rights of way for their electric lines or gas pipes.  In exchange, these utilities collect a specified amount of money on the utility bill of consumers within the municipality and pass that money on to the municipality.  These contracts also specify who is responsible for various aspects of repair and maintenance of the infrastructure, and have typically been for 20-year periods.

          The Minneapolis Franchise Agreements with Xcel Energy (electricity) and CenterPoint Energy (natural gas) expired at the end of 2014.  Three years ago, leadership from the North American Water Office and an allied organization, Grand Aspirations, recognized that these expirations provided an opportunity for the City to create pathways for energy management in Minneapolis that was much cleaner and more local, efficient, affordable, equitable, renewable and reliable than the energy services being provided by Xcel Energy and CenterPoint under state regulation.  We followed the lead of forward-thinking people in Boulder, Colorado, also in the Xcel Energy service territory, and began a campaign called Minneapolis Energy Options (MEO) to explore strategies for reaching local economic and energy sustainability goals, up to and including a municipal electric utility in Minneapolis.

Comments/letters will be accepted until September 2, 2015.

NOW is the time to hold Xcel to its agreement to the Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership!

The SAMPLE LETTER to send in begins below:

In late May, the nation’s first clean energy partnership between a city and its utilities released its first two-year work plan. It holds true to the notion that the city and utilities can work across a broad swath of energy initiatives in pursuit of increasing energy efficiency and renewable energy. And with some solid metrics, it promises to be an excellent tool for accelerating toward a clean, local, and equitable energy system in Minneapolis.

For background, the Minneapolis city-utility partnership sprang out of grassroots demand for more local energy decision making and was ratified in a signing in October 2014. Late last fall, Community Power board president wrote about the potential for this partnership, raising three key questions:

Published May 26, 2015 as a City of Minneapolis Press Release

A new analysis of the energy use of 365 public and commercial buildings in Minneapolis reveals that these buildings have the combined potential to save $11 million on energy costs per year and avoid more than 62,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by increasing their energy efficiency to reduce consumption by 10 percent. The City of Minneapolis’ new report analyzed the 2013 energy use of 194 commercial and 171 public buildings that submitted data to the City as required by the building energy benchmarking and transparency ordinance (building owners had until June 2014 to submit data). The buildings in the report include 98 million square feet of floor space and account for more than 1.5 billion mmbtu (million British thermal units) of total energy use, which is approximately the equivalent use of 47,000 houses or all of the households in south Minneapolis.

At its May 29^th meeting, the Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership Board formally approved its work plan for the years 2015-2016. Click Here to read the official City press release. The Planning Team of the Partnership along with the Energy Vision Advisory Committee has put forth a lot of dedicated effort into coming up with the work plan. 

The goals of the partnership are to reduce Minneapolis Greenhouse Gas emissions by expanding Minneapolis utility customer’s access to and use of clean/ renewable energy and energy efficiency innovations. It is guided on the principle that the City of Minneapolis and both utilities can accomplish much more on climate and energy goals by collaborating with each other and taking advantage of each other’s complementary assets rather than the previous status quo where the city and both utilities worked in isolation from each other.