Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) announced $52 million in grants to expand broadband access to an estimated 7,700 homes and businesses throughout Minnesota. The grant awards will help broadband providers expand high-speed broadband service in 24 counties across Minnesota. The grants come from two Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) programs:

• $25 million from DEED's flagship Border-to-Border Broadband Program, through which broadband provider grantees are reimbursed for up to half the eligible cost of deploying broadband infrastructure, with funding for a single project capped at $10 million.
• $27 million from the Low Population Density Program, which offers grants to providers building broadband service to areas of Minnesota with particularly low population densities and high broadband deployment costs. The grants can be worth up to $10 million and cover up to 75% of the total cost of a project.

[See List of Border-to-Border Grantees by County and List of Low Population Density Grantees by County at the Link Below]

One of the unexpected consequences of Hurricane Helene is that it disrupted and shut down the high-quality quartz mines near Spruce Pine, North Carolina. This will cause a temporary disruption for the semiconductor industry. One of the most important steps in making silicon chips and key components for solar panels is to melt down a highly purified substance called polysilicon. This can only be done in crucibles that don’t react with the polysilicon, and the best material for making the crucibles is the ultra-pure quartz that is mined at Spruce Pine. One of the key characteristics of supply chain disruptions is that they are most often a big surprise. There is nobody who could have imagined the disruption of mining for ultra-pure quartz in western North Carolina. I’m sure that the folks running that mine would have sworn that such an event was unthinkable. What we’ve learned in recent years is that almost nothing is unthinkable anymore.