DTE Monroe Plant. Photo by Analicia Hazelby, AMH Creative, LLC.
For those who care about clean energy and climate justice in Michigan, 2022 was filled with meaningful progress.
As a direct result of Sierra Club’s legal interventions and public advocacy, Michigan’s largest utilities are moving beyond coal toward clean energy and making deeper investments in efficiency and storage.
- Consumers Energy committed to building 8 GigaWatts (GW) of renewables and retiring their J.H. Campbell plant in 2025, 15 years earlier than previously planned. They also rejected three gas plants, expedited their energy storage buildout and provided over $30 million in shareholder money for low-income bill assistance.
- DTE gave $8 million to Environmental Justice (EJ) community projects and retired their River Rouge, St. Clair and Trenton Channell coal plants. The utility recently proposed building more than 15 GW of renewables, repowering their Belle River coal plant to gas in 2026 (was scheduled to retire in 2028) and retiring two units of the Monroe coal plant in 2028 (12 years earlier than previously planned). However, they plan to keep burning coal at the other two Monroe units until 2035.
- Both DTE and Consumers Energy were persuaded to do better at addressing energy burden disparities, specifically in Detroit and Flint.
Sierra Club helped Michigan’s municipal utilities and governments make progress too.
- After years of public organizing, Grand Haven’s Board of Light and Power abandoned its proposed gas plant and is finally starting to address the legacy of toxic pollution at Harbor Island.
- In November, the Lansing Board of Water and Light retired its last coal-burning plant, the Erickson Power Station.
- In December, the Michigan South Central Power Agency terminated its gas plant proposal because it was too expensive.
- Oakland County passed a transit millage and allocated funding to build out its Sustainability Unit.
- Ann Arbor passed a climate millage to fund programs to help achieve economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2030.
Overlapping all of this:
- Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Council on Climate Solutions finalized their MI Healthy Climate Plan to achieve statewide net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and included moving beyond coal by 2030.
- Federal elected officials passed the Inflation Reduction Act. While it has flaws, it remains the nation’s single largest clean energy and climate investment in history and is expected to dramatically speed up the decarbonization of the power, transportation and building sectors.
Thank you to all the Sierra Club members who supported our efforts this year! Next year, we’ll focus on pushing the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to improve DTE’s recently filed energy plan. Strong turnout at the hearing on December 12 was a good start for holding DTE accountable for substantive climate improvements, including many who testified calling for the shut down of the Monroe coal-burning plant, the third largest climate polluter in the nation.
Want to learn more or get involved? Take action here or email mike.berkowitz@sierraclub.org.