The future of Michigan energy: coal?

Michigan’s “Energy Package” says “No we can’t” to clean, renewable energy

It was supposed to be Michigan’s first step toward green energy: developing it, using it, creating a demand for green collar jobs, but according to wind power producers, the so-called Energy Package legislation in the state Senate is a “toothless” bill that lets DTE Energy and Consumers Power completely off the hook if they decide later that meeting the bill’s requirement of having 10 percent renewable power by 2015 is too inconvenient for them.

“As the bill stands now, if the utilities file papers for three extensions, they are in compliance. Forever. It’s a ridiculous law,” summed up Hans Detweiler, manager of state legislation for the American Wind Energy Association.

Detweiler has some perspective.
Twenty-six other states, including neighboring Ohio last month, beat Michigan to the punch by passing laws requiring their utilities to include clean, renewable energy in their future portfolios. Detweiler’s studied them all.

“It is quite a strange cocktail,” he says of the Michigan bill. “I haven’t seen anything like it in any other state.”

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm touted this very bill in her “State of the State” address in January, saying with wide eyes and in excitable tones that Michigan would recast itself as a manufacturing giant, making wind turbines, solar panels and hydrogen batteries. “Who’s with me?” she implored the lawmakers in the statehouse.

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In a letter Detweiller wrote to Granholm in May, he asked her to veto the House version of the bill if it passed in the Senate, writing, “