The Upper Peninsula Energy Task Force held its final meeting on Tuesday, making the last revisions to the recommendations it will submit to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer later this month.
Whitmer tasked the group with identifying ways to make heating and electricity more reliable and affordable in the UP.
In one of the last changes to the recommendations, Jenn Hill, a Marquette City Commissioner and contractor with Citizens Utility Board of Michigan, suggested highlighting the cost of getting heat from propane and electricity from the Upper Peninsula Power Company.
Hill said many of the public comments she read expressed frustration with the price of utilities, especially electricity purchased from the Upper Peninsula Power Company. Task force chair and state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy Director Liesl Clark agreed.
“The comments tended to focus on the cost issue and the issue of UPPCO. We could maybe summarize that. That would be a way of making sure it’s right there at the front of the report,” Hill said.
“I think that’s a really good point,” Clark responded.
The recommendations also ask the state to pursue “energy justice.”
Getting that language included was “a significant achievement,” said Michigan Technical University Assistant Professor Roman Sidortsov, who proposed its introduction.
Energy justice, Sidortsov said, aims to understand how various groups of people are affected differently by energy production and consumption.
The harms of reliance on propane are not equitably distributed through the UP’s population, for example, and the difficulty of transitioning to renewable energy sources will not be felt the same by everyone, said Sidortsov.
Some UP residents depend on a potentially unreliable propane supply for heat during the winter, and Upper Peninsula Power customers pay the highest residential electricity rates in the state, said task force member David Camps, who owns Blue Terra Energy in Hancock.
Shifting to more reliable and sustainable sources of energy could be difficult in the short term, but beneficial in the long term, he said.
“There’s a lot of issues about the changes coming. There’s pain that’s involved in that, but … there’s so much value in some of these changes that can be implemented.”
