A new contract between Kalamazoo, Michigan, and utility Consumers Energy signals a change in direction for the city’s clean energy strategy as it seeks to become carbon neutral by 2040.
Solar was seen as a pillar of the city’s plans when it declared a climate emergency in 2019 and set a goal of zeroing out carbon emissions by 2040. After spending years exploring its options, though, the Michigan city is tempering a vision for rooftop solar in favor of large, more distant solar projects built and owned by the utility. It’s not alone either, with Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Muskegon and other cities taking a similar approach.
“Folks want to see solar panels on parking lots and buildings, but there’s no way as a city we can accomplish our net-zero buildings just putting solar panels on a roof,” said Justin Gish, Kalamazoo’s sustainability planner. “Working with the utility seemed to make the most sense.”
Initially there was skepticism, Gish said — “environmentalists tend to not trust utilities and large corporate entities” — but the math just didn’t work out for going it alone with rooftop solar.
The city’s largest power user, the wastewater treatment station, has a pumping house with a roof of only 225 square feet. Kalamazoo’s largest city-owned roof, at the public service station, is 26,000 square feet. Spending an estimated $750,000 to cover that with solar would only provide 14% of the power that building uses annually — a financial “non-starter,” he said.
So the city decided to partner with Consumers Energy, joining a solar subscription program wherein Kalamazoo will tell Consumers how much solar energy it wants, starting in 2028, and the utility will use funds from its subscription fee to construct new solar farms, like a 250 MW project Consumers is building in Muskegon.
Under the 20-year contract, Kalamazoo will pay a set rate of 15.8 cents per kWh — 6.4 cents more than what it currently pays — for 43 million kWh of solar power per year. If electricity market rates rise, the city will save money, and Kalamazoo receives Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to help meet its energy goals.
The subscription is expected to eliminate about 80% of Kalamazoo’s emissions from electricity, Gish said. The electricity used to power streetlights and traffic signals couldn’t be covered since it is not metered. As the city acquires more electric vehicles — it currently has two — electricity demand may increase, but city leaders hope to offset any increases by improving energy efficiency of city buildings.
Consumers Energy spokesperson Matt Johnson said the company relies “in part” on funds from customers specifically to build solar, and considers it a better deal for cities than building it themselves, “which would be more costly for them, and they have to do their own maintenance.”
“We can do it in a more cost-effective way, we maintain it, they’re helping us fund it and do it in the right way, and those benefits get passed on to arguably everybody,” Johnson said.
Grand Rapids, Michigan, joined the subscription program at the same time as Kalamazoo. Corporate customers including 7-Eleven, Walmart and General Motors are part of the same Consumers Energy solar subscription program, as is the state of Michigan.
Costs and benefits
“There’s a growing movement of cities trying to figure out solar — ‘Yes we want to do this, it could save us money over time, but the cost is prohibitive,’” said John Farrell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
Until the Inflation Reduction Act, cities couldn’t directly access federal tax credits. The direct-pay incentives under the IRA have simplified financing, Farrell said, but cities still face other financial and logistical barriers, such as whether they have sufficient rooftop space.
Advocates acknowledge deals with utilities may be the most practical way for budget-strapped cities to move the needle on clean energy, but they emphasize that cities should also strive to develop their own solar, and question whether utilities should charge more for clean power that is increasingly a cheaper option than fossil fuels.
“Our position is rooftop and distributed generation is best — it’s best for the customers, in this case the cities; it’s best for the grid, because you’re putting those resources directly on the grid where it’s needed most; and it’s best for the planet because it can deploy a lot faster,” said John Delurey, Midwest deputy director of the advocacy group Vote Solar. “I believe customers in general and perhaps cities in particular should exhaust all resources and opportunities for distributed generation before they start to explore utility-scale resources. It’s the lowest hanging fruit and very likely to provide the most bang for their buck.”
Utility-scale solar is more cost-effective per kilowatt, but Delurey notes that when a public building is large enough for solar, “you are putting that generation directly on load, you’re consuming onsite. Anything that is concurrent consumption or paired with a battery, you are getting the full retail value of that energy. That is a feature you can’t really beat no matter how good the contract is with some utility-scale projects that are farther away.”
Delurey also noted that Michigan law mandates all energy be from clean sources by 2040; and 50% by 2030. That means Consumers needs to be building or buying renewable power, whether or not customers pay extra for it.
“So there are diminishing returns [to a subscription deal] at that point,” Delurey said. “You better be getting a price benefit, because the power on their grid would be clean anyways.”
“Some folks are asking ‘Why do anything now? Just wait until Consumers cleans up the grid,’” Gish acknowledged. “But our purchase shows we have skin in the game.”
A complement to rooftop
In 2009, Milwaukee adopted a goal of powering 25% of city operations — excluding waterworks — with solar by 2025. The city’s Climate and Equity Plan adopted in 2023 also enshrined that goal.
For a decade, Milwaukee has been battling We Energies over the city’s plan to install rooftop solar on City Hall and other buildings through a third-party owner, Eagle Point Solar. The city sought the arrangement — common in many states — to tap federal tax incentives that a nonprofit public entity couldn’t reap. But We Energies argued that third party ownership would mean Eagle Point would be acting as a utility and infringing on We Energies’ territory. A lawsuit over Milwaukee’s plans with Eagle Point is still pending.
In 2018, We Energies launched a pilot solar program in Milwaukee known by critics as “rent a roof,” in which the utility leased rooftop space for its own solar arrays. Advocates and Milwaukee officials opposed the program, arguing that it encouraged the utility to suppress the private market or publicly-owned solar. In 2023, the state Public Service Commission denied the utility’s request to expand the program.
Wisconsin Citizens Utility Board opposed the rent-a-roof arrangement since it passed costs they viewed as unfair on to ratepayers. But Wisconsin CUB executive director Tom Content said the city’s current partnership with We Energies is different, since it is just the city, not ratepayers, footing the cost for solar that helps the city meet its goals.
Solar panels atop Milwaukee’s Central Library. Credit: City of Milwaukee
Milwaukee is paying about $84,000 extra per year for We Energies to build solar farms on a city landfill near the airport and outside the city limits in the town of Caledonia. The deal includes a requirement that We Energies hire underemployed or unemployed Milwaukee residents.
The Caledonia project is nearly complete, and will provide over 11 million kWh of energy annually, “enough to make 57 municipal police stations, fire stations, and health clinics 100% renewable electricity,” said Milwaukee Environmental Collaboration Office director Erick Shambarger.
The landfill project is slated to break ground in 2025. The two arrays will total 11 MW and provide enough power for 83 city buildings, including City Hall – where Milwaukee had hoped to do the rooftop array with Eagle Point.
Meanwhile Milwaukee is building its own rooftop solar on the Martin Luther King Jr. library and later other public buildings, and Shambarger said they will apply for direct pay tax credits made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act — basically eliminating the need for a third-party agreement.
“Utility-scale is the complement to rooftop,” said Shambarger. “They own it and maintain it, we get the RECs. It worked out pretty well. If you think about it from a big picture standpoint, to now have the utility offer a big customer like the city an option to source their power from renewable energy — that didn’t exist five years ago. If you were a big customer in Wisconsin five years ago, you really had no option except for buying RECs from who knows where. We worked hard with them to make sure we could see our renewable energy being built.”
We Energies already owns a smaller 2.25 MW solar farm on the same landfill, under a similar arrangement. Building solar on the landfill is less efficient than other types of land, since special mounting is needed to avoid puncturing the landfill’s clay cap, and the panels can’t turn to follow the sun. But Shambarger said the sacrifice is worth it to have solar within the city limits, on land useful for little else.
“We do think it’s important to have some of this where people can see it and understand it,” he said. “We also have the workforce requirements, it’s nice to have it close to home for our local workers.”
Madison is also pursuing a mix of city-owned distributed solar and utility-scale partnerships.
On Earth Day 2024, Madison announced it has installed 2 MW of solar on 38 city rooftops. But a utility-scale solar partnership with utility MGE is also crucial to the goal of 100% clean energy for city operations by 2030. Through MGE’s Renewable Energy Rider program, Madison helped pay for the 8 MW Hermsdorf Solar Fields on a city landfill, with 5 MW devoted to city operations and 3 MW devoted to the school district. The 53-acre project went online in 2022.
Farrell said such “all of the above” approaches are ideal.
“The lesson we’ve seen generally is the more any entity can directly own the solar project, the more financial benefit you’ll get,” he said. “Ownership comes with privileges, and with risks.
“Energy is in addition to a lot of other challenging issues that cities have to work on. The gold standard is solar on a couple public buildings with battery storage, so these are resiliency places if the grid goes down.”
Correction: Covering Kalamazoo’s public service station roof with solar panels would provide an estimated 14% of power used by that building. An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the number.
AUBURN HILLS, Mich.-Continental today announced the sale of Zonar, a leading smart fleet management provider, to GPS Trackit, an industry pioneer in cloud-based, IoT fleet solutions and GPS tracking. Details of the transaction, including financial terms, are not being disclosed.
The deal follows Continental’s Group Sector Automotive strategy, announced last year, centered around focusing on its core strengths and streamlining its business operations.
“The decision to sell Zonar is part of our broader automotive strategy to sharpen our focus and enhance our fundamental strengths,” said Philipp von Hirschheydt, Member of the Executive Board and Head of Automotive. “As the market continues to evolve, our focus on value creation is the cornerstone of our strategic efforts. Continental is committed to leveraging innovation and operational excellence to strengthen its position in the marketplace by further investing in its core competencies to prioritize its growth.”
Zonar, founded in 2001, is headquartered in Seattle, Washington with more than 300 employees. It has pioneered smart mobility solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit, and commercial trucking industries. The Zonar mission is to enhance the safety, performance, and success of its customers with actionable, innovative, and AI-enabled insights.
“We are thrilled to welcome Zonar to the GPS Trackit family. This acquisition represents a significant step forward in our mission to deliver innovative, customer-focused fleet management solutions,” said Charles Kriete, CEO, GPS Trackit. “By combining our strengths, such as our best-in-class video platform, with Zonar’s advanced technologies and industry expertise, we are poised to create unparalleled value for our customers and further disrupt the market as two industry leaders in overall customer satisfaction. We look forward to building on the Zonar legacy of excellence and driving transformative growth together.”
Continental develops pioneering technologies and services for sustainable and connected mobility of people and their goods. Founded in 1871, the technology company offers safe, efficient, intelligent and affordable solutions for vehicles, machines, traffic and transportation. In 2023, Continental generated sales of €41.4 billion, and currently employs around 200,000 people in 56 countries and markets.
Election Day yielded few bright spots for the transition to clean energy, but there was one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The city of nearly 120,000 voted 79 percent in favor of a measure to create a “sustainable energy utility” (SEU) that will supplement the existing grid and help residents shift to cleaner, more reliable energy.
With that overwhelming approval, city officials will now figure out the governance, staffing, and leadership of the new local utility. They have already begun outreach to residents interested in participating; 600 customers had registered by Tuesday afternoon. The plan is to assemble an initial tranche of 20 megawatts worth of demand, at which point Ann Arbor will finance the purchase and installation of solar panels, batteries, and energy-efficiency upgrades to serve those customers.
Installations — on homes, sheds, schools, libraries — could happen in the next 18 to 24 months, Mayor Christopher Taylor told Canary Media. Longer term, the utility hopes to construct a district-level geothermal network to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels.
“I’m incredibly gratified by the support that voters of Ann Arbor have given to the SEU,” Taylor said. “The SEU is going to be both great for our carbon future and great for the pocketbook.”
The effort to fast-track local clean energy installations serves Ann Arbor’s ambitious climate goals. But it’s also a response to an uptick in power outages as extreme weather collides with for-profit utility DTE’s aging distribution-grid infrastructure. Monopoly utilities, for the most part, have shown little interest in seizing the opportunities of decentralized energy, but that’s core to the new Ann Arbor utility’s mission.
The measure’s success marks the latest episode in a sporadic national trend of communities trying to break free from the century-old model of for-profit, monopoly utilities controlling local energy systems.
Such efforts typically provoke a scorched-earth response from the incumbent utility. Utilities elsewhere have waged lengthy legal battles and spent millions of dollars on political campaigns to stop these escape attempts. When localities win their energy autonomy, they often have to pay hefty exit fees as a reimbursement for grid infrastructure built on their behalf. Communities that make it through that ringer then have to shoulder the laborious task of operating and maintaining decades-old infrastructure while trying to push ahead with new technologies.
In a bracing and punchily worded 2021 report, Ann Arbor’s sustainability office made clear that it would take a different route.
“Every dollar we don’t spend in litigation or to buy the [investor owned utility]’s old, failing infrastructure is money we can spend on new infrastructure here in Ann Arbor to generate power, distribute power, and store power — dollars we can use to immediately provide reliable, clean, and affordable public power to everyone,” the city wrote.
In short, it’s a distributed energy wish list coming to life. Ann Arbor has created a clear pathway to building more clean, local, resilient, and publicly owned infrastructure. If the city can make electricity cheaper on top of that, it will demonstrate that a better electricity system is possible even without completely overhauling the existing utility industry.
Local action for local needs
In 2019, Ann Arbor set a 2030 deadline to deliver equitable, community-wide carbon neutrality. Meeting that target requires sourcing clean electricity, driving out fossil-fuel combustion in buildings, and cleaning up transportation.
But the city’s built environment poses some challenges. Ann Arbor spans about 49,000 households, 52 percent of which are rentals. Overall housing stock averages 48 years old. That necessitates a lot of retrofits to turn these buildings into efficient systems running on clean electricity.
The SEU thus prioritizes energy-efficiency upgrades for customers. Unlike a for-profit utility, the municipally owned nonprofit has no incentive to let customers keep wasting energy. Ann Arbor aims to make efficiency more accessible with tools like on-bill financing, “structured to match or be lower than the monthly utility bill savings, resulting in a positive cash-flow for the customer immediately,” per the 2021 report.
The utility can buy equipment like solar panels and batteries in bulk and finance these upgrades with its AAA municipal credit rating, accessing far cheaper capital than a bunch of lone homeowners negotiating separately with private lenders. And the on-bill charge stays with the house — if someone moves out, the new resident takes over paying for the improvements that will lower their bill.
Climate goals weren’t the only factor motivating the change. The area’s aging grid has suffered a number of outages lately.
“Ann Arbor is currently served by an investor-owned utility that has a history of reliability challenges in our area,” Taylor noted. “We expect the SEU to provide far more reliable service.”
The SEU plans to install and own solar panels on customers’ rooftops and batteries in their sheds and garages, selling those customers the power at cost, without a markup. That lets residents access solar power and backup power without dropping a load of cash up front for it or taking on debt. This kind of subscription is available from companies like Sunrun, but they do it to make money, not to sell at cost.
The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.
But Ann Arbor officials tracked down a century-old precedent that makes sharing power possible: “The Michigan Constitution preserves the rights of cities and villages to form their own utility or to supplement an existing utility,” Missy Stults, the city’s sustainability and innovation director, told me.
Thus, the SEU will link up different properties if the people living there want it. If a home generates more solar than it can use, it could run a line to a neighboring house that’s shaded by trees, allowing it to buy surplus power.
“We’ll be able to connect homes with each other, schools with homes, schools with each other,” Taylor said. “We’re going to do this in a way that is cost-effective and fully opt-in.”
This plan assumes people will be happy to offer up their roof space for panels that the SEU will own and use for broader community benefit. But doing so will let that household buy cheaper, cleaner power for itself. The battery controls present some additional complications: Will the host customer get first dibs on backup power, or will that be split among the locally connected homes as well? This is new territory for distributed energy in the U.S.
That said, the strong show of support at the ballot box demonstrates the local community is fully on board with the general direction of the SEU. It’s no accident that this idea is coming to fruition in a college town like Ann Arbor, said Liesl Clark, a former state climate leader who now serves as director of climate action engagement at the University of Michigan.
“There are a lot of people who are innovative and also are interested in having agency,” she said. “It is a community that was ripe for a solution like this.”
Furthermore, the city structured the plan in a way to minimize any downside for residents who don’t want to jump on the decentralized power opportunity.
“You haven’t asked me how much it’s going to cost the taxpayer,” Taylor told me as I was about to wrap up our phone call. He answered the rhetorical question: “Nothing!”
That pledge veers into too-good-to-be-true territory, but the SEU structure makes it possible. The city won’t levy any new taxes because it’s not buying out DTE’s assets. Instead, it’s installing new equipment based on voluntary customer commitments, and those customers pay their way, while saving themselves money.
Breaking free from utilities without all the hassle
The outcome of this effort remains far from certain. But so far, Ann Arbor has managed to pursue a low-drama, low-conflict way to break up with a monopoly utility, in contrast to high-profile recent attempts elsewhere.
The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously fought for a decade to peel off from Xcel Energy, and ultimately gave up. In 2010, California mega-utility PG&E spent $46 million to make it harder for communities to source their own electricity, though even that gargantuan sum failed to stop the rise of community choice aggregators.
Maine has grappled for years with its deeply unpopular monopoly utilities. Last year, voters nonetheless soundly rejected a ballot referendum to seize utility assets under a new public power entity. The utilities spent $40 million to fight it, and independent experts raised concerns about how the public entity would deliver on promises of a cheaper, more efficient grid after saddling itself with billions of dollars of debt.
Activists in Ann Arbor have also pushed for full municipalization — a city-level version of what Maine considered and rejected. The city is working on a second study to dig into the details of what purchasing the grid infrastructure would entail. That conversation will continue as the SEU implementation moves forward, Taylor noted.
For its part, Michigan utility DTE hasn’t declared war on Ann Arbor. Following the vote, the company stated that it will continue to invest in making the city’s grid more resilient and clean — a recent Michigan climate law requires ramping to 60 percent renewable power by 2035 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2040.
The public interest in full municipalization may explain the muted response from the utility: The SEU allows DTE to go on with business as usual, and its distribution grid will continue to play a crucial role even if kilowatt-hour sales decline from the new local solar generation.
Instead of fighting the utility colossus head on, Ann Arbor is taking a live-and-let-live approach. It’s a case where avoiding head-on conflict could make it possible to deliver the benefits of clean, local energy far more quickly.
Dearborn, Michigan, was at the heart of auto industry innovation during the days of the Model T Ford.
Now clean energy and environmental justice advocates are proposing that the city play a lead role in greening the auto industry, through a transformation of the Dearborn Works steel mill to “green steel” — a steelmaking process powered by hydrogen and renewable energy with drastically lower emissions than a traditional blast furnace.
The blast furnace at Dearborn Works is due for relining in 2027, at an estimated cost of $470 million. Advocates argue that instead of prolonging the blast furnace’s life, its owner, Cleveland Cliffs, should invest another $2 billion dollars and convert the mill to Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) technology powered by green hydrogen (hydrogen produced with renewable energy).
An October report by Dr. Elizabeth Boatman of the firm 5 Lakes Energy examines the economics and logistics of such a conversion, and argues that demand for cleaner steel is likely to grow as auto companies and other global industries seek to lower their greenhouse gas footprints. Starting in 2026, steel importers to the European Union will need to make payments to offset emissions associated with steel production.
Worldwide, the auto industry is the second largest consumer of steel after construction, and “being able to pass on the price of a ‘green steel premium’ to its end consumers, the automotive industry is uniquely positioned to create demand for green steel without having to rely on public subsidies,” the European Union think tank CEPS said in a recent publication.
“This is a great chance for the state to step in now and ensure this conversion happens, instead of waiting another 20 years,” said Boatman. “All the economic indicators suggest clean steel is the steel product of the future, and the best way to future-proof jobs especially in the steel sector and especially for unions.”
Cutting pollution, creating jobs
Cleveland Cliffs is planning to convert its Middletown, Ohio, steel mill to DRI, tapping a $500 million federal grant for industrial decarbonization under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
A DRI furnace does not need to use coke or heat iron ore to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce pure “pig iron”; the same result is achieved with a different chemical process at much lower temperatures. DRI furnaces can be powered by natural gas or clean hydrogen. Initially, Cleveland Cliffs says, its Middletown mill will run on natural gas, releasing about half the carbon emissions of its current blast furnace. Eventually, the company announced, it could switch to hydrogen.
Along with slashing greenhouse gas emissions, a similar green steel conversion at Dearborn Works would greatly reduce the local air pollution burden facing local residents in the heavily industrial area, which is also home to a Marathon oil refinery, a major rail yard and other polluters.
But it wouldn’t be cheap. Boatman’s report estimated the cost of converting a blast furnace to a DRI furnace and associated electric arc furnaces at $1.57 billion, plus $2.6 billion to build a green hydrogen plant. Utility DTE Energy would need to work with grid operator MISO to add about 2 GW of solar and 2 GW of wind power, plus battery storage, to the grid to power the green hydrogen production.
The conversion would mean closure of the EES Coke plant, which turns coal into coke for the steel mill, on heavily polluted Zug Island in the River Rouge just outside Detroit, five miles from Dearborn. In 2022, the EPA sued the coke plant, a subsidiary of DTE Energy, over Clean Air Act violations.
A recent study by the nonprofit Industrious Labs found that the EES Coke plant could be responsible for up to 57 premature deaths and more than 15,000 asthma attacks. The report also found that more than half the people living within a three-mile radius of both the steel mill and coke plant are low-income, and three-quarters of those living around the coke plant are people of color, as are half those living around the steel mill.
“The total health costs are quite significant,” said Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which is representing local residents as intervenors in the EPA lawsuit against the coke plant. “We allow companies to externalize those costs and not account for them. If they were required by some sort of change in policy or regulation to be responsible for those costs, it would certainly make the case they could make this expensive switch” to green steel.
The law center also represented residents in legal proceedings around Dearborn Works’ Clean Air Act violations, including a 2015 consent decree and a 2023 mandate to install a new electrostatic precipitator at a cost of $100 million.
Leonard said local residents “know Cleveland Cliffs poses a risk to their health, and they want solutions. They know there’s a problem, they are frustrated by the lack of will or attention from state and local government.”
Cleveland Cliffs did not respond to a request for comment.
Why Michigan?
The country’s active steel mills are concentrated in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Advocates and residents are asking Nippon Steel to consider a green steel conversion at the Gary Works mill in Northwest Indiana, if the global corporation succeeds in acquiring Gary Works owner U.S. Steel. Advocates have also proposed green steel conversions for Pennsylvania mills.
There are factors that make a green steel conversion both more promising and more challenging at Dearborn Works, compared to other locations, Boatman explained.
Dearborn Works has only one blast furnace in operation, meaning a potentially smaller investment than at mills with more furnaces. Michigan has also set aggressive renewable energy goals, which could be furthered by the ambitious renewable energy buildout that would be required to produce enough green hydrogen for the steel mill.
“That’s why we’re asking the state of Michigan and the governor to get all the interested parties to the table to actually talk about this, hopefully commit to it, and do the detailed planning that needs to be done to figure out how much wind, how much solar, how much battery storage does there need to be to get this off the ground,” said Boatman.
Michigan has legal limits on behind-the-meter generation that could make it more difficult to build renewables specifically to power green hydrogen production for a steel mill. Utilities would instead need to produce or procure the renewable energy, and sell it to the steel mill, Boatman explained.
A green steel conversion at Dearborn Works could create a total of about 500 new jobs, Boatman estimates, considering that about 500 jobs would be lost at the closing coke plant but 410 jobs would be created at the hydrogen plant, 550 in new renewables and 170 at the mill itself. The DRI conversion at the Middletown steel mill is expected to create 170 new permanent jobs and 1,200 construction jobs, according to Cleveland Cliffs.
A 2023 analysis by the Ohio River Valley Institute found that at the Mon Valley Works steel mill in Pennsylvania, a DRI conversion would likely preserve more iron- and steel-making jobs than “business as usual,” with 87% of the current jobs expected to exist in 2031, compared to 69% without a change — as U.S. steel production continues to shrink and automate.
“We are seeing a general trend for both iron and [secondary] steel production to move toward the South, to states that aren’t friendly to unions and can produce products at cheaper prices by bypassing unions,” said Boatman. “Michigan obviously has a proud history of being a strong union state, it matters to keep those good union jobs there.”
Labor unions have largely been silent on the concept of green steel conversion. The United Auto Workers union — which represents Dearborn Works employees — and the United Steelworkers did not respond to requests for comment.
Hydrogen wild cards
The U.S. Department of Energy plans to spend $8 billion on hydrogen hubs, and a potentially lucrative tax credit known as 45V is being finalized for clean hydrogen. Experts and advocates agree that energy-intensive, hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel are where hydrogen could have the most impact. But large-scale production of pure hydrogen for industrial use is still in nascent stages, and little infrastructure has been built or tested for transporting and storing hydrogen.
That is among the reasons, Boatman said, that there’s been reluctance among residents and union leaders to embrace the concept of green steel. Boatman’s report emphasizes that community benefits agreements and community engagement processes are crucial to make sure residents are informed about, benefit from, and have a meaningful voice in any green steel plans.
“Union workers and fence-line community members all want better air quality, lower emissions, who wouldn’t want to go to work knowing you’re safer being there?” she said. “There’s a lot of interest in cleaning up the air. It’s more a question over how that happens. When hydrogen becomes part of the equation, there’s always some concern.”
She noted that hydrogen could potentially be stored in salt caverns in the Detroit area, though extensive study on the feasibility and environmental impacts would be needed. In Mississippi, a startup company Hy Stor Energy is planning to store green hydrogen in salt caverns, ready to generate electricity during times of high demand.
Tax incentives for clean hydrogen could provide major incentives for steel mills. But clean hydrogen proposed projects have been in flux nationwide as the rules for qualifying for 45V tax credits are being hashed out in a lengthy, controversial process; and the change in presidential administration adds even more uncertainty.
“These industries have to be incentivized,” said Roxana Bekemohammadi, founder and executive director of the U.S. Hydrogen Alliance, which advocates for pro-hydrogen policies on the state level. “Europe is creating a mandate — that’s one incentive. We’d love to support any incentives that would allow hydrogen to be leveraged in the steel industry. With state legislation we certainly can incentivize it. It’s a question of how competitive we want to be.”
A 64-year-old school bus driver from Michigan has been charged with allegedly fatally striking a 3-year-old girl in Hamtramck.
The Charter County of Wayne Michigan released a statement confirming that Marvin Lee Flentroy, a school bus driver for Hamtramck Public Schools, has been charged in connection with a car crash that killed a 3-year-old girl.
The incident reportedly occurred on July 16, when Flentroy was turning onto Burger Street and struck the child while she was crossing the street. First responders were called to scene and transported the child to a local hospital, where she later died.
Flentroy was arraigned on Oct. 10 and given a $10,000 personal bond. He was also ordered not to drive and has been since then charged with Reckless Driving Causing Death.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to finalize more than $200 million in grant funding in the coming weeks to accelerate the clean energy transition at three Great Lakes shipping ports.
The Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority, and the Illinois International Port District were each selected for grants last month under the Biden administration’s Clean Ports Program.
The U.S. EPA said it intends to finalize grant agreements by December or January. That action will obligate the federal government to pay roughly $3 billion in grants under the program, even if President-elect Donald Trump or the next Congress tries to repeal or block further action under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The $94 million grant announced for the Cleveland port is the largest it has ever received and will help it build on work that’s already underway to electrify and decarbonize its infrastructure.
“It puts us at the forefront of decarbonization,” said William Friedman, president and chief executive officer of Cleveland’s port authority. “Now we’ll be able to start figuring out what’s the phase-in and then how do we move forward with the next round.”
The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority will get approximately $25 million for solar panels, charging infrastructure and electric cargo handling equipment, and another $95 million will go to the Illinois EPA for solar, battery storage and hydrogen-related investments at the Illinois International Port District serving greater Chicago.
The largest share of grants will go to ports along the East and West coasts. “But the program is also intended to set the foundation for transitioning the entire port industry to zero emissions,” said Jennifer Macedonia, a deputy assistant administrator for U.S. EPA. “And there are important communities around many of our inland ports as well.”
The shipping industry accounts for roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. While the bulk of that is from ships themselves, port operations typically rely on diesel power for most of their energy. And ships often burn fuel to power equipment even while they’re in port.
The EPA’s review process included ensuring that selected projects can achieve or exceed goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other pollution that can affect nearby communities, said U.S. EPA Administrator Michael Regan. Those criteria air pollutants are ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
The work is especially important for Ohio, which has lagged other Midwest states and regions in deploying strategies to reduce greenhouse gases, said Valerie Katz, deputy director for Cuyahoga Green Energy. “Our regional decarbonization efforts will reduce environmental exposure to toxic air pollutants for downstream Ohio communities.”
Funding for the Port of Cleveland will encompass work for electric cargo-handling equipment and vessels that serve the port, along with solar generation and battery storage, charging infrastructure and shore power for vessels. Project partners include Logistec USA, the commercial operator for day-to-day operations, as well as the Great Lakes Towing Company, which will build two electric tug boats.
Decarbonization is a “competitive advantage that will attract more shipping volume to our port,” said Baiju Shah, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. “Companies are striving to reduce their environmental footprints through their operations and value chains,” including Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. “In addition, electrifying the port operations supports our region’s clean air efforts.”
That’s especially important given the port’s location near the downtown lakefront and riverfront areas, Shah said. Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River are the focus for several waterfront development projects aimed at drawing more business and visitors to Cleveland.
Funding for the Port of Detroit will go toward electric cargo-handling equipment, some vessels and railcar movers, along with charging infrastructure and solar generation. Part of the money also will be used to develop a roadmap for adding EV and hydrogen fueling infrastructure. The Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority is part of the Midwest Alliance for Clean Hydrogen, or MachH2, which was selected last year for $1 billion in Department of Energy funding for a hydrogen hub.
Funding for the Illinois International Port District will cover a variety of projects for its three ports, including hydrogen fueling infrastructure, solar energy and battery storage, and hydrogen and electric cargo handling equipment. Hydrogen and electric locomotives also are on EPA’s program selections list. The Illinois EPA is the lead partner for the grant work.
Like its counterpart in Cleveland, the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority had already begun working on plans to move to cleaner energy sources for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. But zero-emissions equipment to move cargo is new in the U.S. shipping industry and is still generally more expensive than fossil-fueled counterparts.
“What’s great about the EPA grant is that it helps these businesses make the decision to choose this cleaner technology,” said Mark Schrupp, executive director for the Detroit port authority. Over time, costs for such equipment should come down, but the grants will help launch market growth.
Various projects among the 55 selected for grants last month have planning components and provisions for community engagement or workforce development. Planning work on emissions inventories can position other ports to move ahead with clean energy in the future, Macedonia said.
The U.S. EPA plans to move ahead swiftly to finalize grant agreements, which will have the effect of protecting the funds from a possible clawback under Trump or the next Congress.
“We will be awarding the grants in December of 2024 and January of 2025… so that money will be obligated on or before the end of this administration,” Regan said. Depending on the projects, implementation will occur over the next three to four years.
In Cleveland, that means a big chunk of work under the new grant will be taking place even as renovation of the Port of Cleveland’s Warehouse A and electrical work take place under its current projects.
“We’ll have to throw a lot here at the engineers and construction project management people to figure this out,” Friedman said. Yet the timing means it will be that much sooner for the port to move to zero emissions for its own operations.
The following commentary was written by Mel Mackinm, director of state policy at Ceres, a nonprofit that works with investors and companies to advance clean energy policy.See our commentary guidelines for more information.
Look out across Michigan and you’ll see groundbreakings for major solar panel manufacturing sites, huge investments to build battery cells, and sparkling new facilities to ensure the state stays in the driver’s seat as the auto industry moves into the future.
It seems Michigan manufacturing is having a moment.
It’s little wonder why. Michigan has always had the legacy, the workforce, the supply chains, and the know-how to serve as the epicenter of an American manufacturing renaissance. That’s exactly what’s happened since Congress finalized the nation’s largest-ever clean energy investment in the summer of 2022.
Powered by incentives for companies to manufacture and deploy clean energy infrastructure and technology here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act has unlocked more than $360 billion in private-sector investment in less than two years, according to research from Climate Power. Its impact has been felt in every corner of the country with hundreds of new projects taking shape to build innovative technologies, employ hundreds of thousands of workers, and power the economy – all while cutting costs and pollution. But no other state has seen as much activity as Michigan, the site of 58 new clean energy projects.
Michigan policymakers deserve some credit for moving quickly to take full advantage of this opportunity. In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made clear in her MI Healthy Climate Plan that she wanted to make Michigan one of the best places in the world to build and deploy clean energy. Lawmakers since followed her lead with legislation that will move the state to 100% clean electricity by 2040 and ensure clean power infrastructure can be built both quickly and responsibly – a pair of laws that boasted ample support from Michigan companies that recognize confronting climate change is also an economic opportunity.
These policies were designed to fully harness the Inflation Reduction Act, making clear that the state is ready to support the growing number of businesses that supply or rely on innovative clean technology. In response, businesses that include classic Michigan manufacturers like GM, global brands like Corning, and upstarts like Lucid Motors have flooded the state with more than $21.5 billion in new clean energy innovation and manufacturing investment, creating some 20,100 new jobs.
With projects located from Detroit to Holland to Traverse City, so much of the state is already benefitting. That includes communities that have so far been left behind in the 21st century economy. About half of the state’s recent clean energy investment is located in rural or low-income areas, such as Norm Fasteners’ $77 million facility that will create 200 electric vehicle supply chain jobs in Bath Charter Township.
Now is not the time to slow down. We are now in the throes of the 2024 election, and we all know Michigan has been getting a lot of attention. No matter what happens in November, Michigan and the U.S. must continue investing in this revamped manufacturing base. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have prioritized rebuilding American industry to provide good jobs and bolster U.S. leadership
Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing boom provides clear evidence that this shared goal is coming to fruition. Policymakers at both the federal and state levels, along with leaders in the private sector, must maintain this momentum and the strong policy environment that will allow the U.S. and its workforce to lead the global economy in the emerging industries of the future – with Michigan, as it so often has, standing strong as the foundation.
The following commentary was written by Laura Sherman, president of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council.See our commentary guidelines for more information.
Last year, Michigan got attention as the first Midwestern state to adopt an energy storage standard. Energy storage is essential for the clean energy transition because it allows clean electricity initially generated by sources like wind and solar to be available at all times.
The standard calls for 2,500 MW of energy storage to be deployed by 2030. This storage will be fulfilled by a range of technologies, with lithium-ion batteries, the type of the storage that has grown rapidly across the U.S. and the world in recent years, chief among them. But it’s not too early to start thinking about how this standard (and future standards) will also involve new technologies that serve different needs, including shifting low-cost energy over longer periods of time to support electric reliability and affordability. A U.S. Department of Energy report found that to achieve a net-zero economy, the U.S. grid may need 225 GW to 460 GW of long-duration energy storage by 2050. By comparison, the U.S. currently has over 500 GW of gas power plants, and battery storage capacity is expected to double to about 30 GW by the end of this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Fortunately, Michigan’s energy legislation anticipated this need. The legislation that created the 2030 storage target also ordered Michigan regulators to report to lawmakers on the potential for long-duration and multi-day energy storage. The Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) is in the midst of this study right now.
But how is “long-duration” energy storage different from the battery storage that is growing quickly in Michigan and across the country right now? It’s all about the concept of duration, which refers to how long a storage resource like a battery can discharge stored energy until it is out of capacity. Most of the batteries being built at utility scale right now have a duration of around four hours. But long-duration storage refers to resources that have a duration of over 8 hours and up to well over 100 hours.
This longer duration unlocks capabilities that will make 100% clean electricity a reality. Short-duration storage right now can cover shortfalls in wind and solar on an hour-by-hour basis. But what about if there is a shortfall in energy supply expected not for just a few hours, but from one day to the next? Or from one month to the next? Those situations arise especially in seasons like winter, where cloud cover can linger and hamper solar energy production for extended periods of time. That is where the need for long-duration storage comes in. Long-duration storage could become a capacity resource that grid operators can tap to reliably deal with long-term fluctuations in energy supply, like those caused by changes in the season from summer to winter.
What would this type of energy storage actually look like in practice? Two companies that are members of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council are potential examples.
Energy Dome’s above ground compressed gas technology, the “CO2 Battery,” is a closed-loop system that holds carbon dioxide gas in a large dome structure. Using electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, this gas is heated and compressed into a liquid, which can be easily stored at room temperature. When discharging, the liquid is evaporated, and the resulting gas spins a turbine, generating electricity when needed, often with one full cycle per day (8+ hours of discharging). The company is currently constructing its first full-scale plant in Sardinia, Italy, with the project nearing completion. In the U.S., another plant is soon to follow, with project proponent Alliant Energy recently filing for regulatory approval of the Columbia Energy Storage Project in Wisconsin.
Form Energy is commercializing a multi-day energy storage technology, a 100-hour duration iron-air battery for utility-scale applications. Essentially, the battery rusts and un-rusts iron to store and release electricity. Form Energy has constructed a new factory to manufacture these batteries domestically, and is working to deploy the first large-scale demonstrations of its technology with utilities like Great River Energy, Xcel Energy, Dominion and Georgia Power in 2025 and 2026.
A tremendous amount of innovative work will need to happen between now and the realization of the full potential for long-duration storage. There are a few things Michigan regulators should do with their study to best set up the state to reap the benefits from these emerging technologies:
First, the Commission should set clear targets for how much long-duration and multi-day storage utilities need to procure in coming years. Utilities are generally conservative and hesitant to pursue new technologies unless pushed or clearly allowed. But this problem is particularly heightened when it comes to long-duration storage. That’s because utilities, if given a megawatt target for storage they must deploy, will likely acquire storage without considering the benefits of having a diverse portfolio of technologies that can deliver energy over different durations. As a result, Michigan may lose out on the operational benefits that come from having a diversified storage portfolio. These benefits include the ability of long-duration storage to make firing up high-emitting, fossil-fuel-burning peaker plants unnecessary because the storage can provide more reliable, cleaner and cheaper alternatives. They also include overall cost and land-use savings, by storing renewable energy when it would otherwise be wasted and shifting it over long time periods when it is most needed.
Second, speaking of substitutes for fossil fuel plants, the Commission should identify which power plant sites around the state could be good candidates for being replaced with long-duration storage projects. Michigan’s coal-fired power plants are almost all retired, with Consumers Energy this year set to retire its final coal plant in Ottawa County. Long-duration storage could be fitting replacements for not only those plants, but also gas plants that will be reaching the end of their life cycles in coming years.
With its storage targets, Michigan has already become one of the national leaders in energy storage. Let’s further cement that reputation by taking steps now for smart planning for long-duration storage. All Michiganders stand to benefit from the potential for long-duration storage to enable an electric grid that is cleaner, lower-cost and more reliable.
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
DETROIT—In 1913, Henry Ford unveiled the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, reducing the time it took to make a Model T from 12 hours to 93 minutes and igniting a revolution in modern manufacturing. He later perfected the intricate choreography of worker and machine at the 600-acre Rouge plant, which opened in 1920.
On a sunny late-summer afternoon, I stood on a catwalk at the Rouge, peering down at the modern incarnation of that century-old industrial system. Half-built F-150 pickups rolled from station to station at four miles per hour. Each employee had about 45 seconds to perform their task — install a center console, affix a windshield, hook up the truck-bed door.
Ford’s industrial efficiency helped convert America, and eventually much of the world, to automotive transportation, and his factories attracted thousands of workers to Detroit. By the 1920s, it was the nation’s fourth largest city; in 1950 its population peaked at nearly 2 million. Early-20th-century Ford Motor Company casts a mythic aura over Detroit to this day.
“We’re steeped in our heritage,” said Liesl Clark, an architect of Michigan climate policy who now teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “We think a lot about being the state that put the world on wheels. We take a lot of pride in that.”
But Detroit’s industrial joyride hit speed bumps in the second half of the 20th century as the auto industry grappled with technological change, globalization, automation, and supply chains shifting south, Jonathan Smith, senior chief deputy director at the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, told me. As the jobs disappeared, Detroit’s population began emptying out; last year, it stood at just 633,218.
Now something new is stirring along the banks of the Detroit River. The city just notched its first year of population growth since 1957. A few buildings over from the clockwork marvel of Ford’s F-150 plant, another operation cranks out the electric version of the truck, loaded with a battery pack so powerful it can run a whole home. Farther afield, nascent battery plants are in the works, aiming to supply the Big Three automakers with American-made components for their emerging EV lineups.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat elected in 2018, has launched an ambitious effort to reinvigorate Michigan’s remaining industrial base by retooling it for the low-carbon era. Crucially, Whitmer led her party to win majorities in the House and Senate in 2022, giving Democrats full control of state government for the first time in nearly 40 years. They used that popular mandate to pass a series of climate laws last fall, including one of the nation’s most ambitious clean electricity targets. Whitmer has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds to a slew of cleantech factories where workers will make batteries for electric vehicles and new technologies to clean up buildings and electricity production.
Michigan is not the only state actively pursuing new factory investment; its efforts coincide with a generational shift in the nation’s capital, where politicians of both parties are disavowing neoliberal offshoring and embracing policies intended to bring manufacturing back to American shores. President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, incentivizes domestic production of electric vehicles and other energy technologies. But given its industrial legacy and highly trained workforce, Michigan is arguably the state best positioned to make the most of this new economic era.
“It was hard to find a lot of benefit for Michigan workers in … the globalization of some of these key industries, whereas Michigan workers absolutely can benefit from the reshoring and onshoring of existing critical technologies and new technologies of the future that there’s now a policy commitment to see built here in the United States,” Smith told me.
If Michigan’s bet on new clean energy manufacturing works out, it would offer the clearest test case nationally of the Biden-Harris strategy to make clean energy the engine of manufacturing revival. Of the top five states leading the climatetech factory buildout, per a tally by researcher Jack Conness, it’s the only one with unified state Democratic control, not to mention a strong and historically powerful union presence.
“Michigan’s package [of climate legislation] is really significant because it’s in a manufacturing state, it’s in a state where we understand industry,” said Clark, who previously ran Michigan’s environmental regulatory body for Whitmer. “We know we’re going to have to squeeze all the carbon we can out of industry, and we’re going to do that in a partnership with industry, so that we’re also getting the economic-development advantage as we’re moving along that road.”
At the same time, Michigan is one of the most closely divided swing states likely to decide the election between Vice President Kamala Harris, who vows to continue the clean energy policies she helped pass, and former President Donald Trump, who has threatened to undo them.
Michigan broke for Trump in 2016 by around 11,000 votes, part of the shattered “blue wall” that ushered him into the White House. In 2020, Michigan rejected Trump by 150,000 votes. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in the state’s September polling. Democrats may be ascendant in Lansing, but among the waterfront palaces of Grosse Pointe and the lakeside cornfields of the Thumb, the Trump-Vance signs come out in force.
I wanted to assess just how far Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing transformation has come ahead of the 2024 election. After a week of factory visits and interviews with business leaders and policymakers, it was clear that this revolution is further along in Michigan than almost anywhere else in the U.S. It’s also barely getting started.
Private companies have pledged more than $11 billion to build clean energy factories and projects in Michigan, by Conness’ count. Advocacy group Climate Power tallies more like $18 billion for cleantech factories, not counting clean power-plant commitments — money that’s expected to produce nearly 22,000 jobs.
But many of the big-ticket factories announced so far have yet to break ground. Michiganders are feeling only a fraction of the benefits the clean manufacturing boom could furnish; the full effects won’t come until long after the 2024 election is decided. That delay could jeopardize the whole project. For this battery-powered economic revival to succeed, the supporting policies that kicked it off need to stay on the books.
A battery factory in miniature
Detroit emanates from its namesake river like half a wheel, spokes flaring from the cluster of art deco skyscrapers at its center. I followed one of those spokes west past Dearborn, home to Ford and now a thriving Yemeni community, to a flat green land dotted by factories that look like oversized boxes. One of the largest of these houses Our Next Energy, a startup founded in 2020 by materials scientist Mujeeb Ijaz to bring back domestic production of the lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry.
This technology uses cheaper, more widely accessible materials and operates more safely than the nickel-based battery chemistries that have reigned in the EV market. But the first major U.S. company to commercialize it, A123 Systems, went bankrupt more than a decade ago when, among other setbacks, actual demand for EV batteries lagged behind industry hopes. A123 was ultimately sold to a Chinese firm, and several Chinese companies successfully scaled up LFP production, making it a viable choice for EV batteries even though it lacks the cell-level energy density of the nickel chemistries. Ijaz saw this unfold firsthand while leading vehicle battery development for A123. Years later, he thought the time was ripe to try again.
It took me a few tries to find the right door at Our Next Energy’s enormous complex. Once inside, an operations manager for the plant had me cover up my hair, don a dark blue lab coat, and slip on little coverups for my leather shoes. Just before we walked onto the factory floor, he instructed me to tell him if I felt dehydrated, because we were entering a controlled zone of near-zero humidity.
Our first stop was the anode room, where Our Next Energy makes the negative end of the battery. Inside a tall, shiny, 100-liter metal tank, a dough hook mixes a sludge of gray metal powder; a separate machine extrudes this graphite slurry onto a roll of copper, printing an anode.
A parallel system across the room does the same for the lithium iron phosphate cathode, which goes on aluminum foil. Both the anodes and the cathodes then go through an oven that solidifies and dehydrates them, after which they’re sliced into uniform sheets. Then comes assembly: An automated machine stacks alternating sheets of anode and cathode with a separator weaving in between. The resulting stack gets stuffed into a metal box and filled with a liquid electrolyte. After some quality checks, it’s ready to power a car.
And that’s where the tour ended. The 10 megawatt-hour “proto line” I saw was fine-tuning samples for potential customers; it occupied a mere corner of the 660,000-square-foot factory, which sat mostly empty.
The mini-factory proves that American workers are capable of producing the up-and-coming LFP batteries. But the battery market, like the solar-panel market, is all about scale, and that’s what Our Next Energy currently lacks.
The company has suffered a series of recent financial setbacks. It went out for Series C venture funding last year, but couldn’t close the deal (that was a tough time for climate venture capital broadly). To keep things running, management laid off 128 staff in November, roughly 25 percent of the workforce. In December, the board booted founder Ijaz from the CEO spot (but kept him around as chief technology officer) and replaced him with board member Paul Humphries, who held multiple executive roles at Flex, the global manufacturing specialist.
Earlier this year, Humphries fired more staff and convinced existing investors to fund the company’s operations through the end of this year. That pushed off the startup’s nagging existential questions for a while.
After the factory tour, I drove half an hour to the small city of Novi to visit Our Next Energy’s corporate headquarters, a glassy, open-floor-plan affair tucked into the wooded, pond-dotted Michigan landscape. Head of Strategy Deeana Ahmed acknowledged the company’s financial challenges and laid out a clear-eyed view of the tough road ahead.
Any would-be U.S. battery manufacturer has to confront the fact that imported cells and packs from China are far cheaper than anything made in the U.S., even with the current 25 percent tariff. Battery prices were higher when Congress drafted the IRA incentives, but since then, Ahmed told me, China’s battery industry has dumped product into the global market in what she considers an unsustainable effort to depress prices and smother emerging battery factories in the U.S. (Solar panel makers complain of a similar dynamic in their market.)
“Right now, what we’re seeing with the IRA is that it barely is enough to keep us competitive,” Ahmed said. “I was meeting with an investor recently, and they asked this question: ‘What happens if the IRA goes away?’ And it’s like, this is not feasible.”
Our Next Energy has already ordered machinery for its first gigawatt-hour-scale production line, which will make cells for stationary grid storage. But the real prize will be landing a large-scale EV supply contract, which would help secure financing for the full $1.6 billion factory expansion that the company has advertised (and which landed a $200 million grant from the state of Michigan, based on a forecast of creating 2,000 jobs). That would fill out the building I saw with 7 gigawatt-hours of annual production, using machines 25 times larger than the ones I saw, plus another 13 gigawatt-hours somewhere even larger.
“You have to spend $1 billion to $2 billion, minimum, to have a scale that is competitive,” Ahmed said. “Anything below that, you’re just losing money.”
If that investment comes through, Our Next Energy will offer entry-level jobs paying $20 to $35 per hour. The company’s preliminary workforce hasn’t unionized, Ahmed said, but “we respect the right of our workers to collectively bargain.”
Two years after the IRA passed, it’s still too early to see Our Next Energy in the full swing of domestic battery production. The factory holds great promise but lingers in a vulnerable, incomplete state, a dynamic that characterizes much of Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing buildout. Ford is still constructing its $2.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Calhoun County, to employ 1,700 workers, while GM builds a $2.6 billion battery plant in Lansing. Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese battery company, has received regulatory approval to build a $2.4 billion facility in western Michigan, which would employ more than 2,300 people. Gotion had to go to court to defend the project after a new slate of local leaders tried to block it based on the company’s ties to China.
Concerted state and federal policies have produced this flurry of factory commitments, but few of those 22,000 promised jobs have materialized yet. Market conditions are daunting, even with full-throated federal support; if that support wavers, the whole endeavor might crumble.
Ford pumps the brakes on EVs
In between factory tours, I stopped in at the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the famous Diego Rivera mural of the Rouge plant’s Depression-era V8 production. Henry Ford’s son Edsel Ford commissioned the stirring work in 1932 — a scion of American capitalism partnering with a prominent Mexican communist.
Diego Rivera captured the immense effort and attention that Detroit workers put into the assembly of the Ford V8. The 1933 mural blends technology and mythology, like in one detail where the newly designed V8 engine takes on the forms of an ancient Latin American sculpture. (Julian Spector)
In one panel, Henry Ford instructs engineers on the newly designed V8, an engine so powerful that he named the new car model after it. (Ford received letters from notorious bank robbers Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger thanking him for designing such a capable getaway vehicle, though some specialists doubt their veracity.) The museum docent told me that Rivera casts the formidable new engine in the guise of a pre-Columbian dog sculpture, with Ford as the high priest interpreting it for his flock.
Elsewhere in the soaring atrium, furnaces glow like volcanoes while muscular men of various races heave mighty engines onto carts and assemble the cars with freshly stamped chassis, radiators, and tires.
Now Ford is attempting to reconjure this legendary alchemy of invention and productivity for the electric era. The company has electrified two of its most iconic brands: the Mustang, which transformed from muscle car to nearly silent electric crossover SUV, and America’s best-selling pickup truck, the F-150, now available as the Lightning.
But, even with unprecedented state and federal support, Detroit’s automakers are having trouble recapturing the innovative breakthroughs that put them on the map a century ago.
The problem is, Ford hasn’t yet achieved its own century-old standard of a better car at a cheaper price. The cost of a Lightning can easily hit $90,000 with add-ons. Even at these exorbitant prices, Ford’s electric division lost $1.3 billion to earn $100 million in revenue during the first quarter this year. And it only sold 10,000 vehicles. Expenses will naturally be higher at the beginning of the clean energy buildout, but that’s not a sustainable way of doing business.
I had hoped to see how those electric pickups were made, to view the synthesis of American muscle and quiet efficiency. As it happened, my August visit to Michigan coincided with the Lightning factory’s regular summer shutdown to retool equipment for the fall production season, Ford representatives told me. That same week, Ford announced it had canceled its next EV release because it couldn’t make the economics work for a three-row electric SUV.
Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told the Financial Times, “These vehicles need to be profitable, and if they’re not profitable based on where the customer is and the market is, we will … make those tough decisions.” Henry Ford’s genius was to imagine new and better possibilities beyond what customers and the market could imagine; his present-day successors seem unwilling to push those boundaries.
Ford’s peers in Detroit’s Big Three have even less to show for their EV efforts. GM built the popular Bolt, which sold well at accessible prices, but recalled thousands of them to replace batteries, then abruptly discontinued the model. (GM later changed course, un-canceling the cancellation, but the Bolt still isn’t back in production.) GM’s current EV lineup swings hard into luxury, with Cadillacs and Hummers; its most affordable model is the recently released Chevy Equinox, starting at $33,600. Stellantis, corporate parent of Chrysler, only got around to introducing its first all-electric model in North America this year despite claiming that EVs will comprise half its sales by 2030.
The auto industry’s halting progress notwithstanding, the Whitmer administration has thrown its full-throttled support behind the shift to electric mobility.
Whitmer’s Healthy Climate Plan calls for 2 million EVs on the roads by 2030, served by 100,000 public charging ports (up from around 3,000 in the state today), said Justine Johnson, the former Ford mobility strategist who now helms the state’s new Office for Future Mobility and Electrification. The state government will transition all light-duty vehicles in its fleet to electric by 2033 followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2040.
Over the long term, though, the transition to clean vehicles will require dialing back production of automakers’ highly profitable gas-powered trucks and SUVs, and that will scramble the employment landscape in Detroit.
For the Whitmer team, the multi-decade planning horizon for the transition to electric mobility offers more time to prepare and manage the economic transition than, say, the sudden shocks of the Great Recession or the dot-com bubble bursting. The Big Three automakers responded to those crises with mass layoffs and cutbacks on benefits for remaining workers. In contrast, the EV transition can be one that Michigan workers and communities plan for and truly benefit from, Smith said.
“Nobody’s talking about phasing out ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles in the next year or two,” he added. “We’re going to continue to have a lot of stability in our auto sector in Michigan in the years to come.”
Some researchers have concluded that this shift will ultimately reduce the number of jobs in the sector, because EV drivetrains are more streamlined and less labor-intensive than ICE engine fabrication. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently analyzed all the steps and labor hours required to make electric and gas-powered vehicles and concluded that EVs can result in greater labor demand if you include the work of battery production. The latest data, published in March, seems to corroborate Whitmer’s theory that EVs can result in economic gains for Michigan, though the location of the battery factories will influence legacy autoworkers’ ability to transition.
Michigan is building more than EVs
Michigan’s battery and EV bets still look unsteady, but the state’s portfolio of new factory investments stretches well beyond the automotive sector.
In a different boxy building not far from Our Next Energy, I met Jose Nunez-Regueiro, the chief technology officer of Nxlite, a startup that has developed a novel way to make windows significantly more energy-efficient. Out on the factory floor, he opened up a porthole into a large metal chamber: A glowing pink haze filled the space, with twin lines of pulsing lavender tracking along two pipes at the top.
Nunez-Reguiero explained the pipes are hollow tubes of silver stuffed with magnetic filling. The machine ignites argon, oxygen, or nitrogen under intense pressure, turning it into cosmic pink plasma, which then collides with the magnets. That impact dislodges a plume of atoms, which sputter down onto a panel of glass at a thickness of 10 to 40 nanometers — a technique known as physical vapor deposition.
Nxlite uses a high-tech method to sprinkle tiny particles onto glass panes, invisibly helping them retain heat and lower building energy consumption. (Julian Spector)
The transparent, ultra-thin coating blocks select infrared wavelengths, keeping heat out of a building or vehicle in the summer, or keeping it in during the winter. Upgrading windows this way could cut a house’s energy use by 40 percent, Nunez-Reguiero said. Better energy efficiency is an essential component of decarbonizing home heating and cooling, a major goal of both the Michigan climate plan and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Nxlite had the good fortune to move into a fully built and equipped glass factory. Like Our Next Energy, the startup is running pilot operations now before scaling up to full commercial production.
Over in Litchfield, about 100 miles west of Detroit, Whitmer had celebrated the early August opening of LuxWall, which fabricates gas-insulated window panes, another tool for decreasing building energy consumption. The company called this factory “the world’s first high-volume vacuum-insulating glass production facilities,” and announced plans to invest far more money in growing its operations in Michigan. LuxWall employs 87 people now but plans to eventually employ 450, aided by $6 million in state grants and over $31 million in federal money.
And last year, Michigan leaders were proud to close a $400 million factory commitment from Nel, a Norwegian company that makes high-tech electrolyzers for turning clean electricity into hydrogen. Electrolyzers could soon become the picks and shovels of the clean hydrogen gold rush, which promises to decarbonize tricky sectors like long-distance shipping and freight, steelmaking, and chemicals.
Michigan leaders hustled to make it happen. “It came down to two states — I’m not going to name the second state, but the governor of the second state said, ‘Hey, I’m too busy,’” Quentin Messer, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, recounted from his office in Lansing. “And Gov. Whitmer said, ‘Look, this is an opportunity. This is my responsibility, as leader of the state, to be closer-in-chief.’”
Whitmer flew out to Oslo herself and sealed the deal. Messer said it ended up being the largest foreign direct investment announced at the 2023 SelectUSA Investment Summit, the Department of Commerce’s annual conference to facilitate foreign investment in the U.S. economy.
That factory, though, hasn’t broken ground yet — one of many projects held up until the Internal Revenue Service decides how to structure its hydrogen tax credits.
Other manufacturers have operated in Michigan’s industrial landscape for decades, but added new lines in response to new federal and state incentives. Up in Saginaw, Hemlock Semiconductor has for years produced among the highest-grade polysilicon in the country. After Congress passed policies to encourage onshoring of microchip production and the solar supply chain, Hemlock broke ground on a $375 million expansion in October 2022.
Armstrong International’s history in the state dates back even further than Hemlock’s. In 1900, Adam Armstrong answered a newspaper ad offering free land and a building in Three Rivers, a farm town nestled among the cornfields south of Kalamazoo, to any company that could hire 15 people over five years. He relocated his machine shop from Chicago, and got to work in a 40-by-100-foot building crafting bicycle spokes, potato diggers, and railroad repair buggies. His great-great-grandson, Kurt Armstrong, told me the company no longer makes potato diggers, but the inverted bucket steam trap it commercialized in 1911 kicked off a thriving business in industrial thermal equipment that now spans 20 factories and offices worldwide.
Armstrong recently started construction on a 29,000-square-foot expansion in Three Rivers to produce industrial-grade heat pumps within 12 months, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. The company’s design captures heat in industrial facilities that would otherwise escape as waste, and concentrates it to recirculate into factory processes. It plays in the range of 150 to 200 degrees Celsius, assisting tasks like drying out pet food, distilling bourbon, pasteurizing soft drinks, and operating commercial-scale laundries.
Armstrong said the factory addition will employ 10 to 15 people to start, and that could grow based on demand.
“The reason why we stayed in that Michigan location is because there’s such a deep tie-in to the culture and community there,” Armstrong told me. “It’s the employees who make the company great, and you can’t just recreate that somewhere else.”
Armstrong’s expansion is a lot smaller than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory, but it’s bigger than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory that doesn’t yet exist. Michigan’s big-ticket factory commitments drive up the counts of dollars invested and jobs created, but they also require more diligence and risk assessment from their corporate backers, not to mention longer construction times. Meanwhile, the smaller-dollar expansions are putting people to work building tools most people have never heard of, but which serve the climate transition in tangible ways.
Michigan Democrats surge ahead of crucial election
Michigan’s clean energy factories are slowly materializing, but the best is yet to come — assuming the underlying policies to support battery and solar manufacturing remain in effect. Michiganders are uniquely positioned to influence that outcome, by voting in a crucial swing state this November.
One of the big questions facing Democrats broadly in 2024 is whether their efforts to reinvigorate American industry will resonate with voters concerned about the nation’s economic outlook. When Joe Biden was the candidate, swing-state voters weren’t swayed. But the arrival of Harris on the ticket turned states that looked all but lost into toss-ups again. That creates room for a clean energy message to make a difference: Persuading tens of thousands of voters to support a domestic economic platform is more doable than swaying millions.
Measuring voters’ receptiveness to clean energy onshoring is tough to do, especially when, as in Michigan, the most exciting factories aren’t yet boosting local tax revenues and putting thousands of people to work in high-tech jobs. I wasn’t able to find a northern analogue to Dalton, Georgia, where an existing Qcells solar-panel factory used IRA incentives to rapidly grow to 2,000 full-time workers, and the benefits are already cascading across the city.
But Michigan brings two things to the effort that are hard to find together in the other states leading the factory boom: a fired-up state Democratic establishment that’s running on climate action and related jobs, and a newly galvanized union base.
Many of the top winners in clean energy manufacturing dollars have been states led by Republican governors or legislatures, who like the jobs but not the Democrats’ broader policy agenda — places like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Ohio.
Michigan, on the other hand, has a deep bench of liberal state leaders who ran on climate last cycle and won a historic majority.
“The governor had talked about it quite a bit before the election, and had worked with people across the state to develop the Michigan climate action plan,” state Senator Sue Shink, a Democrat from the Ann Arbor area, told Canary Media. “It had all the policies we [ultimately] enacted laid out in it, and talked about pathways to attaining those goals.”
After winning the statehouse, Whitmer and her allies passed a series of high-profile climate policies last year. Michigan committed to produce carbon-free electricity not by 2045, like California and New York, but by 2040. Other laws added labor standards and energy-justice provisions to the clean energy buildout, and created a Community and Worker Economic Transition Office to look out for the workforce amid the shifts to lower-carbon industry.
Knocking on doors for the 2022 election, Shink found that climate and clean energy were on voters’ minds. Weather fluctuations had messed with farmers’ planting schedules. Huge rainstorms had overwhelmed aging infrastructure and flooded homes. The 100-year-old Edenville Dam burst in May 2020. Diminished snowfall had been curtailing the cherished ski season.
While seeking to address carbon emissions, the politicians kept their focus on “making sure the quality of life in Michigan is as good as it can be,” Shink said.
Residents in her district, for instance, struggled with under-insulated homes, which drive up heating and cooling bills. The state laws created programs to take advantage of federal weatherization funds from the IRA, and “it’s making a huge difference in their lives, because they’re warmer, their house is more comfortable,” Shink said. This approach tracks neatly with how progressive data crunchers have advised Democrats to describe the massive and complex Inflation Reduction Act to voters.
Now Michigan Democrats have a package of legislative achievements to run on in November, which happens to complement the principal policy achievements of Harris’ vice presidency. In fact, Michigan politicians are pushing the Harris campaign to speak up more on the domestic manufacturing push, which Biden prioritized in his campaigning, per a recent Politico article. (Neither the Harris campaign nor the Trump campaign responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment for this article.)
Michigan also has another ascendant political force at work: unions.
Much of the country’s recent EV and battery factory investment has gone to Southeastern states, which attract companies with their “business-friendly environment” that includes decades of undercutting the power of organized labor. But unions have played a defining role in Detroit since Henry Ford, after some convincing, recognized the United Auto Workers in 1941.
Democratic state officials are vocally supportive of Michigan’s union heritage.
“We benefit a lot from the fact that we’ve had the UAW, IBEW, and others investing in workforce and helping with workforce training,” said Smith from the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. “I think most employers recognize that’s an asset to them and an asset to the state, not necessarily something that’s going to be a threat to their business model.”
Shawn Fain won the presidency of the UAW last year by running as a reform candidate who wanted to clean up after a string of corruption scandals took down leaders of the union’s long-reigning faction. He proceeded to rally the biggest autoworker strike in decades, and win concessions from the Big Three, including a clear pathway for workers to unionize at battery plants. The UAW has since organized workers at two Ultium battery plants, in Lordstown, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, winning wage increases and other benefits.
Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to appear on a picket line last year when he joined Fain at a GM plant near Detroit. Fain later appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and rallied behind Harris, countering Trump’s recent outreach to working-class voters by labeling him a “scab.”
If winning begets more winning, the political mobilization that’s starting to generate clean energy jobs in Michigan will be an asset for Democrats at the polls in November, something that wasn’t there in 2016 or 2020. If these forces keep Michigan in the Democratic column, that could help ensure the clean industrial policies stay on the books in Washington, giving Michigan’s factories more time to overcome headwinds and deliver on their promises of jobs and community revitalization.
Sen. Bernie Sanders at a rally in Ann Arbor, March 8, 2020 | Andrew Roth
In November’s presidential election, where the results will likely come down to a few thousand votes in battleground states like Michigan, Bernie Sanders told the Michigan Advance on Saturday that the 2023 United Auto Workers (UAW) strike has played a key role in mobilizing voters.
“What the UAW did is, I think not only win a very good contract for its own members, but it inspired millions and millions of working class people all over this country,” Sanders said, notingpolling during the strike reflected majority support from Americans for striking workers across automotive plants around the country.
And as wages have stagnated, while salaries for CEOs rise, the issue of “corporate greed” speaks to voters in the middle class, Sanders said. Vice President Kamala Harris understands that and is responding to it, he said, while former President Donald Trump touts anti-unionpolicies and viewpoints.
“It’s not just the UAW; not just the automobile industry. It’s happening in virtually every sector of our country. The very rich are becoming much richer; working families are struggling. We’ve got to stand up and fight back. That’s what the UAW did, and I think they galvanized a number of other unions to do the same,” Sanders said. “Young people want to get into unions. Unions are now historically popular, so I think UAW played a very, very important role.”
U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) spoke against ‘corporate greed’ and ‘record profits’ secured by the Detroit Three during a rally on Sept. 15, 2023 with striking UAW workers just 500 feet from the North American International Auto Show charity fundraising event. | Ken Coleman
But those are only two unions, Sanders said, adding that dozens of other unions have strongly put their support behind Harris who walked with striking UAW workers in 2019 while Trump visited a non-union plant in Macomb County during the 2023 strike.
“I think the choice is pretty clear in terms of who is supporting unions,” Sanders said.
Sanders and Harris are former political rivals who both sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. But while Sanders said they don’t agree on everything, they agree on enough for him to travel to swing states to garner support for her campaign.
“What I learned from her is that she is very, very smart, and she is very focused, and she’s very tough. She’s a very impressive individual and I think she would make a great president,” Sanders said. “I hope that she may have learned that there are many, many millions of people in this country, the richest country on Earth, who are struggling financially, and that it’s important to respond to the needs of those people and hear their pain, and that it is immoral that we are living in an economy in which so few have so much wealth.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (R) (D-CA) and former Vice President Joe Biden (L) speak as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) looks on during the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27, 2019 in Miami, Florida. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On the drive between speaking engagements in Warren and Saginaw on Saturday, Sanders told the Michigan Advance he has hope for young people flexing their voting power in November. To that end, he’ll be talking with Michigan State University students on Sunday.
And it’s been a potent issue in Michigan, with 100,000 voters voting “Uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary this winter instead of for President Joe Biden, before Harris became the party’s nominee.
In 2020, Michigan’s 16 electoral votes weren’t won by much more than that, as Biden triumphed in the state by about 154,000 votes.
Many members of Michigan’s large Arab-American community have railed against Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war that’s raged for almost a year and continue to demand that Harris take a more aggressive stance, like committing to stop aid to Israel.
Although Israel had a right to defend itself from the Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack, Sanders said, the U.S. should not be offering military assistance to Israel when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone to “war against the entire Palestinian people.”
“While I have strongly supported the domestic agenda of the Biden administration, the President and I have a very strong disagreement on that,” Sanders said. “Even on that issue, Trump will be worse. I think you have Republicans who are not even prepared to support humanitarian aid [to] the children who are starving, who are injured. … And I would hope that even though there is disappointment in the Biden administration on Gaza and I understand that, I’m sympathetic to that, I think the choice still remains clear, that we’ve got to support Kamala and defeat Donald Trump.”
What’s encouraging to see is that the younger generation, in particular, is demanding progressive and just policies that benefit the average person, Sanders said. Although young people have, in recent history, risen up against racism, sexism and homophobia, he said, the current young generation is “probably the most progressive younger generation in the history of this country.”
“They have been in the forefront in fighting to transform our energy system and save the planet from climate change. So it is a great generation of young people, but … you cannot implement what you believe if you’re not involved in the political process and if you are not voting,” Sanders said.
Michael Mueller, a U of M grad student who was among those charged by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, speaking to protestors in front of the 15th District Court Building in Ann Arbor. Sept. 20, 2024. Photo by Jon King.
The Harris campaign is showing up in states, partnering with local and statewide leaders, to make their message clear to different corners of the country, Sanders said.
Young people need to understand that what they believe needs to be heard on Election Day, as the threat of climate change could dismantle the future and the government gets in the way of women’s health care. Sanders said he wants young people to understand Trump believes climate change is a hoax and that the government should have a say in reproductive health care while Harris is fighting for young people’s future.
But young voters have to throw the first punch in November.
“I would hope that as young people look at the important issues — women’s rights, civil rights, the climate, income and wealth inequality, higher education and the cost of health care — on all of those issues, Kamala Harris is far, far superior to Donald Trump, and I hope young people come out and vote and make the difference in this election,” Sanders said.
Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and X.
A newly published study examining property values near dozens of large Midwest solar farms has found no significant negative impact — and even a slight positive effect — from the projects, according to the data.
Loyola University researcher Gilbert Michaud has attended scores of community meetings about proposed solar projects across the Midwest. In past research, he quantified that property values were the most common concern brought up in local hearings about proposed utility-scale solar.
And while solar arrays may have an aesthetic impact, property values are influenced by a wide range of other factors, such as the quality of schools and the local economy.
“I’ve observed a lot of the negative comments framed as ‘I think’ or ‘I saw something on social media,’” said Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at the School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago. So he sought to “elevate the discussion from ‘I think, I think, I think,’” by injecting it with some hard data.
His latest study, published in the December 2024 issue of the journal Solar Compass, looked at property values surrounding 70 utility-scale solar projects in the Midwest and found they actually had a minor positive effect — increasing values 0.5% to 2%.
“While the impact itself — of a few thousand dollars — might not be incredibly meaningful,” said Michaud, “clearly these projects drive economic development in rural communities, through jobs, tax contributions, etcetera, which in turn increase residential property values.”
Emotions running high
Michael Wildermuth, a landowner in Allen County, Ohio, was glad to hear about the proposed 300 MW Birch Solar farm, since he supports clean energy and welcomed the economic benefits. Wildermuth cofounded an organization, Allen Auglaize Coalition for Reasonable Energy (named for the two counties where the project would be sited), to advocate for the project as it faced local opposition.
“The nearest neighbors became enraged so quickly and voiced their rage so loudly that others were placed in a reactionary mode,” Wildermuth said. “The neighbors were greatly concerned with property values and flooding. The landowners were afraid of these vocal neighbors, the public officials were afraid of being on the wrong side of a political ‘hot potato’ issue.”
The developer appealed to the Ohio State Supreme Court, and Allen Auglaize Coalition for Reasonable Energy filed an amicus brief in support of the solar farm. Wildermuth wishes more data about property values had been available during the debate. He also thinks opponents ignored the $81 million the developer estimated it would contribute to the economy, with local officials saying the project would have little local economic benefit since the power would go to an Amazon facility.
“Just get people ‘all het up’ and you don’t have to deal with reason and facts,” Wildermuth said.
“Do I think solar farms could actually improve property values or the financial well-being of landowners and neighbors of solar farms? Yes, I do. We argued that. We also pointed out that, in the rural area where the farm was planned, the properties would remain stable for 30 years,” preventing them from being developed for other purposes that neighbors may find less desirable.
Shining new light
The study, co-authored by Loyola graduate Sampson Hao, notes that the benefits of rooftop solar on energy bills and property values are well-documented. But less is known about how utility-scale solar farms impact nearby properties — even though utility-scale solar accounts for about three-quarters of new solar development.
The study reviewed 70 solar farms built in the Midwest between 2009 and 2022, from a database by Berkeley Laboratory including solar farms over 5 MW. Hao and Michaud analyzed property values compiled by real estate firm Zillow, comparing values five years before a solar project became operational, with values at the operational date, which is often about two years after construction starts.
They aggregated by zip code, and controlled for factors like the COVID-19 pandemic that could affect housing values in a given year. Three-bedroom houses were used as a measure of overall property values. They also analyzed “control group” zip codes near the solar farm zip codes, but without solar farms, to account for other factors that might affect property values.
Michaud noted that while the number of bedrooms and other factors have a much larger impact on property values, the small positive impact that nearby solar farms could have could be similar to that of cultural amenities, like arts centers. Solar farms can also have an impact on schools — a major factor in determining property values — since solar projects augment local tax bases. Solar developers also often make ongoing contributions to school districts in the form of donations, supplies and energy education opportunities.
The study showed high numbers of solar farms going online in 2017 and 2021, with a smaller spike in 2020.
The projects included in the study range from a 10 MW urban installation in Chicago, installed by Exelon in 2010, to the 268 MW Riverstart Solar Park in Indiana, from 2021. Only 11 of the 70 projects studied were over 100 MW in capacity. Indiana had the most arrays at 22, followed by 14 in Minnesota, eight in Michigan and seven in Illinois.
The most beneficial impact on property values was from solar farms between 5 and 20 MW in size, perhaps in part because these can be hidden by vegetative buffers.
“The paper is not about a house that’s 200 feet away from a solar project, that’s very rarely the case,” said Hao, noting that developers often offer to buy properties at above market value in such situations. “We wanted to look at a bigger scale. A project between 5 and 20 MW, you’re really not supposed to even see these with your bare eyes.”
Midwestern focus
Michaud said that debunking myths around solar farms is particularly important in the Midwest, where there is much untapped potential for solar. While it has less sun than the Southeast and California, which have led the nation in solar farm development, the Midwest has massive stretches of agricultural land where solar can be deployed along with crops.
“This is a really important finding for Midwestern government officials, land owners, and many others to know about,” Michaud said. “Many of these folks are now making decisions about whether to host a large-scale solar project in their community, and the potential impacts to property values is often something that comes up in local debates and at local hearings. Data can help tell a story and move the debate beyond anecdotal or subjective arguments.”
The Loyola study cites a 2018 analysis of 956 specific solar farms by a University of Texas researcher that found no conclusive evidence of impact on property values one way or another. The Loyola researchers also noted a study by Berkeley Laboratory that found about a 1% decline in property values around 2,000 solar farms in six states on the east and west coasts and in Minnesota.
“Most Midwestern states have 10 to 20 gigawatts of potential utility-scale solar in their queue, and developers are coming off of the coasts where the grid is more congested and there is less land for development, targeting agricultural land in the center of the country,” Michaud said. “Finding a large plot of land with good solar irradiation and access to a substation is the sweet spot for a lot of solar developers, and in essence, positive attributes of farming crops in the Midwest are also positive attributes for farming ground-mounted, large-scale solar.”
Perception becomes reality
The study notes the irony that perception plays a significant role in determining property values, and fears about property value declines can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Projection and speculation drive market forces,” Michaud said. “A farmer might be angry that a solar farm is going in the community, he’s going to sell and move to Florida. A buyer thinks, ‘maybe I can negotiate this price down,’ and the house sells for less than its value, and an appraiser looks at that. But none of this is real, it’s just based on speculation and emotion, which then drives data points … it all started with an emotional response.”
Hao theorized that developers who make poor choices in siting and managing solar farms can have an impact on property values elsewhere, if negative stories about solar spread by word of mouth or social media.
“Is a developer doing their best to have as much of a buffer as economically feasible?” he asked. “Is the developer making vegetative screenings so you’re not going to see millions of panels? Is the developer doing their best to move the inverter to the center of the leased land so noise doesn’t get over the road? There’s a lot of things at the end of the day that developers can do better. It’s up to the developers to really step up their game to eliminate those potential negative effects.”
The Loyola study notes that solar developers often do things like hosting county fairs or supporting local organizations that can increase property values. Michaud said it’s possible such dynamics were reflected in their data showing small increases in property values, along with other benefits.
“From an economic perspective,” Michaud said, “locals should increasingly look at these data to understand the job opportunities, wages paid, new tax revenues and negligible or positive impacts on property values, and realize that large-scale solar projects might actually be an amenity in their community.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Michael Wildermuth planned to lease land for the Birch solar project, and that he personally filed an amicus brief in the case. The story has also been updated to clarify the scope of Gilbert Michaud’s research.
A youngster holds up a pro-union sign during a break between speeches at Labor Fest in Milwaukee Monday. Both presidential candidates are trying to appeal to union members. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Editors note:This five-day series explores the priorities of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election. With the outcome expected to be close, these “swing states” may decide the future of the country.
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
Wisconsin carpenter Efrain Campos just retired this summer after 30 years, working mostly in commercial multi-story buildings — “from 15 floors and up,” he said. For him the last four years have been a boom period.
Efrain Campos (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
On Labor Day, Campos, 68, was among the thousands of union members and their families who turned out for Laborfest on Milwaukee’s festival grounds on the shores of Lake Michigan.
He had planned to vote for President Joe Biden for a second term in office, but when the Democratic Party pivoted to Vice President Kamala Harris as its candidate, he pivoted as well. “We need somebody to help the middle people,” he said, “so they can advance, get a little bit better than what we are now.”
Campos dismisses the notion that the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, is a pro-worker candidate despite Trump’s populist appeal that grabbed a slice of the working class electorate in 2016.
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s ignorant. He’s a rich man, he gets his way. That’s not what this country is about.”
As the Nov. 5 presidential election nears, Democrats are counting on union workers to deliver voters, particularly in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada where unions have remained an influential bloc, even as their strength has declined over the decades.
Many labor union leaders say they’re working as hard as they ever have to oppose Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and elect Vice President Kamala Harris. The AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions that range from Major League Baseball players to firefighters to workers in the food industry, has endorsed Harris.
A growing share of rank-and-file union members, however, have been less likely to follow their leadership — some of them among Trump’s base.
Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, speaks on on July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)
“It has to be recognized that union members are not monolithic in terms of the party they support,” said Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University. “Many unions have 30, 40, maybe 50% or more of their members who either are registered Republicans or are going to support Donald Trump in this election.”
Last week, International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien announced the union’s executive council would not endorse either ticket and cited the support of a majority of his members for Trump. (The Teamsters aren’t part of the AFL-CIO).
Other union leaders insist that O’Brien is an outlier.
Nick Webber, a business agent with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and a political organizer for the North American Building Trades Unions, said, “It’s unprecedented the amount of interest in people in getting involved” as he marshals union canvassers this fall for the Democratic national ticket. He said in his conversations he’s hearing union members say “not only, ‘am I going to be voting,’ and [that they’re] tuned in, but ‘how can I get involved’ and ‘doing my part.’”
Appeals to steel and culinary workers
When Biden dropped out July 21, the national executive council of the 12.5 million-member AFL-CIO endorsed Harris the next day “because we knew that the administration that has been fighting for working people for the last three and a half years, we know what they’ve delivered, and we knew that her record spoke for itself,” said Liz Shuler, national AFL-CIO president, in an interview with NC Newsline.
In an appeal to United Steelworkers, the most powerful union in western Pennsylvania, Trump said in January he would block a potential acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan-based Nippon Steel.
Nevertheless the union endorsed Biden, who said in a visit in April he also opposed the sale. Both he and Harris reiterated that stance during a Labor Day visit to Pittsburgh. “I couldn’t agree more with President Biden: U.S. Steel should remain in American hands,” Harris said.
In Nevada, Trump held a rally in June where he proposed ending federal taxes on tipped income — an appeal aimed at the workers in the state’s largest industry, hotel-casinos.
Harris adopted the no-tax-on-tips position as well in a visit in August, a day after the powerful Culinary Workers Local Union 226, endorsed her. The union reports that its 60,000 members are 55% women and 60% immigrants.
In a return visit in August, Trump suggested his “no tax on tips” position would draw Culinary members’ support — “A lot of them are voting for us, I can tell you that,” he said.
But the union responded by doubling down on its support for Harris, who on a visit months before had celebrated the union’s successful contract negotiations with the Las Vegas Strip’s largest gambling-resort corporations.
“Kamala Harris has promised to raise the minimum wage for all workers — including tipped workers — and eliminate tax on tips,” said Culinary Vice President Leain Vashon. Vashon said Trump didn’t help tipped workers while he was president, so “Why would we trust him? Kamala has a plan, Trump has a slogan.”
Making the case
For most union leaders, the case for Harris is the stark contrast they see between Trump’s record in the White House from 2016 to 2020 and that of his successor.
Kent Miller, Laborers Union Wisconsin District Council president and business manager (Laborers Union photo)
“When you talk about the politics of what’s at stake in this election, it’s very clear,” said Kent Miller, president and business manager for the Laborers Union Wisconsin District Council.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the 2022 bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with only Democratic votes, opened the sluices to fund a range of investments in roads and bridges, clean energy and electric vehicle infrastructure.
The programs include strong incentives for union labor and for the enrollment of new apprentices in training programs operated by unions and their employers.
“We’ve got record membership and apprenticeship [numbers] right now,” said Miller, crediting the legislation. “Just imagine what another four years of pro-labor, pro-worker investment could do for our union, our communities and for the state of Wisconsin and our economy.”
But the messages unions have been pushing about manufacturing growth, the infrastructure advances and jobs — even unemployment rates that have fallen to just over 4% nationally and 3% or lower in states such as Wisconsin — have been slow to resonate with voters who are focused on higher prices resulting from supply chain shortages.
“Part of that is the investment is still in the works,” said William Jones, a labor historian at the University of Minnesota. “It was slow to be distributed, and it depended largely on state and local government taking it up and creating jobs. It’s possible some people haven’t felt the full impact.”
Jones also suggests there may have been inadequate messaging from the administration — something that unions are trying to make up for in their member outreach.
Beyond what Miller and other union leaders see as those bread-and-butter accomplishments are other policy stakes in who holds the White House, such as the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board and who holds the post of general counsel, the principal architect of the agency’s legal perspective.
Those differences further underscore what most union leaders see as a sharp distinction between the two tickets. “We’ve seen both these movies before,” said Webber of the electrical workers union.
Under the Trump administration the NLRB veered to positions less favorable to unions, Miller observed. Under Biden, it has issued more decisions that have supported union positions.
How much does Trump appeal?
Can the former president succeed in once again carving out some support among union voters?
In Wisconsin, union members’ connections to the Democratic Party appear to have softened since 2016, a review of survey data from the Marquette University Law School poll suggests. While about 65% of union members told pollsters they were Democrats in 2012 through 2015, that dropped to 59% in 2016 and has fluctuated since.
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all previously reliable Democratic states with strong union political involvement, famously flipped to Trump by narrow margins in 2016, leading to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s defeat that year. All three flipped back to help carry Biden to victory against Trump in 2020.
Jones said Trump’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2016 — enacted under Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993 — “helped him among a certain demographic in 2016” — primarily working class white men from rural and small town regions.
When Teamsters President O’Brien announced the union wouldn’t make an endorsement this year, the union released a poll of rank-and-file members that found nearly 60% support for Trump compared to 31% for Harris. The union said the survey was conducted by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm.
O’Brien’s announcement followed his precedent-breaking speech to the Republican National Convention in July, where he called Trump “one tough SOB,” proclaimed a willingness to work with either political party and attacked business lobbies and corporations.
“I think he feels that at least half of his members are Trump supporters,” said Clark, the Penn State professor, in an interview before the non-endorsement announcement. “And while I think he recognizes that Biden has been very pro-labor, you know, politically, I think he felt a need to sort of send a message to his members that he hears them.”
The outcome opened up a rift in the union, however. Within hours of O’Brien’s announcement, local, state and regional Teamsters bodies representing at least 500,000 members of the 1.3 million-member union endorsed Harris, including groups in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.
The pro-Harris Teamsters highlighted Biden’s role in signing legislation, included in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, that shored up the union’s Central States Pension Fund. The fund faced insolvency by 2026 after years of underfunding.
Ken Stribling, retired Teamsters member and president of the National United Committee to Protect Pensions, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024. (Screenshot | Democratic National Convention YouTube channel)
In August, Teamster retiree Ken Stribling of Milwaukee, president of a retiree group formed to campaign for the pension rescue, addressed the Democratic National Convention to thank Biden and Harris. Legislation had circulated during Trump’s term but the former president never took action to advance it, he said.
“The Biden administration and the vice president were really the ones instrumental in making sure that we got what we deserved,” Stribling said in an interview after his convention appearance.
In a statement, Bill Carroll, president of the union’s Council 39, representing about 15,000 Wisconsin Teamsters, said Harris would also build on Biden’s pro-union record. “In contrast, Donald Trump tried to gut workers’ rights as president by appointing union busters to the NLRB and advocating for national right-to-work,” Carroll said. “Trump’s project 2025 would go even further, attacking the ability for unions to even have the ability to organize.”
The labor-related provisions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document — billed as a blueprint for the next Republican White House — include proposals that experts have said would eliminate public sector unions nationwide, make forming private sector unions more difficult and allow states to opt out of federal labor laws. Other proposals would reduce federal protections for workers whether unionized or not.
Union messaging to members has emphasized the document and its ties to Trump, despite his repeated disavowal of the agenda and claims of ignorance about its contents.
“It is absolutely his plan,” the AFL-CIO’s Shuler told NC Newsline. “He’s had over 100 former administration officials and the Heritage Foundation basically writing the blueprint for his next term, which would eliminate unions as we know it.”
Reaching out to members
Union leaders say they’re trying to make sure their members are seeing the campaign the way they see it.
In Nevada, where the Culinary’s canvassing and get-out-the-vote effort is regarded as one of the state’s most formidable, the union boasts that during the 2022 campaign cycle it knocked on 1 million doors.
This year, UNITE HERE says it is once again mobilizing its members and plans to knock on more than 3 million doors in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Michigan “to ensure that Kamala Harris wins the presidency.”
In Wisconsin, the Laborers are building political messaging into a union project to engage members more closely, “connecting union members with other union members,” Miller said, to explain how negotiations affect wages and health and retirement benefits, as well as the importance of increasing union representation.
“We’re a jobs club,” Miller said. The message to the union members, he adds, is that “at the end of the day it’s everybody’s right to decide who to vote for — but we want to let you guys know these are the issues at stake in this upcoming election.”
Experienced union members are holding one-on-one conversations, particularly with newer and younger members. “We’re not just doing phone calls, we’re doing job site visits, and member-to-member doing doors,” Miller said.
Webber’s work with the building trades group is similar. “We’ve been doing a lot of reaching out and making sure to have those conversations,” he said — on job sites and during union meetings.
The message: “These jobs don’t come out of thin air,” Webber says. “There’s been strategic, intentional investment for a need in the community.”
The communications don’t just focus on other union members, either, he said. “You need to be sure people on the periphery of the union hear [the message],” said Webber. “Union household members are a huge part of these conversations — a partner, a spouse or child.”
The Wisconsin law known as Act 10, enacted in 2011, has weakened the once-powerful The Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union. But Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, WEAC’s president, said the union remains active phone-banking weekly and with regular canvassing planned for October.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain speaks onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on Aug. 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“We’re making the calls to ensure that our members are well educated on who’s on the ballot this go around and what they’ve done,” Wirtz-Olsen said.
Those calls focus both on the state races, where educators are hoping that a vastly different Legislature in 2025 could help unlock more funding for public schools, as well as on the national ticket.
“During the [presidential] debate we had a dozen house parties hosted by our members,” Wirtz-Olsen said. Along with Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, as her running mate, the contrast between the Harris campaign’s support of public education and Trump’s vow to abolish the federal Department of Education “has them fired up and excited about this race.”
On Monday, the United Auto Workers union unveiled a national YouTube video aimed directly at members who might still see Trump through the lens of his attacks on NAFTA in his first presidential campaign.
The UAW has endorsed Harris. In the 3 1/2-minute video, UAW President Shawn Fain finds both Democrats and Republicans culpable for NAFTA and the factory closings over the quarter-century since it was enacted. In 2016, Fain says, “All of that pain had to go somewhere. And for a lot of working-class people, it went to voting for Donald Trump.”
The video, however, portrays Trump as a con man, highlighting his 2017 tax cut as favoring the wealthy and the USMCA, the trade law Trump enacted, as no better than NAFTA, which it replaced.
While emphasizing that “both parties have done harm to the working class,” Fain said that under Biden and Harris, “we’ve seen the tide starting to turn.”
Under Biden there’s been “more manufacturing investment in this country than at any point in my lifetime,” he says, and under Harris, “the Democratic Party is getting back to its roots.”
Paula Uhing (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Paula Uhing is president of the local Steelworkers union at a suburban Milwaukee factory. She’s another enthusiastic Harris supporter, but said she and other labor leaders “know that we still have a lot of work to do” to pull more union voters behind the vice president.
“We have so many union members that vote against their own interests,” Uhing said. “It’s just because they’re not paying attention, they’re not listening to the right people.”
She describes herself as “optimistically cautious,” though. One reason has been some of the conversations she’s had with coworkers.
“There are people at work who are not necessarily turning away from the Republican Party altogether, but they are considering the Democratic ticket,” Uhing said. “They’re looking at it in a completely different way than they did last cycle, which is a good thing.”
Kim Lyons, Pennsylvania Capital-Star; Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current; Rob Schofield, NC Newsline; and Andrew Roth, for Michigan Advance, contributed reporting for this story.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of UAW President Shawn Fain.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. A handful of issues and groups of voters in battleground states could decide the race. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: This five-day series explores voter priorities in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election and the nation’s future. With the outcome expected to be close, the “swing states” as they are called are often a bellwether for the country.
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
It’s been a wild few months in the presidential race: President Joe Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris captured the Democratic nomination. Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and was targeted again at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Despite the historic lead-up to Election Day, the race has now settled into familiar territory: Much like 2020’s contest, top political strategists on both sides of the aisle expect control of the White House could come down to just a few thousand votes in a handful of battleground states.
“This is not going to be an election where you will see a landslide. It’s going to be won in the margins in six to seven swing states,” Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told a crowd of state lawmakers from across the country last month.
Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, shared the stage with Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign and advised him in the White House.
Unsurprisingly, the pair disagreed on much.
But while speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Kentucky, the two senior strategists framed the race similarly to the 2020 contest, when fewer than 50,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from an Electoral College tie.
“It is a different race. It has turned in very short time, but the issue set hasn’t changed at all,” Conway said. “And I think that’s what’s important here.”
Voters line up on the first day of early voting in 2020 in Las Vegas, Nev. (Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Like last cycle, the two campaigns are pouring millions into Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In this “Battleground” series, States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, explores the political issues and groups of voters that could make the difference in those seven states and, consequentially, in the race for the White House.
Unsurprisingly, economic issues — namely, stubbornly high prices — are proving central for many voters across the swing states. But voters also are concerned about immigration, abortion access and the future of the Supreme Court.
In states such as Michigan and Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, labor unions could prove instrumental for Harris after years of significant gains by organized labor.
In Georgia and North Carolina, Black voter turnout could make the difference, while Latino voters are closely divided in Nevada after helping propel Biden to victory there four years ago. In every swing state, campaigns are focused on all-important suburban voters.
The election’s outcome also could be shaped by the work of officials who have been debating who can vote and which votes should count since the mayhem of the last presidential contest.
This is not going to be an election where you will see a landslide. It’s going to be won in the margins in six to seven swing states.
– Democratic strategist Donna Brazile
Four years ago, a false narrative that questioned the security and integrity of elections took hold in some legislatures. New laws changed ballot-counting practices and made it more difficult to vote in many states, including swing states. In states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, there is broad concern that despite the checks and balances built into the voting system, local Republicans tasked with certifying elections will be driven by conspiracy theories and refuse to fulfill their duties if Trump loses again.
Fears that these efforts could sow chaos and delay results is not unfounded: Over the past four years, county officials in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania have refused to certify certain local elections.
With such a close race, voter turnout and motivation will be key in all the battleground states.
As in other swing states, North Carolina’s 16 Electoral College votes could hinge on how political independents vote, said Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican strategist who has worked on many campaigns.
And those independents can be unpredictable in North Carolina: Their votes helped both Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Trump carry the state in the last two general elections.
“It’s the independents that are up for grabs, and they don’t mind splitting a ticket at all,” Wrenn said. “Ultimately, in the general election, that’s the key group.”
The economy
In every state this year, the economy is a central issue.
As Trump tries to fault Harris and Biden for the high costs of everyday living, polling shows voters blame Harris less for the situation than they did Biden — though likely voters profess more confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy.
For her part, Harris has unveiled plans to lower prices of rent, homebuying and groceries, arguing she will remain focused on the middle class from Day One, contrasting her ideas with what she characterizes as Trump’s catering to billionaires.
In Georgia, Republicans and Democrats alike have found success in recent statewide campaigns by highlighting similar kitchen table issues. After attending a Harris rally in Savannah last month, Georgia voter Sarah Damato said she doesn’t believe Trump will fight for the middle class.
At the event, the vice president told listeners she would lower costs by fighting corporate price-fixing and touted her proposal for a “care economy,” a set of progressive proposals including benefits for parents of newborns and credits for first-time homebuyers.
“Kamala Harris made it very evident today that the American family is the most important thing on her mind these days, and she’s going to make it easier for each one of us to have a brighter future,” Damato said.
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, meanwhile, Republican Party volunteer Sharon Buege said she supports the GOP ticket because she sees the race as a matter of “good versus evil.” Speaking outside a news conference by Trump running mate J.D. Vance, Buege said she opposed “the whole left agenda,” adding that her top issues in the race were border security, the economy, human trafficking, homelessness and “indoctrination” in public schools.
It is a different race. It has turned in very short time, but the issue set hasn’t changed at all.
– Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway
At that same news conference, a man who would only give his name as “John” said the economy and inflation mattered most: “I don’t need a reminder of why to support Trump. I can get that every time I go to the gas station or grocery store.”
Groups of voters
With Republicans looking to run up margins in rural parts of the battleground states and Democrats banking on big leads in cities, the suburbs remain pivotal.
In Georgia, diverse and growing suburbs have helped move the state from reliably red to purple.
In the state’s two largest suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett, Biden picked up more than 137,000 votes in 2020 over 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. The same year, Trump boosted his total by just under 32,000 votes over his 2016 performance.
The Trump campaign boasts a mighty in-state operation: nearly 15,000 volunteers signing up between mid-July and the end of August, nearly 300 events scheduled for September, and 4,000 neighborhood organizers and canvassers — known as Trump Force Captains — joining the cause in July and August.
But Team Harris says they are running the largest Georgia operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle, with more than 200 campaign staff in 28 offices. Harris’ recent visit to the more conservative south side of the state marked her 16th trip to Georgia since becoming vice president and her seventh trip this year.
Harris is hoping to fire up the young, diverse Democratic base, but her team also is hoping she can hang onto or expand on Biden’s coalition of older, affluent, educated and largely white suburbanites.
“Those are the people who are actually kind of pivotal and who will modify or change their behavior,” said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.
“These people are largely Republicans, but they can’t bring themselves to vote for Donald Trump or for Republicans who are closely associated with him,” Bullock said.
Larry Ceisler, a Philadelphia public affairs executive and political analyst, said the four suburban Philadelphia counties surrounding Pennsylvania’s largest city are key to winning that state. Once a Republican bastion, the so-called collar counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery have swung strongly in the other direction since 2016.
That complicates messaging for both campaigns, Ceisler said. Trump’s anti-abortion stance and Harris’ effort to back away from her earlier statements against fracking — both positions that appeal to rural and western Pennsylvania voters — are potential liabilities in suburbs.
Democrats have a 343,000-voter registration advantage over Republicans in Pennsylvania. But the state has been decided by narrow margins in the last two presidential elections.
Daniel Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg, noted that the Trump campaign has paid attention to Black and Latino voters.
“One of the weaknesses that Biden had as a candidate was he had weakening support among African American voters. And then Trump has actually done fairly well, particularly in some other states, like in Florida, with Latino voters,” Mallinson said, adding that Harris’ nomination changes the equation somewhat.
After Democrats seemingly all but wrote off Arizona for Biden, the contest there is proving more winnable for Harris. Biden narrowly won Arizona in 2020, but he had been hemorrhaging Latino support this year.
Employees join the picket line in September 2023 at General Motors’ Lansing Redistribution Center in Lansing, Mich. (Anna Liz Nichols/Michigan Advance)
In the manufacturing-heavy upper Midwest, labor unions could prove consequential in not only persuading voters but also motivating them to the polls.
Biden was the first sitting president to visit a picket line when the United Auto Workers last year took on the “Big Three” Detroit automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — by going on strike. That effort led to significant increases in pay and benefits for workers.
The UAW, which in August announced a national campaign to motivate its 1 million active and retired members to vote for Harris, says its membership accounted for 9.2% of Biden’s 2020 votes in Michigan alone.
“To me, this election is real simple,” UAW president Shawn Fain told a crowd of about 15,000 people last month at a rally in Detroit for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “It’s about one question. It’s a question we made famous in the labor movement: Which side are you on?”
Political weaknesses
While Democrats are more motivated than when Biden was the presumptive nominee, they still face internal conflicts, the most high-profile of which has been about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Dee Sull, a Las Vegas attorney who works in immigration and family law, is a registered Democrat who said she would never vote for Trump. Yet she doesn’t really want to vote for Harris, leaving her “very torn” this election.
“I believe our foreign policy in Gaza is completely ridiculous. I’m very disturbed,” she said of U.S. military aid to Israel. “If we’re going to spend money, I want it spent on my kids here — on my neighbors’ kids here.”
Sull said both parties have silenced the voices of those who protest the death and destruction in Gaza. And she was irritated that Palestinian American activists were not allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention last month.
Sull won’t sit out the election, but said she would prefer to vote for a third candidate with a viable shot at winning.
“Probably like a lot of Americans would if they had that opportunity,” she said.
For Trump, voters’ overwhelming support for abortion rights could prove a huge liability in swing states.
While Trump has wobbled in recent months on whether he would veto a national abortion ban, the Supreme Court justices he appointed dismantled abortion access across the country in 2022 — an unpopular position even in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio that since have voted to expand abortion rights.
In Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood stopped offering abortions at its health clinics after the court’s Dobbs decision because of an 1849 “trigger” state law that immediately took effect. Wisconsin women lost all abortion services there for a year and a half, until a court re-interpreted the state law.
This summer’s shakeup has reset the race, said Amy Walter, publisher of The Cook Political Report, an independent, nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes elections. So far, likely voters in the swing states view Harris more favorably than Biden, she said. But with Trump benefiting from an electorate skeptical of the state of the economy, the newsletter characterized the race as “a battle of inches.”
The campaigns both face a lot of voters who are disenchanted with politics altogether, or else unhappy with their options.
Amy Tarkanian, a conservative television commentator who once lauded Trump to national audiences and was chair of the Nevada State Republican Party in 2011-12, said she’s at “a complete loss” this year. She remains a Republican, even after the state party heavily criticized her when, two years ago, she endorsed a pair of Democratic candidates for state offices.
“I’m not happy, or necessarily sold on Kamala,” Tarkanian said. “… But I absolutely do not want to vote for Donald Trump.”
Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small, Michigan Advance’s Anna Liz Nichols and Jon King, Nevada Current’s Hugh Jackson, NC Newsline’s Galen Bacharier, Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall and John Cole, Georgia Recorder’s Ross Williams, and Wisconsin Examiner’s Ruth Conniff and Henry Redman contributed reporting.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. GREENSBORO, N.C., and IRVING, Texas – National Express School team members have once again demonstrated their dedication to cultivating and perfecting their craft through their latest participation in Thomas Bus Institute’s three-day advanced training sessions for both electric and standard school buses.
Team members in Ann Arbor, MI, participated in a three-day advanced level (HV3) electric school bus training session taught by Thomas Built. The advanced training session is the final and most advanced level of electric training provided by Thomas Built and focuses specifically on high-voltage processes and tests such as insulation integrity and high voltage ground resistance and de-energizing the battery electric vehicle (BEV).
Prior to advancing to the final level of training, team members are required to complete two other training sessions – level one (HV1), which focused on familiarizing technicians with the features of electric vehicles and illustrating the differences between maintaining and owning an electric vehicle (EV) fleet vs. a standard school bus fleet, and level two (HV2), which trained technicians on low and high-voltage systems with an extra emphasis on safety processes.
In addition to EV school bus training, advanced training sessions for standard school buses took place in two locations – Greensboro, NC and Irving, TX. At the training sessions, participants received hands-on training focused on advanced diagnostics on different engine platforms, advanced electronics, and other bus components.
Eleven technicians attended the training sessions that covered the following topics:
Advanced Electrical Skills
Advanced Multiplex Systems
Air Conditioning
Coolant Class
Detroit and Cummins Engine and Aftertreatment
Electrical Charging systems
Electronic Resources
Introducing Electric Thomas Bus Familiarization
Seating Systems
Wheelchair Lifts
Type C Conventional reviews the multiplex electrical system, troubleshooting information, and software available.
“We understand the importance of continuously providing our teams with training opportunities to help them flourish in their craft and expertise,” said Wayne Skinner, Senior Vice President of Maintenance, National Express. “The trainings also help ensure that our technicians possess the necessary and most up-to-date skills to maintain our fleet at the highest standards while also increasing engagement and productivity. We will continue developing our relationships with our original equipment manufacturer and electric vehicle partners so that we can ensure our technicians are always performing at their best and able to reach and further advance their potential, and ultimately, their careers.”
About National Express:
National Express LLC (NELLC) is the North American subsidiary of Mobico Group, one of the premier global mobility firms. We operate across 34 states and two provinces. Our organizations share a strong commitment to provide the highest level of safety, quality, outstanding customer service and positive employee relations. National Express School (NEXS) operates more than 15,590 school buses, serves more than 429 school districts and contracts in 30 states and two provinces, and transports more than 1.3 million students on a daily basis.
More than a year after 5 Lakes Energy released a report detailing more than $7.8 billion in federal investments available to fuel Michigan’s transition to clean energy, the consulting firm is taking stock of the state’s energy economy following the passage of multiple laws based on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s climate plan.
In November, the Democratic-led Michigan Legislature voted through a host of policies including goals for transitioning the state to 100% clean energy by 2040 and increasing the state’s energy waster reduction standards and efforts intended to streamline the permitting process by allowing the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to approve large scale renewable energy projects provided they meet state requirements.
“The future of our energy sector — and a significant part of our economy — lies in clean energy. This report highlights how investments in clean energy fuels robust job growth across the U.S. energy sector, with Michigan playing a key role,” state Sen. Sue Shink (D-Northfield Twp.) said in a statement.
“Our historic Clean Energy Future legislation has positioned Michigan as a national leader in the fight against climate change, reducing household utility cost and safeguarding our air, water and public health, while creating good-paying jobs for people. This report proves that prioritizing clean energy isn’t just good for the environment — it’s also a powerful boost for our economy and American workers,” said Shink, who was a lead sponsor of one of the bills in the clean energy package.
By examining the interactions between the Inflation Reduction Act and Michigan’s suite of clean energy legislation, the report estimates Michigan families will save an average of $297 a year on their energy bill by 2030 and $713 a year by 2040 compared to if these policies were not enacted, saving Michiganders more than was predicted in the previous report.
Additionally, Michigan will bring in $15.6 billion in investments from the Inflation Reduction Act by 2030 and $30.7 billion by 2040. The state will also shrink its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 65% over the next six years, down 88% by 2040.
Michigan is also projected to save $7.3 billion by 2030 in avoided public health costs — such as deaths, hospitalizations and lost school and work days — with savings across the state totaling $27.8 billion by 2040.
The report also broke down the economic impact of these policies on a more local level, breaking the state into 10 regions and examining the projected growth of jobs and the gross domestic product of those regions.
Alongside breaking down the economic impacts by region, the report also polled and interviewed 20 members of the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council, a trade organization focused on supporting innovative energy technology.
In the survey, 75% of companies indicated they were hiring or understaffed, with 90% indicating they would need to hire or they would be understaffed in the next three years.
To further support Michigan’s clean energy, the report shares policy recommendations including additional state policies advancing the growth of clean energy and decarbonizing the state’s building and transportation sectors in line with Whitmer’s MI Healthy Climate Plan, continued investment into clean energy projects and monitoring and evaluation to ensure energy goals are met.
The report also advises lawmakers to enact a new policy on conducting cumulative impact assessments to determine the effects of retiring existing energy assets and building new projects, to ensure communities of color and low income communities and communities with a history of disinvestment can reap the benefits of clean energy.
Additionally, it recommends taking steps to reduce the amount households spend on their energy bills by ensuring that cost reductions for energy utilities translate into savings for customers.
In its final recommendation the report calls on the state to develop workforce training programs in support of the clean energy sector, placing a focus on ensuring opportunities for those transitioning away from traditional energy industries like those based in fossil fuels.
Detroit’s City Council again postponed a vote on a fund connected with the proposed solar plan this week. The plan involves building 200 acres of solar fields in six neighborhoods to offset the energy used by municipal buildings.
Councilmembers continue to voice disagreements over the first phase of the plan, which would create 104 acres of solar in the Gratiot-Findlay, State Fair and Van Dyke-Lynch neighborhoods.
Councilmember Angela Whitfield-Calloway has argued that utility-scale solar is wrong for the city and questioned why Detroit hasn’t explored placing solar on municipal buildings or developing arrays outside the city.
However, Councilmembers Fred Durhal III and Coleman A. Young II have said the plan could revitalize neighborhoods and save residents money. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has pitched the program as a way to meet city climate goals while reducing blight and illegal dumping in vacant lots.
Homeowners in the footprint of the proposed solar fields would receive twice the fair market value of their homes or $90,000, whichever is higher, while renters will get 18 months of rent to relocate. Homeowners within community benefits areas surrounding the projects will receive $15,000 to $25,000 each for energy efficiency upgrades.
In the five neighborhoods being considered for the second phase of the solar plan, 28 of the 31 homeowners have already signed letters of intent to sell their homes, according to Duggan.
He has proposed using a $4.4 million equity fund derived from the Utility Conversion Fund, which is legally required to be used for energy conservation, to purchase these homes.
City council has twice delayed a vote on the fund so far, with Whitfield Calloway emerging as a strong critic. She said during the July 2 council meeting that the arrays would do little to address blight and crime.
“Solar panels will disrupt and destroy entire neighborhoods. There will be no future affordable housing being built anywhere around a solar farm,” Whitfield Calloway said.
Young responded to Whitfield Calloway, saying the plan would help lower taxes for Detroiters who would otherwise be paying the utility bills for city buildings.
“I, for one, believe the taxes are too damn high,” he said.
One resident who lives near the proposed 40-acre State Fair solar project in Whitfield Calloway’s district spoke out against the plan on Tuesday, calling attention to the infill housing developed by the nonprofit Emmanuel Community House in the area.
“That area could be used again for single-family housing and bringing people back to the city of Detroit,” she said. “I’ve been there since 1980 and want to bring it back.”
Meanwhile, the city council is considering asking for an outside legal opinion on the solar plan. Council President Mary Sheffield has said she has questions about the city’s use of eminent domain and whether it can exempt itself from its own zoning ordinance.
Detroit Corporation Council Conrad Mallet and the council’s Legislative Policy Division have said that the solar sites are exempt because they’re being put to public use.
Councilmembers question placing arrays in neighborhoods, criticize DTE Energy
As city council weighed the equity fund, its Public Health and Safety Standing Committee has been considering a resolution to approve the acquisition of land for the solar plan and the contracts for Lightstar Renewables and DTEEnergy, the businesses chosen to develop the solar fields.
Developer representatives and city departments made lengthy presentations touting the potential for solar to improve health outcomes by reducing emissions from fossil fuel power plants and increasing energy reliability as the grid is upgraded to enable solar.
During Monday’s meeting, Whitfield Calloway questioned why Detroit hasn’t explored placing arrays on city buildings or developing solar fields outside the city limits as places like Chicago, Cincinnati and Philadelphia have done.
“Why not put the solar panels on the structures that we’re trying to drive power to?” she asked. “Why do we have to put them in neighborhoods?”
“We really feel that it was the right thing to do to invest in our land here and make sure that residents are able to benefit from it,” Trisha Stein, Detroit’s chief strategy officer, said earlier in the meeting. She said neighborhood groups had drawn up the areas that would host the solar fields and surrounding community benefits areas.
DTE Energy also came in for criticism on Monday, with councilmember James Tate saying he was met with “eyerolls” and “sighs” when he told the Detroit Green Task Force that DTE Energy would be developing some of these projects.
“You have a terrible reputation,” he said, calling out the utility’s opposition to community solar, which allows residents to subscribe to offsite solar arrays and receive bill credits for the energy produced.
The committee will continue deliberating on these contracts next week.
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