Gary DeVaan: Hopkins

“We’ve always been advocates for renewable energy, and looked at putting solar panels on our house. But our neighbor has this giant black walnut tree that shades our roof.

So what other option is there to be involved in renewable energy?

After the community solar bill passed the state legislature, I saw advertisements from different companies.

Here’s how it works. Somebody builds a community solar project of let’s say an acre, and they sell subscriptions to that. So you are essentially using 10 of those solar panels in that acre solar array. The electricity that’s generated by those 10 panels, you get a credit for, which is directly applied to your utility bill. 

I turned down one company, but eventually went with Cooperate Energy Futures. 

This is a great program that saves citizens money. This helps us stay within our budget… Every little bit helps.

I think it saves tax money too because the utilities don’t have to build as much infrastructure to provide electricity for every Minnesotan.

Most people would like to have renewable energy and just can’t. Before community solar, if you didn’t own your own roof, there wasn’t much you could do…

And now they want to sunset Minnesota’s community solar program, eliminate the LMI program, and make it nearly impossible to build new solar gardens.

And it’s just politicians bending to utilities. They want to own all the generation.

After the IRA and the infrastructure bill passed, I thought, there’s so much money now for renewable energy and for green technology, we should be claiming all of it and start getting this stuff done right away, because we really need to get on the stick here and get this done.

If we want to be able to look our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, in the eyes someday… this matters.”

Gary DeVaan

Hopkins, Minnesota