Globalby Sabine Engel, Ph.D.
Recently, I had an intriguing conversation with Olmsted County Commissioner and former Minnesota State Senator David Senjem, who previously served as chair of the Senate Capital Investment Committee and the Senate Energy and Utilities Committee. It’s how I came to know and work with him for the past dozen years as part of the Institute on the Environment’s (IonE) international renewable energy partnership effort involving Germany. He told me about a virtual meeting he’d just had with local government leaders eager to lead their cities and counties into a resilient future.
The challenge, it appears, was “how do you actually see the future to lead there?” Where do you look? For Senjem, the answer was specific in a way that sticks with me:
“I saw the future, honestly, through foreign travel. You get to go where it’s different. People do things differently and think differently. Looking carefully and with an open mind, you eventually return home and realize that’s probably where some of the future is. Now you are in the position to lead.”
Twenty groups of established and emerging leaders in Minnesota have had the opportunity to engage in global learning on energy and climate since 2011. More importantly, they have been able to turn these learning experiences into action at home since the IonE program started in partnership with the Dayton Administration and Lt. Governor Yvonne Prettner Solon in 2011. Policymakers such as state Senator Senjem, House Majority Leader Jamie Long, and House Speaker Melissa Hortman took inspiration from Germany and authored legislation setting Minnesota on a path to sustainable energy, Think Minnesota’s 2013 Solar Energy Standard and the 2023 100% Clean Electricity Law. Agency heads at Commerce, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the Department of Transportation established formal collaborative working agreements with peer agencies in Germany’s state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to share best practices on energy efficiency, climate change and resiliency and transportation infrastructure.
Sustainability-minded businesses, including Ever-Green Energy and Connexus Energy, our state’s largest electricity distribution utility, encountered approaches and practices that inspired new business measures.
A group of twelve municipalities in Minnesota and NRW joined as technical partners in IonE’s Climate-Smart Municipalities (CSM) project to learn from each other and lead together. The glue that holds it all together, gives us hope, and I believe, motivates on a deep emotional level are our U of M students and students from FH Muenster University of Applied Sciences, our CSM international partner. Each year during Winter Break, a group of 22 U of M students from across the system have the opportunity to travel to Germany as part of the CFAN3532 study abroad experience “Germany: Leading the Renewables Revolution.”
The students meet leaders in politics, state and local government, and business in Germany’s NRW state. They visit sites that show aspects of a sustainable future centered around people and their local communities. They connect with student peers at FH Muenster University of Applied Sciences. And they come back inspired and transformed.
FH Muenster’s environmental engineering students play a special role in Minnesota. They serve as five-month technical interns with CSM partner cities and businesses in Minnesota, accelerating the clean energy and sustainability transformation that is underway in our own state at the local level. Cities that “see the future” often don’t have the technically trained and research-connected personnel to help develop ideas and collect data for grant application. The CSM interns, however, are able to provide this support. CSM interns have helped accelerate energy and sustainability efforts at the City of Duluth, St. Cloud’s wastewater treatment plant, and the City of Morris. This year’s cohort of six young environmental engineering interns are currently at work on projects at the City of New Ulm (energy & water), the City of Morris (heat pumps for cold climates), and our U’s West Central Research and Outreach Center (renewable hydrogen, green ammonia as a drop-in fuel, agricultural robots, and PFAS mitigation).
All students participating in the CSM project, whether enrolled at the U of M or FH Muenster, gain experience, skills, and perspectives that prime them for potential leadership roles in a professional field of their choosing.
I often wish we could place our U of M students in similar internships in Germany. The key requirement is command of the German language. How do we get to that baseline? This year for the first time, a student from UMD interned at the City of Saerbeck working at its internationally known Bio-Energy Park. She is a graduate of the Twin Cities German Immersion School and effortlessly meets that baseline requirement.
Sabine Engel is the Director of International Partnerships at the Institute on the Environment