Ecolab Inc., a global company based in St. Paul, says it's going all solar in Minnesota.
The company said Monday that it signed a deal with renewable energy developer SunEdison to acquire enough solar-generated electricity to offset virtually every watt of electricity used in its Minnesota business operations.
Ecolab, a seller of hygiene, energy and water technologies to businesses, is the first big Minnesota company to go all-in on solar. With this deal, Ecolab will acquire more solar output than now exists across the entire state.
"It makes business sense to do this," said Raj Rajan, vice president of global sustainability at Ecolab, which employs 2,500 people in Minnesota and 45,000 worldwide.
The deal by Ecolab, a Fortune 500 company, is the most dramatic evidence that a solar boom is looming in Minnesota. A 2013 state law requires investor-owned utilities to get 1.5 percent of their power from the sun by 2020. The law also authorized market-driven solar projects, known as community solar gardens, whose output is shared by interested subscribers — like Ecolab.
"It's groundbreaking in many ways," Ken Johnson of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group, said of the Ecolab-SunEdison deal. "When people think of solar they tend to think of places like California, Arizona, Hawaii and Florida. They don't traditionally think of the Midwest. This is going to open up a lot of eyes."
Many U.S. companies have made large solar investments, including Wal-Mart and Target, though not in Minnesota. Kohl's, the retailer based in Menomonee Falls, Wis., offsets all its electricity use with rooftop solar panels and purchased solar credits.
Sam Youneszadeh, a managing director at SunEdison, whose solar unit is based in Belmont, Calif., said the deal with Ecolab is the first stage of SunEdison's plan to build 200 megawatts of solar gardens on 15 to 20 sites in the Twin Cities area. Once they are built — sometime next year — the projects will be owned and operated by TerraForm Power, a renewable energy company based in Bethesda, Md.