Free feast, music, and more at solar commons event

TOWER- The Vermilion Country School and the Tower Economic Development Authority have reached an agreement to create the state’s first-ever Solar Commons, a method of converting financial savings from solar-generated power to funding for community-based projects, and they’re celebrating the achievement this Saturday, Oct. 3.
The celebration, set to run from noon to 5 p.m. at the Vermilion Country School, will feature partner exhibits, live music, and art-making. Musician and artist Annie Humphrey will be performing live, and her “Fire in the Village” arts collective will have arts and crafts projects for all ages. A free community feast, featuring locally-grown foods, will be served.
The school building, which is owned and leased to VCS by TEDA, is now home to a 37-kilowatt rooftop solar array, which is part of a groundbreaking commons-based approach to solar energy. The event will demonstrate the tools developed to make solar commoning possible — including a simple legal agreement and a beautiful digital dashboard that will monitor and calculate cumulative energy savings from the solar array.  The dashboard makes visible the sun’s solar energy next to data from other types of place-based common wealth, such as air quality, water quality and, in northern Minnesota, and the health of wild rice (Manoomin).
Vermilion Country School students will explain their plan for “school participatory budgeting” to annually distribute solar savings and report on outcomes.
The commons is a legal and community governance tool designed to demonstrate a new model of community solar ownership to be implemented throughout the U.S. by harnessing the free energy of the sun. The savings generated by this solar project will benefit the entire community, not private individuals. The twenty-first century energy transition will generate billions of dollars in energy savings from long-lasting solar technologies. The goal of creating a commons is to ensure that these savings can be pooled and stay in the hands of local communities to build community wealth. The Tower project is one of two school projects nationwide, the other is in Arizona. The toolkit for creating other solar commons projects will be available, free-of-charge, for other groups interesting in using solar energy to help build more sustainable communities.
Partners in this project include: Vermilion Country School, the University of Minnesota’s Solar Commons Research Project, the city of Tower, TEDA, the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships Program at UM Extension, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Computing for Social Justice, SISU, the local solar installer, Heliene, Inc., the National Community Solar Partnerships, the MN Department of Commerce (funder), and others.
The concept for the Solar Commons Project was created at the University of Minnesota- Duluth, led by Prof. Kathryn Mulin. Mulin is the founder and director of the Solar Commons Project , a recipient of a 2022 DoE Sunny Award for Equitable Community Solar. She is also a research fellow at the Minnesota Design Center at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities.
Vermilion Country School, located at 1 Enterprise Dr. in Tower (behind the harbor), is a public charter school serving grades 7-12, with campuses in Tower and Mt. Iron.