America is retiring coal plants at a steady clip, and there is no real aftermarket for the leftovers. The boilers get cut up for scrap, the smokestacks get dropped on camera, and the land tends to sit in permitting limbo for a decade.<\/p>\n
In Becker, Minnesota, the most valuable thing at the state’s biggest coal plant turned out to be none of that hardware. It was the plug.<\/p>\n
On July 21, Xcel Energy announced<\/a> it had completed the third phase of Sherco Solar, pushing the site to 710 megawatts generated by 1.7 million panels. That makes it the largest solar facility in Minnesota and one of the biggest in the Upper Midwest, by the utility’s own careful scoping.<\/p>\n The capacity number is respectable. The interesting part is where those panels connect. Sherco Solar feeds the grid through the transmission infrastructure and interconnection rights of the Sherburne County Generating Station, the coal giant next door that has been pushing power into the same wires since 1976. Borrowing that connection let 710 megawatts of solar walk past the single worst line in American energy.<\/p>\n Any new power plant that wants onto the US transmission grid has to join an interconnection queue, where grid operators study what upgrades the system needs before anything gets energized. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s latest count<\/a>, published July 1, some 2,061 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage are sitting in those queues. That is more capacity than every power plant currently operating in the country, combined.<\/p>\n The line moves about how you would expect a 2,000-gigawatt line to move. The median project takes roughly five years to get from request to operation, and the backlog peaked near 2,600 gigawatts at the end of 2023 before easing a little.<\/p>\n Sherco Solar mostly sidestepped it. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which runs the grid across the middle of the country, gives the owner of a retiring plant three years<\/a> to reuse its interconnection rights for a replacement resource. Those rights cannot be sold to anyone else, so they are strictly use-it-or-lose-it.<\/p>\n Xcel used it. The nonprofit RMI estimates<\/a> this generator replacement route can cut connection time from that five-year average to under one year, which in this business counts as overnight shipping.<\/p>\n Rob Gramlich, CEO of the consulting firm Grid Strategies, put it more bluntly when CNN visited the site<\/a> in 2024, saying “somebody just has this Disney pass to skip the line.” He also called queue-jumping a sensitive topic in the industry, which tells you exactly how the other 2,000 gigawatts feel about it.<\/p>\n Transmission is the scarce asset underneath all of this. There is rarely a spare line sitting around anywhere on a modern grid, which is why Tasmania is currently rebuilding 287 towers on a corridor it is not allowed to switch off<\/a>. A live connection with real capacity behind it is close to priceless, and a retiring coal plant has exactly that.<\/p>\n The build itself moved quickly by American standards. First power flowed in late October 2024 at more than 220 megawatts, a second phase followed through 2025, and the 250-megawatt third phase wrapped this month.<\/p>\n All in, the site now spreads across thousands of acres of farm country around Becker and Clear Lake, and it produces enough electricity for roughly 150,000 homes on Xcel’s Upper Midwest system.<\/p>\n Xcel handles the groundskeeping with sheep, which graze beneath the arrays so nobody has to mow 1.7 million panels’ worth of grass. There is a Great Pyrenees named Ozzy on the payroll to guard them. Solar sites keep finding second jobs for their land like this, the way Arizona farms are growing crops in the shade of raised panels<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe plug is worth more than the boiler<\/h2>\n
1.7 million panels and a flock of sheep<\/h2>\n