CARLTON — Carlton County officials are racing to start building an estimated $4.75 million solar field to secure federal funding that is set to expire under the recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The passage of President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill on July 4 could sunset an estimated $600,000 in anticipated federal funding for a proposed solar field outside of the recently constructed
Carlton County Justice Center.
The funding was earmarked in the Inflation Reduction Act, which appropriated significant amounts of federal funding for renewable energy projects.

The county has already secured a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project, which requires a dollar-for-dollar match from the county. County officials are counting on a tax incentive in the Inflation Reduction Act that would cover 30% of the county’s match. But the Joe Biden-era incentive could be eliminated by the end of the year.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that we get this moving along in a way that we can capture that 30% of the county’s share,” County Administrator Dennis Genereau told the Carlton County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday. “That’s a significant amount of dollars that would reduce the overall cost and budget to the taxpayer.”

County officials hope that starting construction by the end of the year will obligate the federal government to provide the 30% match. The county might need to expend 5%-8% on the project cost by year’s end, which would meet the IRS’s definition of startup construction in the tax code, according to Adam Seidel, an account executive with McKinstry, a construction and energy services company overseeing the proposed solar field.

“The big key is that we start construction by the end of the year,” Seidel said.

McKinstry representatives are collecting bids, which they will present to the county board Aug. 5 for first review. County staff hope to have the project approved by the board of commissioners by the end of August, ahead of the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30.

“There’s been some new kind of urgency in terms of making sure we capture all the dollars available that we’ll walk through in terms of timelines,” Seidel said.

Though the funding for the project is on reserve by the Department of Energy, the county can’t receive it until the agency approves the proposal, which McKinstry is working on on the county’s behalf.

McKinstry projects the solar field could save the county between $6.9 million and $7.5 million over the next 25 years.

Because the project hasn’t been fully audited, Seidel cautioned that final costs could vary by about 10%.

Seidel said the project would make the justice center “a state-of-the-art building that’s almost exclusively electrically heated and cooled with a 90% electric offset — a very, very low-use, near-net-zero building.”