A 12 oz. bag of Salsa Verde flavored Doritos®, a gallon of 2% milk, a Starbucks® grande caffè mocha, an issue of ESPN The Magazine, an ice cold bottle of Coors® original… If this were the ramblings of a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid, the category would be, “Things That Cost More Than What I Pay Per Day For Power.” (more…)

We can’t do it alone. And we don’t really want to.

We partner with the pros all of the time. We ask energy experts to help us with our energy assessments. We ask heating and cooling experts to help us with our Home Energy Audits. And this week, we’re partnering with a pro football team to get the word out about (more…)

I am not going to lie — when I first heard about solar battery storage, I was not overly excited. Because I usually work with our efficiency programs – and communicating how our customers can conserve energy and save money – I was way out of my comfort zone. And I’d missed lunch, so I was cranky. (more…)

If you had proof that you use more energy than 78% of your neighbors, would you take steps to cut back?

Turns out that most of us would.

Through a pilot with OPower, Xcel Energy has been sending customized home energy reports to 50,000 customers in Minnesota. (more…)

How great is it when one good thing creates a bunch of other good things? According to national averages provided by the American Wind Energy Association, the 201-megawatt Nobles Wind Farm in southeastern Minnesota created approximately:

• 200 construction jobs (more…)

A recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune featured a Montevideo, Minn., business owner who upgraded his energy equipment with the help of his local utility. On the surface, it may not seem newsworthy – thousands of businesses in Minnesota and across the country partner with their local utility to take advantage of energy efficiency rebate programs. (more…)

I think it would be a system operator’s nightmare. You’re responsible for keeping everyone’s lights on, but a passing set of clouds cuts the output from several solar arrays from 100% to 20% — and then raises it back up to 100% in less than a minute.

Fluctuations like that would put me in the (more…)

We know Minnesotans are hardy stock, but will their electric vehicles match their owners’ mettle? That’s one of the things being tested by the City of St. Paul and Drive Electric Minnesota, a collaboration of businesses, nonprofits and government agencies in the Twin Cities. They’ve teamed up to build an EV infrastructure (more…)

In Colorado, hedge fund billionaire Louis Moore Bacon is fighting a new transmission line proposed by two utilities: shareholder-owned Xcel Energy, and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a wholesale electricity supplier.

Bacon, the founder of Moore Capital Management LLC and owner of the (more…)

Xcel Energy, the largest electric utility in Colorado, Friday filed a plan with the Public Utility Commission that would bring it into compliance with Colorado’s new Clean Air Clean Jobs Act signed into law by Governor Ritter in April. The new law is designed to target encourage steep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants — and to effectively block (more…)