Town undergoes historic shift from coal to solar power — here’s what this could mean for the future of clean energy

A town in Minnesota, looking to take advantage of incentives offered in the Inflation Reduction Act, is replacing one of the nation’s largest coal plants with acres of solar panels, The New York Times reported.

Becker, a small town northwest of Minneapolis, is the first of the group of seven Minnesota municipal areas that are converting themselves from being the home of dirty energy plants to having economies based on clean energy — mainly, solar. The group is calling itself the Coalition of Utility Cities.

The change is being met with some skepticism, understandably, from Becker residents, many of whom have long relied on jobs in the dirty energy industry. Officials, however, are confident that the benefits will far outweigh the drawbacks.

“It’s a culture transition in addition to an infrastructure transition,” Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Times. “It may take a little while for people to understand the benefits. All of these things do take time.”

“We are the guinea pig for the whole group,” Tracy Bertram, the mayor of Becker, said. “People don’t like change. It’s the unknown: ‘What will my world look like?'”

In a broad sense, the benefits of solar energy over coal energy are very clear. Coal, a nonrenewable energy source, emits massive amounts of air pollution whenever it is burned. This air pollution can cause respiratory health problems for anyone in the vicinity and also contributes to the ongoing overheating of our planet that has already led to such issues as increased extreme weather events and the spread of vector-borne diseases.

Solar, on the other hand, emits no air pollution while drawing energy from the sun, a fully renewable resource. (While there is some amount of pollution produced during the manufacturing of solar panels, transportation of those panels, etc., it is far less than the amount produced by every stage of coal energy production.)

As jarring as it may feel for people who have relied on coal or other dirty energy plants for so long, coal is, by necessity, on the way out. Meanwhile, clean energy is offering these towns a way to keep their economies growing.

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