Michigan’s insane 25x25 proposition: A postmortem
Why Michigan voters wisely rejected the crazy idea of 25% electricity from renewables by 2025
Kevon Martis
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The Michigan Energy-Michigan Jobs (MEMJ) Proposal
3 – its 25 by 25 gambit – would have forced Michigan taxpayers and
ratepayers to produce 25 percent of the Wolverine State’s electricity
via expensive, unreliable, parasitic wind and solar projects by 2025.
The misguided program has now been laid to rest by the wisdom of Michigan’s voters. What can we learn by autopsying its corpse?
This
initiative was hardly local. It was driven by out-of-state pressure
groups like the Sierra Club that were backed by the League of
Conservation Voters, natural gas company Chesapeake Energy, and a number
of deep-pocketed elites. MEMJ itself was funded largely by the Green
Tech Action Fund of San Francisco; the Natural Resources Defense Fund of
New York, whose president is multi-millionaire Frances Beinecke; and
San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.
These
carpetbagger activists placed a bull’s-eye on Michigan ratepayers with
Proposal 3. Sierra Club was blunt: “If successful, the [Michigan] 25x25
initiative will send an important signal to the nation that public
desire to move toward green energy remains strong.”
The grassroots activists who defeated this proposal had no billionaire largesse to draw upon. They were united under the Interstate Informed Citizen’s Coalition,
a bipartisan renewable energy consumers watchdog group dependent on
small contributions to support its work and committed to advancing
sensible science-based energy policies and free market land use
policies.
Compelled
by the principle that industrial renewable energy schemes like Proposal
3 bring far more benefit to their invisible corporate cronies than to
the environment, IICC members traveled the state on their own dime to
speak out, protest, educate and inform. Their reward was sweet: they
took their message of science-based energy policy to the people, who
responded at the ballot box, soundly defeating Proposal 3 by 64-36
percent.
Using Sierra’s own test, Michigan ratepayers have shouted there is no such “public desire.”
In
fact, there is widespread opposition to mandating forest-denuding
biomass and massively expensive solar. But the hottest conflict focused
on industrial wind. Michigan wind projects have lost at the ballot box
virtually every time they have been put to the vote in a fair manner –
and by similar margins.
At
the township level, opposition to wind cronyism is just as strong. In
Lenawee County, Riga Township rejected wind-friendly zoning by 64-36
percent. Two more Lenawee Townships followed suit. In Huron County, Lake
Township removed a wind friendly ordinance by a similar 61-39 percent.
And in Clinton County townships are intent on adopting police power
regulations for wind energy installations, in defiance of too-permissive
county level zoning.
This
opposition is strongly bipartisan. Proposal 3 and its miles of wind
turbines were opposed by both the free market Americans for Prosperity and Michael Moore movie producer Jeff Gibbs.
The
ballot box evidence is clear. Michigan ratepayers from left to right
are emphatic that there is no “desire” for mandated and subsidized
industrial wind projects, in their backyard or anywhere in the State.
The
push for Prop 3 also broke the big utilities’ code of silence on wind
inefficacy. MEMJ unwittingly exposed CMS Energy’s duplicity on this
issue – observing that CMS praised its new Ludington area wind plant for
furnishing “reliable and affordable energy,” even as its public
relations surrogate Care for Michigan was calling wind “expensive and unreliable.” Unfortunately for MEMJ, the Care for Michigan version was the truth.
Opponents
of renewable energy have long pointed out that wind energy is parasitic
– totally dependent on fossil fuels for backup power, with every
megawatt of wind power supported by a megawatt of redundant coal or
natural gas generating plants. So wind cannot possibly or meaningfully
reduce emissions.
But
the utilities stood silent. Their beloved existing 10 percent renewable
mandate, PA295, restored their monopoly status and guaranteed them nice
profits, in exchange for a small number of renewable projects. They
were not interested in biting the legislative hand that was (and is)
feeding them.
But
Prop 3 brought all stick and no carrot for the utilities. They could no
longer remain silent. Out came the truth. Wind cannot replace fossil
fuel plants. Wind is not getting inexorably cheaper, but is far more
expensive than current generation and, minus the huge hidden subsidies,
more expensive than new coal. Wind cannot increase employment without
costing employment in other industries that get stuck with soaring
electricity bills. Wind energy cannot liberate us from foreign oil or
from out-of-state coal imports.
What
then did our autopsy discover? Michigan renewable energy mandates –
including PA295 – are doomed. Because of gluttonous overreach, they will
die by their own hand. Politicians need not fear public reprisal for
opposing and repealing renewable energy mandates. It is now safe for
lawmakers to acknowledge and act on the fact that renewables mandates
like PA 295 are of no benefit to ratepayers, employers or employees, and
are of dubious benefit to the environment.
Through
the failure of Proposal 3, Michigan wind has been dissected and
eviscerated by public opinion. The sooner our elected officials zip the
death bag shut and send the corpse out for burial, the sooner Michigan
can protect its rural areas from needless industrialization and our
energy intensive industries from rising electricity costs that
compromise their competitive edge.
Other states, and our federal government, should take note.
___________
Kevon Martis is Senior Policy Analyst for the Interstate Informed Citizen’s Coalition (www.iiccusa.org) in Blissfield, Michigan.
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