Above, Michigan Governor and rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer’s remarks just before signing a suite of new energy legislation.
Michigan is set to become the third state in the Midwest and twelfth in the country to require a shift to clean electricity.
Of all those states, Michigan is one of the most ambitious because of the extent of the change it is making.
Michigan’s target year for reaching 100 percent clean electricity is 2040, which is as soon or sooner than every state except for Rhode Island. (The bill that would do this is heading to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk for an expected signature, as Aydali Campa and I wrote this week.)
And, Michigan is starting from a place of having unusually dirty electricity, with nearly two-thirds of its current supply coming from fossil fuels.
To better understand this, I spoke with Jacob Corvidae of RMI, the clean energy research and advocacy group. He walked me through an analysis of the Michigan legislation in the Energy Policy Simulator, an open source forecasting tool put together by RMI and the think tank Energy Innovation.
I asked him to compare Michigan with Minnesota, a state that passed a clean electricity requirement in February, and Illinois, which passed its law in 2021.
All three states made leaps forward with their laws, but Michigan stands out for the “huge shift” it is making, Corvidae said with some state pride. He was born in Detroit and raised in the Detroit area and in a small town near Ann Arbor. He got his undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College and has had several stints doing clean energy advocacy and analysis work in the state.
In 2022, Michigan got 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and 23 percent from nuclear power, according to RMI. With those two together, the state got 38 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources. (Note that these percentages are slightly different than the ones from the Energy Information Administration, which I often cite, because of variations in counting methods.)
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Despite having different starting points, Michigan and Minnesota would both aim to reach their goals by 2040 and Illinois has a target year of 2045.
I asked Corvidae what I may be missing in observing that Michigan has chosen a heavy lift, while this looks easy for Illinois.
One point to remember, he said, is that Illinois is larger than the other two states in terms of electricity generation, so even if it has a smaller share of coal and natural gas power plants to phase out, it still has a lot of those plants and will need to find ways to affordably and reliability replace the electricity.
Minnesota has some advantages as it reaches for clean electricity goals. A big one is that its largest utility, Xcel Energy, was the first major utility in the country to commit to get to net-zero emissions, and the company was already five years down the road of implementing its plan when Minnesota passed the clean energy law.
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I’m focusing on the three Midwestern states because the transition to clean energy in this region is a vital part of the country’s transition. Midwestern states are some of the most dependent on fossil fuels and they are closer to the political center than states in the Northeast and the West Coast.Once the transition gains momentum in the Midwest, it’s a sign that these kinds of policies have reached the mainstream.
“This is heartland policy,” Corvidae said, about the three states’ energy policies. “And I think that really signals that this is because hearts and minds are changing, people’s understanding of the challenges and possibilities are changing, and the economics have changed. And I think it is a pretty major emblem of that change.”
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There’s no question the new laws have kicked over a hornet’s nest of right wing angst about green globalist plots as well as a coordinated disinformation campaign lead by fossil funded “Think tanks” and Republicans who just plain hate Gretchen Whitmer and can’t stand to see her succeed.
But in many ways, this is a critical battlefield, and Michigan’s ability to take on this heavy lift in the industrial heartland, both technically and politically, will be an indicator of how much hope, if any, is left in the battle to save a livable planet.
The real work starts now – stay tuned.
Governor Whitmer tried to stop the closure of Palisades nuclear plant in 2022 (though she came very late to the party). However, Holtec, the company that bought the plant from Entergy to decommission it, has since decided to not only restart Palisades (which would be a first for a closed plant in the US), but also to build two new 300MW small modular reactors, of its own design, on the same site. Taken together, that would increase nuclear generation in Michigan by nearly 50%. Palisades had a 99.2% capacity factor in its last full year of operation.