To help move the clean energy transition forward, Xcel Energy has announced it is seeking proposals to add significant carbon-free energy for its customers in the Upper Midwest through new renewable energy projects and energy storage projects. The company is seeking proposals from developers for at least 900 megawatts of electric generation to meet customers’ energy needs and help the company reduce carbon emissions by eighty-five percent in the region by 2030, compared to 2005, as it moves toward its vision of providing one hundred percent carbon-free electricity to customers by 2050.

As the company works to implement its recently approved Upper Midwest Energy Plan, this request calls for new solar projects, or solar projects with energy storage. The company aims to have about 300 megawatts of the new energy resources connect to the grid at the Sherco plant site in Sherburne County, Minnesota, to bring clean energy to the region as the coal plant is retired in phases beginning in 2023.

Under the company’s Upper Midwest Energy plan, more than eighty percent of customers’ electricity in the region would be carbon free by the end of the decade, with more than half coming from wind and solar. These projects will help move those plans forward. The plan calls for retiring all the company’s Upper Midwest coal plants by 2030, dramatically increasing wind and solar energy, and ensuring reliable, affordable energy by extending the generation of carbon-free nuclear energy at the Monticello plant for an additional 10 years, to 2040.