Celebrating 20 years of community-led clean energy action

We are excited to announce that 2023 is the Clean Energy Resource Teams’ (CERTs) 20th Anniversary! We hope you will join us as we make plans to celebrate our CERTsiversary all year long!

Why are we excited? Because 20 years feels like a big deal. We’ve been in the community-based clean energy game for longer than our children have been alive.

More importantly though, because it feels like the last 20 years have prepared us for this exact moment when clean energy is on the cusp of even more amazing opportunities.

We are just so optimistic and ready to bring the skills, the tools, the friendships and partnerships, and the passion to deliver on the promise of this moment.

Grid of CERTs staff through the years

For 20 years CERTs has focused on centering people in clean energy. We often describe our work as coming alongside communities to help them move their projects forward.

We have worked across Minnesota on everything from biomass gasification to transportation electrification to energy bill stabilization.
We have hosted countless educational forums from our early years hosting community wind events, to community solar forums in the 2010s to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and Inflation Reduction Act sessions today.
We’ve helped people connect through statewide conferences, peer-to-peer networks, and ice cream socials at manufactured home parks.
We have focused on projects, implementation, and deployment through models and tools, cohorts, direct assistance, and seed grants.
We have built relationships and collaborations with community-based organizations, Native nations, main street businesses, utilities, and more.

Grid of CERTs staff through the years

Whether we’ve known you for 20 years or just met you last week, we know it’s going to take all of us working together to seize the clean energy opportunities ahead. So, as we celebrate this year, we are excited to share more events, more stories, more seed grants, and more tools and resources to move your projects forward. We are excited to eat cupcakes – it is a CERTsiverary!

And most importantly, we’re excited to partner with you to scale up our shared efforts and build Minnesota’s clean energy future together!