The Michigan Public Service Commission will hold a public hearing in Detroit Wednesday night to hear public comments on DTE Energy’s pending application to raise its rates.
The event on Wednesday will give residents a chance to weigh-in on DTE’s request, which was made in March. If approved, residents could see an average increase on their bills of about $11 per month.
Many customers have complained in recent months about frequent, long-lasting power outages. However, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has said the proposed rate hike is “excessive and unnecessary.”
The MPSC hearing will take place from 6-8 p.m. at Mumford High School, 17525 Wyoming St., Detroit.
The Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency is inviting Vietnam-era veterans to a ceremony at the Soul Harvest Cathedral in Highland Park on Thursday to recognize them with a special lapel pin.
The Detroit Tigers are working hard to make the Major League Baseball playoffs. The team is on a three-game winning streak and has won 8 of its last 10 games. They play the Royals tonight in Kansas City.
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That’s where battery technology comes into play. Batteries are used to store and transfer energy from solar panels and wind turbines. The problem with batteries is they’re expensive and can be dangerous. In some cases, people have died in explosions involving batteries in electric bikes.
To discuss the new facility and how battery technology works, Vice president and General Manager of Energy and Industrial Automation Milan Dotlich and Senior Vice President of Communications Kathy Fieweger joined The Metro.
Use the media player above to listen to the interview with Dotlich and Fieweger.
More headlines from The Metro on Aug. 29, 2024:
WDET’s comedy showcase “What’s so Funny about Detroit?” takes place at the Old Miami tonight! We’ll talk about the event, and some of the most interesting comedians in town with WDET’s Ryan Patrick Hooper.
Lots of music events are taking place this Labor Day weekend, including the Detroit Jazz Festival. Chris Collins, president of the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation, joined The Metro to share details about this year’s event.
The Hamtramck Labor Day Festival is also happening this weekend. To discuss the festival, we were joined by WDET’s Mike Latulippe and festival organizer John Szymanski, whose band The Hentchmen are playing at the festival with Jack White on Monday.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.
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The National Weather Service reported wind gusts of more than 75 miles per hour at Detroit Metro Airport Wednesday night, with high winds bringing down tree branches and causing power outages around the region.
DTE Energy reported more than 200,000 power outages Wednesday morning. Weather on Thursday is expected to be mostly dry and humid, with a high of 81 degrees. Thunderstorms are likely to return on Friday with heat indices ranging from the upper 80s to mid 90s.
Other headlines for Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024:
Outages on the Dearborn-Allen Park border caused problems for motorists trying to get to Detroit Metro Airport Wednesday morning.
Detroit has set up cooling centers to keep residents safe during the high temperatures that blanketed Detroit this week.
Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.
Trusted, accurate, up-to-date.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Michigan’s new climate laws require utilities to transition to entirely “clean” electricity sources by 2040. As the state’s Public Service Commission figures out what that will look like, it has to pay special attention to the Upper Peninsula and the natural gas plants that went online there just five years ago.
The U.P. is a huge area with many rural communities, and power can be unreliable. Over the years, some utility rates have been among the highest in the state and even the country.
But Chair Dan Scripps said when it comes to the energy transition, the region may have a leg up.
“Largely because of the hydroelectric assets — the dams across the Upper Peninsula — the Upper Peninsula actually gets a significant higher amount of its electricity from renewable resources than the rest of the state,” he said.
Energy crossroads
Transitions in the U.P. are nothing new.
In 2013, the iron ore mining company now called Cleveland-Cliffs switched from the coal-burning Presque Isle Power Plant to a different provider. (That was made possible by a 2008 law that allowed mining companies to choose where they got their energy.)
The Cliffs mining company was the Presque Isle plant’s biggest customer, using around 85% of the load. With federal pollution standards looming as well, the Wisconsin utility that ran the coal plant, We Energies, announced plans to shut it down.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages the region’s transmission, rejected those plans. MISO reasoned that it would destabilize the grid. And the cost of keeping the coal plant open was pushed onto customers in the U.P., hiking rates higher.
After years of wrangling between the state, feds, mining companies and utilities, the Public Service Commission agreed to replace coal with natural gas.
“This new gas-fired generation is a critical piece in shaping the future of energy supplies in the U.P. — a future that is cleaner, more reliable and affordable for U.P. residents and businesses,” said then-chair of the commission Sally Talberg in a 2017 news release.
The commission approved a plan to spend $277 million on two natural gas stations. It was proposed by Upper Michigan Energy Resources Corp., a U.P.-based subsidiary of the Wisconsin utility WEC Energy Group.
The plants are in Baraga and Marquette counties and hold a total of 10 reciprocating internal combustion engines, known as RICE units. They went online in 2019 and were built to last for decades, according to UMERC, which serves around 42,000 customers.
Scripps said the natural gas units “were put in place to solve a very specific concern, and in partnership with the largest customer — again, the mines in the Upper Peninsula.”
As part of that agreement, Cleveland-Cliffs pays back half of the $277 million over 20 years, and residents and businesses pay the rest.
Natural gas conundrum
If the utility keeps using those natural gas units as is, it might not be able to meet what’s required under Michigan’s clean energy law.
The legislationspecifically mentions these natural gas plants as a hurdle and directs the public service commission to figure out what to do.
According to Scripps, this might require a more flexible approach, like reducing or offsetting their emissions instead of shutting them down.
“How do you effectively get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 but maybe with more flexibility around carbon capture and that sort of thing,” he said, saying that reasoning has been used in other parts of the state.
The law allows for natural gas that’s paired with carbon capture and storage, when emissions are trapped and then stored deep underground, a technology that’s still being developed.
Burning natural gas generally emits less carbon dioxide than coal. But it’s still a fossil fuel made up mostly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And groups like the climate think tank RMI argue that many comparisons of coal and gas only consider end-use emissions, and don’t account for methane leaks during production or transportation. According to an RMI analysis published last year, those leaks can put the climate impacts of natural gas on par with coal.
Natural gas engines at one of Upper Michigan Energy Resources Corp.’s stations.
Reliability and cost
The Upper Peninsula’s instability — and the lack of affordable energy — can have serious consequences for people living there.
People in the U.P. say that “a squirrel sneezes and the power goes out,” according to Tori McGeshick, a member of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
McGeshick, who now lives in northern Wisconsin, works as a climate resilience coordinator for the tribe and the U.P. organizer for the advocacy group We the People MI. She wants energy decisions to include more input from tribal nations.
Unreliable power has had a profound effect on her community, McGeshick said, especially elders and people with specific medical needs in remote areas.
“A lot of my elders live like 15 to 20 miles on the outskirts of town, and they experience the outages the most. And a lot of the elders that I’ve spoken to have medical issues,” she said. “That’s when it just becomes a survival issue.”
For her, this process is about energy justice for the entire region.
“If you’re constantly raising the utility rates and expecting us to pay these rates, but then also not giving us the reliability that should come with it, then it’s a problem,” she said.
Some Yoopers are strongly in favor of keeping natural gas. During the commission’s public hearing in Marquette at the end of July, some said they’ve already footed the bill for the natural gas plants and that it was important to energy security.
“Access to affordable and reliable energy is key to keeping the Marquette Iron Range competitive and viable for another 177 years,” said Michael Grondz of Ishpeming, who works at the Cleveland-Cliffs Tilden mine and is the vice president of the United Steelworkers Local 4950. “Cleveland-Cliffs has made great progress to reduce emissions by replacing the Presque Isle Power Plant with the modern gas RICE generators, while reducing the cost and making local electricity supply more reliable for families like mine all over the Upper Peninsula.”
Others believe a compromise can be worked out, and don’t think the state’s laws necessarily need to change.
“Renewables continue to be more and more efficient,” said Abby Wallace, a member of the Michigan Environmental Council and a student at Northern Michigan University who spoke at the public hearing in July. “There are ways that the RICE units could be made more efficient themselves. And I think it’s premature to say that the U.P. in no way could meet the goals that the rest of the state are being held to in the legislation.”
And not everyone agrees that natural gas is key to energy security. Roman Sidortsov, an associate professor of energy policy at Michigan Technological University, said gas prices are variable and hard to predict.
“People tend to forget that fossil fuels, and oil and gas in particular, it’s incredibly volatile business,” he said. “There’s very little stability in the prices.”
Sidortsov, who was a member of the state’s U.P. Energy Task Force several years ago, said the U.P. deals with different environmental factors and customers than the rest of the state. And the grid was built to serve industries that aren’t as robust as they once were.
He thinks a lot of the region’s demand can be met with distributed generation — getting power through smaller, more localized sources of energy, something energy experts have discussed for years.
The model of large, centralized power plants has worked for the Lower Peninsula and other parts of the country, he said, “but it’s perhaps not the most efficient way to produce and deliver power when you are talking about the geography of the Upper Peninsula when the distances are vast.”
The Public Service Commission has to recommend what to do with the natural gas units and determine how feasible renewable energy is in the U.P. It must submit a report to the governor and legislature by December 1.
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At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is taking the opportunity to talk up the city’s plan to use previously blighted spaces as solar farms.
The city of Detroit’s climate strategy calls for a transition to clean renewable energy by 2034. City officials say the Solar Neighborhoods initiative is the first step toward achieving that goal.
The program aims to create 200 acres of solar arrays to generate enough clean energy to power all 127 of the city’s municipal buildings. While the project will not directly affect residents electric bills, Duggan says, the solar farms could potentially cut the city’s power bill by more than 50%.
Three solar farms are expected to be online in the city within the next year.
I was able to speak with Duggan at the convention about the city’s solar project, as well as the future of transit in Michigan and the growing excitement around the new Democratic presidential ticket.
Listen: Duggan talks public transit, city’s solar program at DNC
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Mike Duggan: The U.S. Conference of Mayors has asked me to speak at a number of events for other mayors that relate to climate change, and I think the reason is that the eyes of the country are now on Detroit, with the adoption last month of City Council, the plan to take 200 blighted acres of the city and turn them into solar fields to power all city-owned buildings.
Russ McNamara: Has there been some pushback from residents who would rather have more houses near them than solar fields?
MD: No, the residents were overwhelmingly supportive. That’s how we got this passed. So we allowed the residents of the community to pick the areas they wanted in their areas, basically they have maybe one occupied block per house that weren’t going to be coming back for decades; and the adjoining homeowners who stayed are getting $15,000 a house for energy efficiency upgrades for their houses — new furnaces, new hot water heaters, new windows. And so the community, neighbors came out overwhelmingly for this, and now we’re moving forward.
RM: Has this works in other cities, or is Detroit on the cutting edge?
MD: You’ve had two or three cities that have built solar fields out in farmland, 30-40 [miles] — in Chicago’s case, 200 miles outside of city, which is a step in the right direction. We’re the first city to step up and say, “We don’t need to go build in a farmland in somebody else’s community. Let’s take responsibility for moving off fossil fuels to renewables for city buildings right within our own city. And the people of Detroit have embraced that.
RM: You’ve mentioned the environmentally friendly upgrades. What are the benefits when it comes to the electrical bill of a Detroit resident?
MD: It won’t have a long-term effect on the electric bill. So all that’s going to happen is right now, the city is spending something like eight or $9 million a year to our energy provider to provide the energy. Instead, those costs will be offset somewhat by the renewable energy that we produce, so it will probably come out about the same. This is not necessarily to reduce the energy bill, but this is to have Detroit show that we don’t just have to talk about goals in 2035 or 2050, we’re a city that’s actually taking action on climate change,
RM: Is the city going to be in charge of maintenance?
MD: So we have two providers — one is our local energy provider, DTE, and the second is a Boston-based solar panel company called Lightstar. So each of them will be building about 100 acres of solar fields. They’ll have long-term leases for us, and we will then purchase that energy from them.
RM: What else can the city do to reduce the environmental impact? Because you know, cities — especially one as old as Detroit — are not necessarily built for changing green technology.
MD: No and so we have already converted all of our municipal parking fleet — the people who write your parking tickets — have all been converted over to electric vehicles. Our buses are now being converted to both electric and hydrogen. And the thing that I’m most focused on at the moment is building up a vehicle charging grid, because now we have General Motors with several thousand workers building the electric vehicles at Factory ZERO in Detroit, and they’re saying to me, “we want to make sure that people who buy the new electric vehicles aren’t anxious about whether they’ll be able to charge them.” And so over the next year or so, you’re going to see the city of Detroit build out a network on our main streets of chargers.
RM: I just got done talking with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. She talked about one of the legislative priorities being changes to the SOAR fund, putting more money towards public transit. Do you see the city of Detroit like being flexible with that and wanting to work with the state to build out new public transit? We’re in Chicago right now where, and all I’ve done is ride the L this week.
MD: Yeah, we are completely supportive of the proposal. I hope they can get it through the legislature. So it’s been frustrating that our legislators haven’t been able to get it passed, but we support it 100%.
RM: Any changes to Detroit public transit?
MD: Again, depends on what version of the bill passes, but in the city what would be very helpful is to add bus rapid transit to have routes with more frequent service with bumped out boarding sites that would go quickly; potentially passing lanes would get you around backups at red lights and the like. So we have a significant plan to expand it, but the legislature has been talking about funding transit for most of my lifetime, so it’d be good if they actually stopped talking about it and passed it.
RM: A Democrat is in control of Oakland County — long gone are the days of L Brooks Patterson. Is this a regional plan, or do you think Detroit might have to go on its own?
MD: Oh, no. Dave Coulter has been a terrific leader on transit. In fact, he and I and Warren Evans — county executive of Wayne County — have been on this plan for quite a while, so we would like nothing better than to see that happen.
RM: You’re a delegate for the Michigan Democratic Party. So are you even kind of getting a little bit of whiplash after everything that’s happened over the past two months?
MD: I think I would say there’s more enthusiasm than anything else. Joe Biden was great for the city of Detroit — I think he was great for the country. But when he made the decision that I think was right for him and right for the country to step aside, there is a different level of excitement and energy and all the stuff that you were hearing from Trump about how Joe Biden is too old, you know now Donald Trump’s the president who can’t hold a press conference without meandering from subject to subject and getting names wrong and facts wrong. So it’ll be a different kind of a campaign, and think we feel very good about Kamala Harris and a lot of Michigan folks feel very good about Tim Walz — somebody that many Midwesterners can identify with.
Use the media player above to listen to the interview with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
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