When the Minnesota Legislature passed and the Governor signed the 100% Clean Electricity Law in 2023, it did several things: 

1. It updated, renamed and tweaked the existing Renewable Energy Standard (RES) in place since 2007. That standard became the Eligible Energy Technologies standard: 55% of electricity should be obtained from eligible energy sources by 2035.
   
2. It also created an additional Carbon Free Standard for electricity production: 100% carbon free by 2040.

As part of this bill, hydroelectric was expanded to include large hydropower facilities (100 megawatts or more), but not new large hydropower facilities that would become operational after the date of the bill’s enactment (February 8, 2023). Previously only hydro projects smaller than 100 megawatts could count as renewable energy.

This change to the definition represents a battle between power companies that want to count hydro-electric power and the impacted Indigenous communities who want to protect their land and natural resources. (See this Energy News Network article from Frank Jossi). 

At the beginning of the legislative session in 2015, the Renewable Energy Standard did not allow any hydropower to count to the RES.  But Xcel Energy and Minnesota Power both purchased power from Manitoba Hydro and were lobbying to get it to count it in their renewable energy portfolio. A Manitoba tribe was opposed.

At that point, Manitoba Hydro already had 15 dams for which Indigenous people did not give consent,  and according to Darin Paupanakis, then secretary to the Pimicikamak Councils, “[they] have turned the environment upside down.” 

“They say hydro is green and renewable, but where I come from it’s gangrene and un-renewable – gangrene because it cuts off the life of the river and its tributaries, leaving them suffocated and destroyed,” he said. 

The new Keeyask project can hardly be called renewable because it involves pouring more than a million tons of concrete into the river to create the dam, he said. 

What resulted during the 2015 legislative session was a compromise: only small projects could count. 

But that compromise was compromised in 2023 when large hydro projects were allowed to count, as long as they weren’t new.

The point of this is to share that what was included in the then “Renewable Energy Standard,” and updated in what is now called the “Eligible Energy Technologies” standard was based on political maneuverings and again decided by the legislature in 2023.

In contrast, what meets the Carbon Free Standard should be based in science and include only those technologies that in fact generate electricity without emitting carbon dioxide.