Minnesota Modifies Environmental, Energy Regulations for Data Centers

The Minnesota Governor signed a law that modifies environmental and energy regulations related to data centers. The changes include: 1) imposing an annual fee on qualified large-scale data centers based on their peak electricity demand; 2) exempting qualified large-scale data centers from contributing to utility energy conservation plans; 3) prohibiting utilities from spending on energy conservation for those facilities; 4) creating a new distributed solar energy standard requiring utilities to source a portion of retail electricity sales from small solar systems by 2030, with some exemptions for industrial customers including data centers; and 5) requiring the state to refer data ...