Transition Triumph
A decade-old decision to decommission the coal-fired Sherco plant could have had grave implications for the city of Becker and Sherburne County. Collaboration with Xcel Energy and a coalition of others has paved the way for a bright future.
By Kevin Allenspach | Photography by John Linn
Tracy Bertram remembers the day she learned that her hometown, the city of Becker, would change forever.
It was the fall of 2014, and Bertram was serving her second City Council term. She represented nearly 5,000 residents whose economy and identity had been linked to the nearby Sherburne County Generating Station since it opened in 1976. Sherco, as the station is commonly known, was responsible for 330 high-paying union jobs. It accounted for 77 percent of Becker’s tax base and about 14 percent of the county tax base. It truly powered the schools, community centers, and much of local government.
Like most people in the area, Bertram can look out the windows of her home and see the familiar smokestacks with their winking lights dotting the skyline. There was no hint of disturbance when she learned that Ron Brevig, then plant director, and Cindy Shore, Sherco’s business support manager, wanted to talk to the council. Both had been with Xcel for more than three decades.
“It was a courtesy meeting, as I remember, and these were people we talked to quite often,” Bertram said. “There was no other business, and there probably weren’t a half-dozen other people on hand. It was short-term and a quick turnaround.”
The meeting had massive consequences. Sherco’s three units not only routinely electrified 1.5 million homes but also were Minnesota’s largest source of carbon emissions (the 10.5 million tons they would release in 2022 were equivalent to the exhaust of two million cars). As cleaner options of wind, solar, and nuclear energy gained capacity, coal became less appealing and efficient. An official announcement wouldn’t come for almost another year, but Brevig and Shore needed the council to know one thing: Sherco was shutting down.
“There was no sugar-coating it,” Bertram said. “They basically told us, ‘This is what we’re doing and this is what’s going to happen.’” It was, she said, a pivotal moment. “We could have just said, ‘Well, it’s been fun.’ But we said, ‘Uh-uh. Let’s grab a pencil and a piece of paper and sketch out how we’re going to solve this.’ I recognized it as the opportunity for Becker either to just become a wayside rest stop or be a place that my children will be happy about.”
It wasn’t going to be easy. Economic transition would be a heavy lift. Government support often needs a long runway. And many hands would have to pull together to power a new era.
Making the Most of a 10-Year Warning
For almost 40 years, the Initiative Foundation has supported economic development in 14 counties and two Native nations in Central Minnesota—and done so with a focus on renewable energy. Reverberations of the Sherco announcement immediately reached Don Hickman, then vice president for community and workforce development at the Initiative Foundation. (Hickman retired in January 2025.)
“From a conservationist standpoint, it was good news,” said Hickman, who worked as an environmental consultant in Utah and Minnesota before joining the Initiative Foundation in 1999. But he couldn’t forget the impact of past work he’d done with a group funded by the Rockefeller Family Foundation. Called the Just Transition Fund, it included all coal-dependent communities, whether mining or power plant sites.
“I remember a union leader from the coal country of Appalachia who said, ‘Brothers and sisters, every time conservationists cheer the closure of a coal plant, you need to know how many families are now going to struggle to feed their children.’ My heart just hit my shoes,” Hickman said, “because it was real and those communities had struggled for a long time. You can’t ignore those economic consequences.”
Hickman did feel a sense of relief that the city of Becker and Sherburne County would have time to figure out how they would recover from the loss of this key employer. “Xcel gave us 10 years,” he said. “No one in the country gets 10 years to diversify an economy.”
Shuttering Succession
Xcel began transitioning from coal in 2006 and had shuttered 10 plants around the country by the time of the Becker decision. Sherco Unit 2 shut down in 2023, and Unit 1 is scheduled to follow next year. When Unit 3 goes idle in 2030, Xcel will be completely divested of coal, having closed or converted 30 plants.
“We’ve done this at more than 20 locations across the United States without layoffs so far, and we want to accomplish this again,” said Michelle Schmitz, who became local manager of community relations for Xcel last April, succeeding Mark Osendorf, who was with the company for 37 years. “That’s the standard if we do it in phases, bring on the right renewable, and keep the grid reliable.”
Any workers who want a job will be employed at another Xcel facility, but that likely means leaving Becker, if not Sherburne County, and each departing worker takes families and tax dollars with them. So, there were difficult conversations to have about how to pivot. One of the first came on a brutally cold night in St. Cloud during a meeting with members of the dozen unions that support Sherco.
“I walked in, and, even though I was on time, I was clearly the last person there,” Hickman said. “The biggest, unionist-looking guy said, ‘Nothing you can do will replace the quality of the jobs we’re losing.’ I said, ‘I know.’ His face fell, and he said, ‘Oh, I never thought you were going to be honest with us. If you’re here to be truthful, what are we going to do?’” Hickman’s response was honest and clear. “I said, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m here—to learn from you.’”
Strategic Investments, Big Returns
Hickman began working with Bertram, who became mayor in 2016, a position she held for the next eight years. The pair tapped into Dan Weber, assistant Sherburne County administrator, and Jacob Sanders, Becker community development director, to mobilize and investigate what the city government could do. Weber then traveled to Colorado to see how a similar community had transitioned from coal, and Sanders dug into what potential businesses might find a home where Sherco had thrived for so long.
Bertram engaged politicians from both sides of the aisle to gain support in the Minnesota Legislature, and Hickman used his contacts to learn that the McKnight Foundation, a major force in funding climate solutions for Minnesota, would be receptive to talking about a partnership. Soon, the Initiative Foundation was entrusted with three bi-annual $200,000 grants to support feasibility studies, pre-engineering, public engagement, and pilot projects to diversify the economy.
The investment leveraged $27 million in state bonding to improve the infrastructure necessary to attract new business. “This is emblematic of what we believe is possible through the power of partnership,” said Ben Passer, program director of McKnight’s Midwest Climate & Energy program. “It’s a powerful example of local leaders working with a key actor in a utility and with philanthropy and advocacy organizations. Everyone came together early in the process to understand what was happening.” A lot has changed over 10 years, Passer said, when the idea of a statewide 100 percent clean energy mandate still seemed far off.
“The federal landscape has shifted significantly several times. But it demonstrates the ability of locally driven, community-based solutions being core to how change happens,” Passer said. “The work in Becker with Sherco was a key driver in helping to shift the landscape and say, ‘This is possible. These are things we can do, and communities can benefit.’ People nationally are taking note.”
In 2022, Xcel announced a solar project that would replace some of the power from the coal-fired units. Sherco Solar 1 came online on Oct. 31, 2024, and a second array is expected to be up later this year, coinciding with the start of construction on a third. Eventually, these arrays will power some 150,000 homes. Covering more than 3,000 acres, it will be the fifth-largest solar field in the nation and generate 400 union construction jobs, ongoing operations and maintenance employment, and an estimated $350 million in local economic benefits through payments to landowners and governments. It’s all part of Xcel’s goal to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2030 and achieve 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2050.
“They’re very much real goals to us,” Schmitz said. “We’ve made substantial progress. We’re at a 57 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared to 2005 levels, and the grid is at 64 percent carbon-free energy.” Because Xcel’s customers are in some of the sunnier and windier areas of the country, she said, and the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine, “we’re able to power a lot of our needs with wind and solar. Nuclear plants complement our renewables, and we’re looking at alternative fuels to reach our 2050 goal, like hydrogen and advanced forms of energy storage.”
Xcel is creating a 10-megawatt, 100-hour battery storage facility to ensure reliability when wind and solar are at lower production. And construction of the Minnesota Energy Connection transmission line will connect 2,000 megawatts of low-cost solar and wind energy from southwestern Minnesota. Suddenly, Becker is transforming into a clean energy hub that looks increasingly attractive to some major new industries.
A New Becker Takes Shape
One of the first companies to move in was Northern Metals Recycling, forced to relocate from Minneapolis in 2019 because the area around its former Twin Cities site had become too developed to withstand exposure to potential health risks.
“The leaders in Sherburne County and Becker saw that as an opportunity,” Hickman said. “Where do we find an industrial park with distance from a concentrated population, easy access to a rail spur, and a source of clean energy? So, the train that literally brought coal into Sherco now brings in scrap metal and takes processed metal back out.”
Northern Metals has a 75-acre property with plenty of buffer around its facility. It employs about 160 people at unionized wages similar to those at Sherco.
Then, in 2024, Microsoft and Amazon bought sites for data centers, and city development officials like Sanders are cultivating a third that is yet to be announced. Data centers provide computer storage systems crucial to connectivity and the expansion of artificial intelligence. They require substantial electricity, have their own goals for clean energy and so are attracted to sites where it’s easiest to achieve both. More than 1,000 construction jobs will be needed to create the data centers, which then require a small staff to operate.
While some may call the data center construction jobs temporary, they stretch over an extended timeline and bring ancillary benefits for housing and commercial growth. “Not only is this going to replace what we’ve lost,” Sanders said, “it represents a change in Becker’s economic landscape. Without all the people aligned on where this is going, without our planning commission, the EDA, the City Council—the list goes on and on—we wouldn’t have been able to take action.”
Weber said the impact of the Initiative Foundation on the Sherco project cannot be overestimated. For example, it provided $2,500 for a consultant who helped land a $1 million rail grant.
“The decision to close Sherco wasn’t ours, but we’re doing our best to replace it and make lemonade out of lemons,” he said. “I don’t know if it will be better, but it’s going to be different. We’re changing with the times because we were forced to do so. Our elected officials empowered us to start working on this a long time ago. Hopefully, we can be a blueprint for other communities that might face the same thing.”
Times change and life moves on. At the last election, Bertram lost the mayoral race to Mark Kolbinger, who has assumed leadership of a city that has come through a lot. Bertram, a health insurance underwriter, has joined the Initiative Foundation board of trustees and believes Becker’s future will be bright.
“I think we’re as well-positioned as we ever have been,” she said. “Initially, it was doomsday. Nobody knew what our future would look like, and it was scary. But we discovered how the public and private sectors can work together to share ideas and great partnerships.”
As a result, Becker, once known for its enormous, aging coal plants, is now home to one of the greenest industrial parks in America. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this evolution has been covered on CNN and the front page of the New York Times.