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TOWER — A small town on the Iron Range is now home to the state’s first interconnected solar commons.
A community gathering held Saturday in Tower featured the unveiling of a 40-kilowatt rooftop solar array at Vermilion Country School as part of the University of Minnesota's Solar Commons Research Project, which seeks to turn electricity savings into a long-term source of community funding.
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Unlike conventional solar installations that only lower energy bills for building owners, the solar commons system diverts a portion of the energy savings into a dedicated community trust fund.
A dashboard will be used to track energy and associated savings, which may be used for an education savings pool, an end-of-year celebration event or community projects.
“You have 20 years of a revenue stream coming to your trust fund from solar — a gift from the sun,” said project developer Kathryn Milun, an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Milun describes the concept as built around the idea of “commonwealth” — focusing on resources such as sunlight, clean air and water that aren’t created by individuals or businesses.
“I started thinking about sunshine,” Milun said of her development process. “How is sunshine itself a form of commonwealth? It’s a gift.”
Milun began developing the model more than a decade ago while working with the Tomales Bay Institute, a California-based environmental think tank. She questioned whether some of the wealth generated through solar energy could remain with communities, rather than flowing exclusively through public and private economic systems.
Turning that idea into something communities could actually use and benefit from required more than just installing solar panels.
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Working with the city of Tower and Vermilion Country Schools, Milun and the solar commons research team crafted a legal agreement establishing the community trust and digital dashboard, which shows how much electricity the panels produce and how much money goes into the fund.
The dashboard will also serve as an education tool, with a curriculum being developed for teachers at Vermilion Country School to use to connect the system with lessons about energy, environmental stewardship, budgeting and civic participation.
The Tower project bloomed out of preliminary work done in 2024 through funds from the Empowering Small Minnesota Communities program. Milun said project partners initially pursued approximately $20 million in federal funding. That funding dried up following the change in presidential administrations, she said, prompting the pursuit of a smaller-scale project.
Funding from the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s Solar on Public Buildings program also assisted in paying for the installation.
University researchers are using the Tower site as a test case to develop a manual and other tools that Milun said will eventually be made free and open-source, allowing other communities to replicate the model.
Information gathered from the Tower solar array will also help shape a larger project at Heliene’s solar-panel manufacturing facility in Mountain Iron. The proposed 500-kilowatt installation would create a trust supporting indigenous food-sovereignty efforts.
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