First, Minnesota residents want Enbridge to remove its old pipeline. Enbridge says it is better to keep it in place. (This would all be contingent on the replacement of the pipeline.)

From MPR:

…a growing chorus of landowners and tribal groups is calling for Enbridge to remove the old pipeline if the new one gets the OK. They’re concerned about potential pollution from the old pipe, that it could become buoyant and pop out of the ground or that it could potentially act as a water conduit underground.

“When you’re done with something, clean it up. It’s that simple,” said Richard Shustarich, 77, who lives along the current Line 3 route just outside Grand Rapids, Minn….

[Shustarich] had no problem signing an easement to give Enbridge permission to add another line in 2010. He said they’re a safer way to transport oil than trains.

“I figured that was a smart way to do it,” he said. “But I hadn’t thought that Enbridge would disrespect the people who allowed them to go on their property, you know, for a few thousand bucks.”

This parallels the concern many have about copper sulfide mining to the east of this area in Minnesota. Mining companies, petroleum companies, energy and mining companies in generally, typically talk the talk before they build a project, but later on, fail to walk the walk, leaving the environment, communities, everything and every one, in the lurch.

Enbridge has an argument that we are better off leaving it in place because removing it could be tricky, there are so many pipes in the ground, crossing each other, in this area. Clearly, the state should have gotten assurances when the line was put in, in the form of a removal fund, originally.

Meanwhile, in the Southwestern part of the state,

“Basically, they’re paying me to let the wind blow,” [Minnesota farm owner Conrad] Schardin [said].

Today, Schardin is … reaping the benefits of wind turbines on his land and on the surrounding farms. But just like other Minnesota farmers, he still grows corn and soybeans. The wind turbines, Schardin recently told the Independent, is just one of his “revenue streams.” But the turbines also play well with his philosophy when it comes to farming.

“Mother Nature, she always wins. You can’t fight her. I have always said that,” Schardin said. And when it comes to wind in southwest Minnesota, there’s no sense in fighting it. So Schardin decided to work with the wind.

…

“A group of farmers and businessmen — we started Community Wind North. There is a group of seven of us and we put up a 30 megawatt wind project up in Verdi Township. I’m on the Verdi Township board and we put up 12 turbines up in Verdi Township here,” Schardin said.

Schardin said the 30 mega watt wind turbine project cost about $58 million to put up. He said Community Wind North received financial help from an equity partner.

“We got three turbines on land we own,” he said. “We leased the land from other local farmers. We started out with 150 investors and we lost some over deaths over the years. It’s been a good project for the investors and you know they got a good return on their investment. So far it’s been a good deal. It was a risky thing to do.”

Schardin said Community Wind North is now working with its third partner.
…

“It seems like the people who are against it either don’t have one, or have a turbine close to them and not getting the benefits of it. I know Sioux Falls, Lincoln County and South Dakota, they fought it, and they had a lot of false information.”

It is an interesting story, go read the rest here.

Here is an example.

This is Solar power across the US (a screen grab of part of the graphic):

Here is Nuclear across the US, and I’ve chosen a different background map:

Here is Minnesota, all tyhpes of energy with a greyscale map. The graphic on the left is on all of the views, I just didn’t include it on the screen grabs above.

Minnesota is cool. Look at all that wind. I wonder what West Virginia is up to?

Bad West Virginia!

Go check it out!

Here’s the elevator speech version: Minnesota residents get around five thousand dollars cash (over several years), monetary incentives to upgrade all their energy using devices from furnaces to cars, some 80,000 new, high paying jobs, and in the end, the state is essentially fossil fuel free.

About half of that fossil fuel free goal comes directly from

the plan itself, the other half from the economy and markets passing various tipping points that this plan will hasten. The time scale for the plan is roughly 10 years, but giving the plan a careful reading I suspect some goals will be reached much more quickly. This means that once the plan takes off, Minnesotans will have an incentive to hold their elected officials accountable for holding the course for at least a decade.

The central theme of the plan is to use a revenue-neutral carbon price, which is widely seen by experts as the best approach for cleaning up our energy supply. The simple version of the carbon price works like this: Releasing carbon is saddled with a cost, way up (or early) in the supply chain. So you don’t pay a gas tax or any kind of energy tax, but somewhere up the line the big players are being charged for producing energy reliant on the release of fossil carbon. They, of course, have the option of producing electricity from wind and solar.

The campaign notes, “Rebecca’s Minnesota-Powered Plan doesn’t raise taxes a single penny. It levies a carbon price on fossil fuel companies, and pays 100% of the revenue back to Minnesota residents, so we can take charge of our own energy.”

That money is then distributed to any citizen who wants it (of course they will all want it), evenly, across the board. So, in theory, your cost of living is a little higher if dirty energy producers are in your own personal supply chain, but lower if they are not, and in any event, you are paid off to not care. The point is, if you personally eschew fossil carbon releasing products or energy sources, you get the payoff and someone else is paying for it. That would apply to both individuals and companies, because companies can often make those choices. For example, a school bus company would be more likely to replace an old dirty bus with an electric bus rather than a propane bus. (Just yesterday, an electric bus set a record, going over 1,000 miles on a single charge! Electricity is some pretty powerful magic.)

The Otto plan has a twist. While 75% of the carbon price is distributed evenly and directly to all citizens, 25% is distributed as refundable tax credits intended to cover 30% of the cost of clean energy improvements that use Minnesota companies. This may include solar panels, heat pumps for heating and cooling, insulation, new lighting, etc. New or used electric cars count. So it all goes back to the people, but some of it is directed to support the energy transition for individuals and families.

(A “refundable credit” is a tax credit that you still get even if you did not pay enough taxes to use it, so people of any income will be able to access the clean energy benefits.)

The conservatively estimated potential cash gain for a typical Minnesota family is laid out in this table from the Otto campaign:

That is for one year. As the plan matures, a decade down the line, we can assume the carbon price component will diminish, but the household payback for being off fossil fuels will increase, and, guess what? The plant gets to live and your children don’t have to live in as much of a dystopian future!

The clean energy technologies that will need to be deployed mostly already exist, and most of them can be processed and supplied right here in Minnesota. Indeed installing PV panels and car chargers, or efficient heat pump based furnaces, etc. is the kind of job that can not be outsourced to some other country, because your house is here so the work gets done here! It is estimated that some 80,000 long term high paying jobs will be generated from this infrastructure redo. That will in turn increase revenues to the state and quite likely, will spell surpluses, some of which are likely to be tax rebates or other sorts of payoffs to the citizens of the state.

A quick word about the Coal-Car Myth. Some will read about this plan and say, “yeah, but … if I drive an electric car and stuff, that electricity is even worser because it is made with dirty coal and stuff.” (Yes, I make the Coal-Car Mythers sound a bit dull because, at this point, you’d have to be a bit dull to still be thinking this). First, know this: There are circumstances under which burning coal to make electricity to charge a car will be more efficient than running a gasoline car. To conceptualize this, imagine two engineering teams in a competition. One is to make an energy plant using coal, the other is to use an energy plant using only 6 cylinder Ford motors. The winner builds the plant that is more efficient. The team using the thousands of internal combustion engines will lose. Second, know this: It is simply not the case that all of our electricity comes from coal, and every week there is less and less of it coming from coal. Electric cars have the promise, by the way, of outlasting internal combustion cars on average. So, over perhaps half the lifespan of a given electric car, what might have been a tiny increase in efficiency for a small number of electric cars (the rest start out way more than tiny) will become a great efficiency. It is time to switch to electric cars in Minnesota.

You can expect opposition to this plan from the likes of the Koch brothers, who are currently spending just shy of a billion dollars a year, that we know of, to keep fossil fuel systems on line and stop the clean energy transition. I asked Rebecca Otto what she expected in terms of push back. She told me, “Investing in clean energy means investing in our communities and taking charge of our own energy, instead of subsidizing big oil. Hence, big oil will be the stumbling block, as this will affect their bottom line over time.”

I asked Rebecca why this is something that needs to be handled by the states, rather than at the national level. She told me, “The crippling dysfunction in Washington is persistent and we need to act now. Oil companies are spending billions of dollars to rig the system against clean energy solutions. We need to break their stranglehold on our democracy and put people, not oil companies back in charge.”

She also noted that “we also have a moral imperative to do something and the federal government has become paralyzed by big oil propaganda and political spending. The states could become laboratories to begin to tackle climate change. And whoever does is going to reap the economic benefits from the job creation. These jobs pay 42% higher than the state’s average wage.”

Economists say the carbon price is the best way to make the energy transition happen. Regular Minnesotans benefit the most, the Minnesota economy benefits, and the environment benefits. This is a good plan. I endorse it.

This plan, which you should read all about here, has also been endorsed by the famous and widely respected meteorologist Paul Douglas, by Bill McKibben of 350.org, St Thomas scientist and energy expert John Abraham, and by climate scientist Michael Mann.

I’ve got more to say about this plan and related topics, so stay tuned.

Here’s a video of Rebecca Otto discussing energy from the roof of her solar paneled home, with her windmill generating electricity in the background. Apparently, she walks the walk!

Another post on the plan:

Powering Minnesota to prosperity through energy leadership
_________________________________________

*You may have seen recent research suggesting that we have more time than previously estimated to get our duck in a row with clean energy. That research was misrepresented in the press. A statement made by one of the authors clarifies: “..to likely meet the Paris goal, emission reductions would need to begin immediately and reach zero in less than 40 years’ time.”

There is absolutely no logic to this policy, but it is in fact the policy. The reason for it is generally thought to be that the big rich corporations and individuals that control coal and petroleum resources, and that are fully engaged in delivery of those energy sources (and other materials, such as plastic bags made of petroleum) pay off the politicians to support their businesses. And that is true, they do this. But that does not explain why regular voters or grassroots “populist” supporters go along with it. Every other thing about how such folks think and act should turn them away from the big corporate donors. These grass-rooted populs should be putting up their own energy generators and cutting themselves off from the grid, telling Big Electricity to tread no more upon them. But they don’t do this. Rather, they go along with the Republican plan to repress the development of renewable independent energy production, which I like to refer to as the making of Freedom Volts, and this is entirely inexplicable.

In the broader context it makes sense, in the context in which the populs vote for the faux populist against their own interests. Voting for coal and against solar is voting against one’s own interests, by and large, even if you are a coal miner. But then, while we have explained the bone-headed approach to energy that most Republican voters embrace we’ve only explained one illogical process by saying that it looks and feels like a larger illogical process.

The reason the leaders and politicians that run the Republican party vote against the planet and in favor of the Koch Brothers is because the Koch Brothers and their ilk own them.

But, the reason the people who support those politicians, against their own interest, act like they do, is a matter of punching hippies. Some call it identity politics. That’s a fancy term, “identity politics.” Translation: “hippie punching.”

But recently, it seems like there is a move to stop punching the hippies quite so much. Consider the following quote, from a recent piece in Bloomberg News:

“Seventy five percent of Trump supporters like renewables and want to advance renewables. The conversation has changed. You have to have the right message. Talk about energy freedom and choice. The light bulb will go off.”

Those words were uttered by Tea Party organizer Debbie Dooley at a recent energy finance conference.

Indeed, we are seeing a pro-energy transition shift among the right wing generally. It is not at all clear that the current Republican White House, assuming they ever manage to do something that isn’t based on a night time drunken tweet storm by the leader of the free world, will go in one direction or the other on energy, climate change generally, or Paris in particular. Subsidies for renewable energy may be left alone. Promises to renew coal have already been broken. Paris may be kept intact.

(Make no mistake: Big oil owns the state department, science is fully under attack and research will be curtailed. These things are very real and very bad. But at the same time, there is strong evidence of waffling on just how much the Trump White House well end up hating on clean energy in the private sector.)

Congress is less uncertain. The Republicans in Congress are bigly owned by Big Energy and they will not change their stance at all. Or, more exactly, the only way the hoax huxters in the House and Senate are going to drop their love affair with coal and oil is if they are replaced.

I would predict a fight between Congress and the White House over this, but there won’t be. The Congress owns the White House and will own the White House until actual arrests are made. (Never wonder again why both the House and Senate investigations of the White House are stalled.) So there won’t be any real fighting, just a lot of counter productive and destructive confusion.

But long term, the hippie punching is becoming a thing of the past, with respect to energy.

Don’t worry, though, there are still plenty of reasons to punch the hippies. No one on the right wing need be worried that their favorite past time is going anywhere any time soon.

I’m not going to explicitly disagree with the various elements of the solutions part of this article (the last parts). But the run-up to that discussion, in my opinion, reifies and supports a number of falsehoods, mainly the dramatic (and untrue) dichotomy between the perfect and wonderful large-plant mostly coal and petroleum sources of energy on one hand with alternatives fraught with All The Problems on the other. Since this VOX piece is a “beginner’s guide” I would hope we can stick a little more nuance into beginner’s thinking.

I choose to Fisk. Thusly:

“Doing that — using electricity to get around, heat our buildings, and run our factories — will increase demand for power. “

It decreases the demand for power, overall. Internal combustion engines are inefficient compared to electric, to such a degree that burning huge amounts of petroleum or coal in one place to ultimately power electric vehicles in a reasonable size region is more efficient than distributing burnable material to all those vehicles to run them. Electrification is inherently more efficient and lower maintenance.

“That means the electricity grid will have to get bigger,”

Our grid, in the US and generally, in the west, is fully embiggened. Globally, maybe. That depends on if a “big grid” is the best way to deliver power everywhere. It probably isn’t.

[The grid must become] “more sophisticated, more efficient, and more reliable — while it is decarbonizing. ”

This contrasts the improvement of the grid with decarbonizing as though they were opposites, but for most of the expected improvements of the grid, improvements of the grid and decarbonizing are the same actions. They are not in opposition to each other.

“On the other side are those who say that the primary goal should be zero carbon, not 100 percent renewables. They say that, in addition to wind, solar, and the rest of the technologies beloved by climate hawks, we’re also going to need a substantial amount of nuclear power and fossil fuel power with CCS.”

This is a false dichotomy in my opinion. There is uncertainty here, of course. But let’s try this. Let’s try decarbonizing 50% of our current power without nuclear. At that point we will know whether or not to invest trillions into an unpopular solution (and nuclear is unpopular). If we need to, we’ll do it. If we don’t, we won’t. Maybe something in between. But worrying about this now, and using uncertainty to argue one way or another, is a waste of conversational energy.

“(If you shrug and say, “it’s too early to know,” you’re correct, but you’re no fun to dispute with.)”

LOL. But no. Rather, I’m thinking that it is too early to know and, in contrast, you are hiding a pro-nuclear argument in a blanket of uncertainty! Maybe you are not, but this is what such arguments almost always look like. Beware the nuclear argument wearing sheep’s clothing. A greenish tinged sheep, yes, but still a sheep.

“The sun is not always shining; the wind is not always blowing.”

Another falsehood. Technically the sun is not always shining on us, true, but as sure as the Earth is spinning, the wind is always blowing. People who say this have never been to the Dakotas.

It does vary in intensity and by region. So does nuclear, by the way. Nuclear plants have to be shut down or slowed down regularly for refueling. When severe storms threaten, nuclear plants are often shut down, and that is not on a schedule. When any big power plant suffers a catastrophe there is a long term and catastrophic break in the grid, as compared to a cloudy day, or even, a broken windmill.

The sun is up during the day, and in may places and for many times, generally everywhere, the demand for power is greater during the day.

Overall, this is a falsehood because it attributes perfection to the traditional sources, especially to Nuclear, and great imperfection to the non-Carbon and non-Nuclear alternatives. That distinction is not nearly as clear and complete as generally stated.

“The fact that they are variable means that they are not dispatchable — the folks operating the power grid cannot turn them on and off as needed.”

Another falsehood. First, you can’t turn a major traditional power plant on or off as needed. Indeed, there are already major storage technologies and variation methodologies at work. There are high demand industries that are asked to increase or decrease their use, on the fly, to meet production variation on large grids. There are pumped storage systems. Etc. The fact is that there is variation and unpredictability in the current big-plant system, it is a problem, and it is a problem that has been quietly addressed. Quietly to the extent that people making comparisons between traditional big-plant electricity and clean energy systems often don’t even know about it.

“As VRE capacity increases, grid operators increasingly have to deal with large spikes in power (say, on a sunny, windy day), sometimes well above 100 percent of demand. “

Yes indeed, and this is the challenge being addressed as we speak. Enlarging grid balancing systems, increasing storage, developing tunable high energy industries, and so on. This is the challenge, it is being met as we speak.

“They also have to deal with large dips in VRE. It happens every day when the sun sets, but variations in VRE supply can also take place over weekly, monthly, seasonal, and even decadal time frames.”

Yes indeed, and this is the challenge being addressed as we speak. Enlarging grid balancing systems, increasing storage, developing tunable high energy industries, and so on. This is the challenge, it is being met as we speak.

“And finally, grid operators have to deal with rapid ramps, i.e., VRE going from producing almost no energy to producing a ton, or vice versa, over a short period of time. That requires rapid, flexible short-term resources that can ramp up or down in response.”

Yes indeed, and this is the challenge being addressed as we speak. Enlarging grid balancing systems, increasing storage, developing tunable high energy industries, and so on. This is the challenge, it is being met as we speak.

The article mentions the economic problems. I don’t see those as difficult to solve but they are important, but I’ve got no comments on that at the moment. Read the article.

“The last 10 to 20 percent of decarbonization is the hardest”

Absolutely. And, know what? The first 25% will be the easiest. Do that now, and we’ll know a LOT more about the next 25% and maybe it won’t seem so hard after all. Maybe a major technological solution will come along before we get to that last 10%, maybe society will change enough that people will simply agree to having occasional reductions in energy availability. But certainly, the greatest difficulty and uncertainty is linked to that last 10%.

Our goal should be to have that problem soon.

“A great deal can be accomplished just by substituting natural gas combined cycle power plants for coal plants.”

Yes, if by “a great deal” you mean the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Before extolling the virtues of methane, do check into it further. I once thought methane as a bridge was a good idea too, until I learned about what it involves, about leaking methane, etc. No, not really a good idea for the most part.

“Natural gas is cleaner than coal (by roughly half, depending on how you measure methane leakage), but it’s still a fossil fuel.”

My impression is that every time we learn something new about leakage, it is that the leakage is worse than we previously thought.

“If you build out a bunch of natural gas plants to get to 60 percent, then you’re stuck shutting them down to get past 60 percent.”

Well put.

Do read the article, but please, keep in mind that it is unfair (in the context of an argument) to attribute undue perfection to one option while emphasizing uncertain problems with the other. We need to forge ahead into that uncertainty and speed up this whole process. Everybody get to work on this please!

Here’s the abstract from the paper describing this work:

To realize the sustainable energy supply in a smart city, it is essential to maximize energy scavenging from the city environments for achieving the self-powered functions of some intelligent devices and sensors. Although the solar energy can be well harvested by using existing technologies, the large amounts of wasted wind energy in the city cannot be effectively utilized since conventional wind turbine generators can only be installed in remote areas due to their large volumes and safety issues. Here, we rationally design a hybridized nanogenerator, including a solar cell (SC) and a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), that can individually/simultaneously scavenge solar and wind energies, which can be extensively installed on the roofs of the city buildings. Under the same device area of about 120 mm × 22 mm, the SC can deliver a largest output power of about 8 mW, while the output power of the TENG can be up to 26 mW. Impedance matching between the SC and TENG has been achieved by using a transformer to decrease the impedance of the TENG. The hybridized nanogenerator has a larger output current and a better charging performance than that of the individual SC or TENG. This research presents a feasible approach to maximize solar and wind energies scavenging from the city environments with the aim to realize some self-powered functions in smart city.

The paper is “Efficient Scavenging of Solar and Wind Energies in a Smart City” by Wang, Wang, Wang and Yang. You can see the abstract and download a PDF file here.

Renewable Energy Systems Americas Inc., better known as RES Americas, said Tuesday it will build two of the largest commercial-sized energy storage projects in North America.

RES, a wind farm developer based in Broomfield, Colorado, said the two projects will be built outside of Chicago, and once completed in 2015, will be capable of storing a total of 19.8 megawatts of power to support the local Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) electricity grid.

These batteries will be on line, or should I say, inserted into the back of Chicago behind a giant plastic plate held in by a huge screw (I assume). by August 2015, and they will operate for ten years.

Details here.

Meanwhile, Ford is also installing wind turbines at four US dealerships. This is a wind sail type turbine, which is fairly efficient and should be relatively bird friendly. Each installation will be accompanied by a 7 kW solar array. Each system will produce 20,000 kW of electricity each year, offsetting 14 tons of GHG annually per installation. The electricity will be used to provide electricity to the dealerships and power a few plug-in chargers for cars.

An American company, Altaeros Energies, recently launched a prototype helium-shelled wind turbine that can be used at high altitudes. While the test run took place at 350ft above ground, the ultimate goal is a height of 1,000ft. Tethers send the converted power back to the ground. Compared with traditional wind turbines, the prototype garners twice as much energy, as wind is stronger at higher altitudes.

Sources: Green Tech Media, Smart Planet

I’m speaking specifically of the reliability of, or variation in, wind over time. Many people live in places where they personally experience highly variable wind, or at least, think they do, so it is easy to assume that wind generators would be sometimes running on full, sometimes standing still, in a more or less random and unpredictable way, but this is not necessarily true. There are regions where wind is much more consistent than people might imagine, though of course it is always somewhat variable. In fact, a bigger problem with wind may be not so much the variation, but the fact that in some regions it is out of sync with energy demands. In some temperate zones, wind may be weak during the day but stronger at night when electricity demands are low (but this can vary from region to region, and seasonally; there are places where winds tend to come up during the day and calm down at night)

The thing is, we often hear about how wind varies and thus wind can’t make up more than a certain percentage of our energy production. But this statement, while probably partly true until much better batteries are invented, ignores two things: 1) other forms of electricity generation also vary; and 2) we may have to live, in the future, with variable amounts of electricity. Oh, and 3) we can probably fix this all with a DC smart grid, but I’ll leave that for another time.

Regarding this first point, let’s compare wind to nuclear. A nuclear power plant like the one nearest me gets turned off now and then to replace fuel rods. This is not too often, and in theory this is done on a highly predictable schedule, but it is still a large amount of variation. That power plant, I assume, at best goes from normal high capacity to zero capacity for a while then back to high capacity. While wind may vary unpredictably, investing the cost of one smallish nuclear power plant in one small nuke plant vs. dozens of wind farms distributed across a very large area of the Dakotas and Minnesota will get you less difference in variation over time than one might expect.

As I noted, this variation in generation by a nuclear power plant is very predictable, so it doesn’t really count as variation. Variation you know is going to happen can be planned for. Predictability is the problem. But, that happens too with nuclear power plants. Whenever there is a tornado warning at the aforementioned plant, it gets powered down. That is not predictable. All sorts of other things happen at nuke plants that cause them to be powered down to some extent as well.

The point here is simple: When considering alternative forms of energy generation, it is not fair to say “wind is unpredictable and variable” and leave it at that, because it is not the case that all other forms of energy are perfectly “predictable and non-variable.”

I won’t say much about the second point, but it is obviously true. You can’t rely on being able to do whatever you want whenever you want it with whatever technology you want if we live in a world where doing these three things is causing us to lumber steadily towards self-inflicted Armageddon. Technology is not going to fix everything. We will have to make some adjustments. Please expect that and start growing accustomed to the idea now.

There is another form of variability that I want to mention: Catastrophic failure. If you build a whole bunch of wind farms across the Dakotas and Minnesota and spend the same amount on a small nuke plant somewhere in that region, catastrophic failure will have different patterns. Really bad storms, a rare earthquake, or terrorism (Canadians sneaking over the border and blowing up our stuff, presumably) will not take out all, or even most, of the wind farms, but a total “melt down” figuratively or literally, of the nuke plant will put the long term kibosh on that method of making electricity.

It is very difficult or even impossible to figure in the likelihood of catastrophic failure of any of these systems, but we can compare the form of such failure, and the worst case scenario for hundreds of wind generators distributed over three states is very different than the worst case scenario for a single nuclear power plant.

A few facts that might help frame this discussion in proper scale:

The annual generation of power at the aforementioned nuclear power plant is said to be 4,192 GWh. The plant is rated at 610 MW. That is the smaller of two plants in Minnesota, the other with an annual generation of 8,914 GWh (two 548 MW reactors).

A wind turbine may have a capacity anywhere from about 1.5 MW to over 7 MW (the latter are very rare) with the largest in design but not yet built closer to 10. Realistically, it would take about 600 to 1000 wind generators to equal this nuclear power plant. In Minnesota, the total wind energy capacity is about 2196 MW with about 10% more being constructed. This translates into 657 GWh annually, compared to 13,106 GWh annually for nuclear. The current plan in Minnesota is to more than triple wind capacity by 2021.

All the above numbers are based on capacities and estimates that may not fully add up. Another way of making the comparison is to look at recent estimates of the total percentage of energy generated by various sources statewide. At present, about 57% of our energy is from coal, 23% from nuclear, 9.4% from wind, 4.8% from natural gas and the remaining few percent from other sources. That nearly a fourth of our energy is produced by three nuclear reactors at two plants is both impressive (that’s a lot of electricity!) and somewhat concerning (that’s a lot of pressure to keep the plants working, and a big problem if one breaks).

Sources: Minnesota Energy Facts, and Wikipedia.