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When Ric Evans won a Board of Directors seat at Great Lakes Energy three years ago, it marked the first time a pro-renewables candidate joined the co-op’s board. Now he's seeking re-election. We asked him about his initial stint as a GLE board member, the...
Charlie Weaver, who was once a special education teacher and now guides anglers down the Manistee and Au Sable rivers in northwest Lower Michigan, is pursuing a new career. This resident of the Manistee River Valley in Kalkaska County’s Bear Lake Township...
Energy—how it’s made and how it’s used—affects everyone, particularly with rising fuel costs and growing environmental concerns. So understanding and doing something about it is appealing, particularly if it also involves fun. That’s why Michigan Energy F...
Solar advocates and staff from Michigan’s two largest utilities are mulling over a draft report that suggests ways the state could start catching up with the nation’s accelerating, jobs-rich boom in roof-top solar energy without raising customers’ rates s...
All the slide shows and presentations are handed in; advocates and opponents have made and rested their cases; and the state’s Solar Working Group has had its last meeting on the future of sun power in Michigan. Now it’s the Michigan Public Service Commis...
The SWG holds its last information-gathering meeting May 20 before the state issues a draft report in June that could recommend new ways to develop more customer-owned, rooftop solar power in Michigan. The meeting might be contentious: It features a prese...
As work group meetings continue, interviews with solar panel owners confirmed that they are glad they built their systems, but have suggestions for improving the utilities’ solar pilots and the state’s net metering rules....
Five years ago, when DTE Energy and Consumers Energy launched small pilot programs offering premium rates to customers for power from their solar panels, Oak Electric and Four Elements Energy became very busy installing solar systems on homes and small bu...
Representatives of Michigan’s two largest utilities, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, made their first presentation to the state’s solar work group, and expressed little enthusiasm for expanding the use of customer-generated, jobs-producing, clean solar e...
Karl Rábago's crowning achievement, so far, is his success at Austin Energy, where he parlayed an obscure phrase—Value of Solar—into a guiding principal that helped the public electric utility’s customers “go solar,” big-time. Value of Solar shows in exac...
About 40 energy experts gathered in Lansing last week for their second discussion about ways the state’s top utilities can spur more solar power development in Michigan, which is now well behind many other states in deploying the booming clean-energy tech...
A specially assembled “solar work group” of state regulators, officials from the state’s two largest utilities, and clean-energy business advocates is considering ways to deploy more solar energy in Michigan that help, not hurt the firms’ bottom lines; pr...
Hundreds of people turned out last week to pepper local officials and employees of Enbridge, Inc. about the 60-year-old oil pipeline running under the Mackinac Straits. They wanted to know what's being done to prevent underwater leaks, and how a rupture w...
Officials and dozens of residents in Holland, Mich., are working to implement a Community Energy Plan after the city began approving work groups for the effort in August 2012. The CEP, would, among many other things, expand the snowmelt district and chann...
Clean energy advocates weren’t expecting a whole lot from Gov. Snyder on energy issues during his State of the State address. But we were at least hopeful, given the pre-speech scuttlebutt, that he would say something substantive and positive about them. ...
The problem that supporters of the proposed 600-megawatt plant never recognized was this: Planet Earth is not a perfect place to build a coal plant. Coal is too dirty; it has become too expensive to mine, ship, and burn; and it is the number-one source of...
Sparked by strong initial success, Traverse City’s residential efficiency program, TCSaves, is again offering city residents a path to a more comfortable home that uses less energy. The communitywide effort, dormant since last spring, has a new goal, a ne...
State utility regulators are considering a historic case that could help determine how much clean energy Michigan’s second-largest electric utility develops over the next 25 years....
The Snyder administration’s latest—and last—draft report on Michigan’s energy future says what it should: The state’s five-year-old energy efficiency mandate, known as Energy Optimization, is not only working well, there’s plenty of room for utilities to ...
There are lots of happy faces around our office since the Snyder administration released its draft report on renewable energy. Based on last winter’s energy forums, it says we can get to 30 percent renewable energy by 2035 without straining the power grid...
