Minnesota Solar Farms Show Why Location Beats Panel Count

Building a solar farm isn't just about buying panels anymore. It's about finding somewhere to plug them in.

Minnesota Power is building two solar farms right now that prove this point perfectly. Both won bids in the same 2023 auction, both target mid-2027 completion, and both use nearly identical technology. But one will cost far less than the other, and the panels have nothing to do with it.

Boswell Solar in Cohasset gets the easier path. The 85-megawatt farm with 177,675 solar panels sits right beside the Boswell Energy Center, a coal plant that's been running since 1958. That coal plant already built a substation and transmission lines decades ago. The new solar farm just needs 2.5 miles of new wire to plug into what's already there.

Regal Solar near Royalton tells a different story. This 119.5-megawatt farm with 255,000 panels sits on empty farmland. No coal plant. No existing wires. No substation waiting. So Minnesota Power has to build everything from scratch: a brand new substation plus 3.5 miles of transmission line just to reach the grid.

Both projects use bifacial solar panels on single-axis trackers. Bifacial means they catch sunlight bouncing off the ground and snow, which matters more in northern Minnesota than you might think. The technology is nearly identical. The location makes all the difference.

Boswell's coal plant unknowingly paid for the solar farm's connection back in 1956. Two coal units still run there today at 940 megawatts combined. They'll retire by 2035, but their infrastructure lives on. Seventy years of generating power in one spot bought a lot of steel and wire that solar can now reuse.

The Bright Side

This isn't just a Minnesota quirk. It's becoming a national solution to one of clean energy's biggest problems: the wait to connect.

The average solar or wind project now spends more than five years stuck in line waiting for grid connection approval. But federal regulators created a shortcut in 2018 that lets new clean energy take over connection spots from retiring coal and gas plants. PacifiCorp is working through dozens of these requests out West. Virginia and Indiana passed laws in February 2026 to encourage more of it.

Xcel Energy already ran this playbook 90 miles south of Boswell, where 710 megawatts of solar now flows through the old Sherco coal plant's wires. As coal retires across America, it's leaving behind the exact infrastructure that solar and wind need most.

Boswell Solar will generate about 167,000 megawatt-hours yearly, enough to power 19,500 homes. The construction phase will create 110 jobs at peak. Hunt Electric and Lakehead Constructors are leading the build with local contractors.

The expensive part of solar isn't the panels anymore; it's finding a place on the grid that's already wired and waiting.