How is Cooperative Energy Futures building community wealth?
Right off the bat, the amount our subscribers pay each month is less than the credit they receive on their utility bill. Our subscribers save about 7-10 percent on their annual electric bill.
But this is just the beginning because as the co-op generates profit, whatever is not reinvested in the co-op is distributed directly as dividends to members based on their share of the energy produced.
We can distribute those profits through a combination of cash or equity. For equity, we retain cash in the cooperative and invest it in new activities that preserve and grow the wealth each of our members own, for example by financing home insulation and other home upgrades to our members. This insulation would save subscribers’ energy and therefore cut further costs on their utility bills while repaying the co-op’s investments and growing member equity. The co-op creates a democratic process of deciding how much net profit we want to reinvest together versus distribute individually based on what our members need.
We also contract with climate justice and social justice community organizations. They help us find subscribers, and we pay them for that service. We’ve paid out almost $600,000 to community-based organizations to engage subscribers for our first rounds of projects.
There’s also a job creation end to this. We require all of our installation contractors to use at least 50 percent minority labor. We support partner organizations who provide solar workforce training by helping place trainees, such as a program through the Minnesota Department of Corrections to hire formerly incarcerated people.
What role does community-controlled energy play in a just transition?
It’s absolutely central. Community-controlled energy can serve as a template for how we think about just transition. How societies structure their economies, communities, and political power is highly influenced by energy systems. Every major new innovation in how energy is harnessed and utilized has triggered major changes in our economic and political structures.
A key example of this is the industrial revolution. There was a shift from most people being individual farmers or small entrepreneurs to the vast majority of people becoming wage laborers.
The shift towards community-controlled energy is a relocation of our physical energy, which then changes the economies of scale for how we produce food, how we make things, how we organize buildings and communities. It is also a relocalization of wealth and decision-making power.

The Ramp A community solar garden in downtown Minneapolis.
Do you have advice to individuals or groups seeking to enter the cooperative space?
First, a cooperative is a business. Yes, it’s a business whose objective is shared member benefit, not personal profit, but it’s still a business — meaning it still needs to have a model for what it’s going to offer people and how it’s going to economically self-sustain itself. If you don’t have that core engine, you don’t have the resources to do the rest of the mission.
Secondly, I think one of the biggest challenges in creating non-hierarchical decision-making structures is that there’s often a tendency to involve everyone in deciding everything. That’s consistently dysfunctional. A core principle of decision-making and power-sharing in cooperatives is that it’s not everyone deciding everything, it’s everyone agreeing on who decides what. Being really clear on those channels of decision-making and avoiding the too many cooks in the kitchen problem, which just exhausts people, is really key to prevent people burning out.
How can readers support your work?
We are part of an emerging network of energy democracy and climate justice groups who are launching similar community solutions all across the country. If you’re in Minnesota, get involved with us. We’d love to work with you. If you’re in a different area, find a similar group and plug into that. If you can’t find a group, talk to your neighbors and try to start your own cooperative.