This huge Minnesota solar farm is about to get super-sized

Minnesota’s largest utility, Xcel Energy, is expanding its Sherco Solar project in the state, and that’s going to make it one of the US’s largest solar farms.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved adding a 250-megawatt (MW) array to the 460 MW solar farm currently being built. The 710 MW project, which is expected to come online at the end of 2025, will become the largest solar farm in the Upper Midwest.

Once online, Sherco Solar is expected to generate enough electricity to power over 150,000 Minnesota homes annually.

Xcel Energy has sited its huge utility-scale solar farm at Sherco, or the Sherburne County Generating Station (pictured above), in Becker. The largest power plant in Minnesota, it’s a three-unit coal-fired plant with a combined capacity of 2,238 MW. The new solar farm is going to replace the capacity of one coal unit that will be retired this year.

Xcel Energy has said it plans to shut down not just all of Sherco’s coal generators, but all of its coal generators by 2030.

Building renewable projects on the sites of retiring fossil fuel plants is efficient and cost-effective because it allows the new clean energy to reuse the grid connections already in place.

Xcel Energy is investing an additional $406 million with its new expansion at Sherco Solar, and that brings the company’s total investment in the Minnesota project to more than $1 billion. 

Read more: The US’s largest solar panel maker breaks ground on a 3.5 GW factory

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