Rural Minnesota town will be 'guinea pig' for long-duration solar batteries. It's a big change for this community.

Becker, Minnesota, is covered with viny potato fields and endless rows of corn that go as far as the eye can see. But in this small community of 5,000 residents, solar panels by the thousands are about to be added, replacing three of the town's coal mines in a test of long-duration batteries, reports Ivan Penn of The New York Times. "Becker is also one of two sites where Xcel Energy is installing demonstration battery systems from Form Energy, a Massachusetts company. The systems — using readily available materials like water, air and iron — can store solar and wind-generated energy as a backup, with a capacity to power 2,000 homes for up to five days."

The Sherburne County Generating Station, known as Sherco, is a massive example of what Minnesotans are doing to meet the state's goal of "100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040," Penn writes. "And it tests how the energy transition could unfold on a nationwide scale for jobs at decades-old fossil fuel facilities, local tax revenues and agricultural businesses. . . . Sherco will stand as the largest solar farm in the Upper Midwest — replacing three coal units in Becker with three solar sites on the town’s outskirts along the Mississippi River."

The closing of the coal plants has been met with distrust and some past-employee grumblings. "Among skeptics of the energy transition, suspicion about solar runs as deep as the town’s cornfields are long. . . . Xcel [has] promises no layoffs," Penn reports. "'We are the guinea pig for the whole group,' said Tracy Bertram, the mayor of Becker, acknowledging the anxiety some have felt about the loss of an economic anchor. 'People don’t like change. It’s the unknown.'"

Despite the positives that Xcel's development offers, some Becker residents are sad to see coal go. Rob Miller, a journeyman who has worked at the Sherco [coal] plant for 20 years, told Penn, “There’s a lot of pride, blood, sweat that has gone in here. It’s sad to see it coming to an end.”