Talk about meeting a deadline early. This year, Minnesota Power will reach the state mandated-requirement of producing 25 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources. That’s 11 years early. With substantial investments in wind energy in recent years, the Duluth-based utility will reach that 2025 mandate by the end of 2014, Al Hodnik, Allete’s chairman, president and CEO, told nearly 900 people gathered for the company’s annual shareholders meeting last week at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center.
Minnesota Power, which provides electric service to 143,000 customers in a 26,000-square-mile area in northeastern Minnesota, is one of Allete’s utilities. Its investment in wind energy includes nearly $800 million in the growing Bison wind energy operation in North Dakota—the largest in that state—which Minnesota Power will own and operate.
“Investing in wind makes economic and environmental sense and reflects in real terms our commitment to answering the call to transform the nation’s energy supply,” Hodnik told the gathering, which included many Minnesota Power retirees who are shareholders.
Currently, Minnesota Power gets 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind and hydropower and 75 percent from coal and energy market purchases, according to Allan Rudeck Jr., Allete’s vice president of strategy and planning.
That will be boosted this summer when Minnesota Power’s Thomson Hydro Station resumes operation after two years of repairs and improvements, Hodnik also announced. The hydroelectric facility, 20 miles north of Duluth, had sustained major damage during flooding in June 2012. With the help of the hydro station, Minnesota Power expects to generate 26 percent of its electricity from renewables by year’s end, and the rest largely from coal, Rudeck said. The company plans to better that in the 2020s, by reaching an energy mix of one-third renewables.
