History

The Phillips Community Energy Cooperative was an idea that originated from Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin and the Phillips Partnership, a group of major Phillips businesses and institutions that focuses on improvements to the quality of life in the neighborhood. Their goal was to find a way to aggregate the energy
expenditures of these large entities and leverage this substantial energy
purchasing power to lower energy costs for residents of the neighborhood.

The Phillips Partnership felt it had to have a partnership with an
environmentally-oriented, on-the-ground organization in Phillips and approached
the Green Institute. The Partnership’s interest in some coordination of
energy purchasing came at the same time that the Green Institute was evaluating
the feasibility of building a biomass combined heat and power plant at the
South Transfer Station site. Peter made some contacts with the Minnesota Rural
Electric Association which generated the idea of an urban-based utility
cooperative modeled after the rural electric cooperatives common in rural Minnesota. The two
ideas---a neighborhood energy cooperative and the development of a biomass heat
and power facility---started as parallel tracks that reinforced each other but
have now merged into a single strategy for the Phillips neighborhood to attain
energy self-sufficiency with renewable energy sources.