Defining the Clean Energy Future
The City of St. Cloud, Minnesota has become a national and global leader in sustainability work. Join LWV Upper Mississippi River Region for a webinar featuring St. Cloud Public Services Director Tracy Hodel to learn how the community is flipping the script on climate change!
Eight years ago, St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis set a goal for City operations to be carbon neutral by 2030, not including energy generated by the city's hydropower dam on the Mississippi. The city met the goal of carbon neutrality in 2020—ten years ahead of schedule. When taking into account the hydro facility, the city now produces three times as much energy as it uses as a municipality, saving about $1.5 million from their annual budget. The City's new goal is that by 2028 the entire St. Cloud community is carbon neutral for its electrical use, and by 2038 will be carbon neutral for electrical, building heat and transportation.
As part of meeting this goal, the City of St. Cloud is now pursuing a course that could lead to their city operations being carbon negative: taking in more carbon than they emit. They are integrating treatment of their wastewater, the use of solar energy to power their services and the recovery of biogas and fertilizer. The treatment center is also poised to be the first wastewater facility in the world to use all end products on-site from the electrolysis process, including producing green hydrogen, green oxygen and waste heat, fuel and pure oxygen on-site, as well as run the first program in the country to capture carbon from exhaust and be able to sell the end product for building materials.
The webinar will be recorded and the video posted on this blog via the LWV UMRR YouTube channel.
The League of Women Voters Upper Mississippi River Region (LWVUMRR) is an Interleague Organization comprised of state and local leagues in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin that are located within the Upper Mississippi River Region, a USGS defined region of the US. LWVUMRR engages in advocacy and educational outreach focused on preserving and protecting the Mississippi River and its watershed.