Testimony in Support of House Bills 5710 and 5711, addressing critics’ assertions Michigan House Committee on Energy
Cameron Sholty, Executive Director, Heartland Impact
April 28, 2026
Chairwoman Wendzel, Vice Chairs Preston and Tate, and Members of the Committee:
Thank you – again – for the opportunity to submit testimony in support of House Bills 5710 and 5711. Since I’ve previously provided testimony in support of the proposed legislation, I wanted to take this opportunity to address assertions made by opponents of the bills and a more top line critique of advocates for so-called “green” energy in furtherance of decarbonization goals on very aggressive and uneconomical timelines.
Opponents of HB 5710 and HB 5711 treat Michigan’s decarbonization policy largely as an emissions question. That is incomplete. Michigan energy policy should be judged by whether it provides affordable, reliable, secure, dispatchable, and environmentally responsible electricity at total system cost. A decarbonization mandate does not become affordable merely because wind and solar have no fuel cost, and a resource does not become clean simply because emissions are shifted from the point of generation to mining, manufacturing, forced-labor-risk supply chains, land use, transmission corridors, recycling, and waste management.
Michigan lawmakers should therefore be skeptical of claims that defend existing decarbonization mandates without fully addressing ratepayer exposure, low-income energy burdens, federal subsidies, grid integration costs, critical mineral dependence, forced-labor concerns in solar supply chains, lithium-ion battery fire and disposal risks, and the transmission buildout required to accommodate intermittent resources.
Decarbonization is expensive and hits ratepayers hard, especially lower-income households.
The most important omission in criticisms of the legislation is the ratepayer. Electric-sector decarbonization is not paid for only through the sticker price of a wind turbine or solar panel. Ratepayers also pay for transmission, distribution, interconnection, storage, backup capacity, reliability services, utility capital spending, and the administrative cost of forcing the system to comply with state-mandated resource preferences.
That matters in Michigan because residential electric prices are already high. In February 2026, EIA reported Michigan’s average residential electricity price at 20.00 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with a U.S. average of 17.65 cents per kilowatt-hour. EIA’s annual data also show Michigan’s 2024 residential average at 19.30 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 16.48 cents per kilowatt-hour nationally. Put plainly, Michigan households already face above-average residential electric rates.
Higher electricity costs are regressive. The Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data tool indicates that the national average energy burden for low-income households is 6 percent, about three times the 2 percent burden for non-low-income households, and that in some areas energy burdens can exceed 30 percent. That means higher electric bills fall hardest on the people least able to absorb them: seniors on fixed incomes, renters, working families, and small businesses operating on tight margins.
The correct test for HB 5710 and HB 5711 is therefore not whether decarbonization sounds desirable in the abstract. The correct test is whether Michigan families and employers can afford the all-in cost of the transition. A policy that raises rates in the name of decarbonization should be treated as a cost-of-living policy, not merely as an environmental policy.
“Cheap renewables” claims often ignore subsidies and full-system costs.
A common defense of renewable mandates is that wind and solar are now inexpensive. That claim is often based on levelized cost of energy comparisons that measure generation cost, not the full cost of building and operating a reliable electric system around intermittent resources.
Standalone wind and solar are not equivalent to dispatchable generation. Solar produces when the sun shines. Wind produces when the wind blows. Michigan still needs power at night, during winter peaks, during wind droughts, and during extreme weather. That means the system must also pay for some combination of storage, dispatchable backup, overbuilding, demand response, additional transmission, and imported power. Those costs are real even when they are not captured in a simple generation-only comparison.
Federal law continues to provide significant tax preferences for zero-emission electricity and storage. The IRS describes the Clean Electricity Production Credit as an emissions-based production tax credit available for qualified facilities and energy storage placed in service after December 31, 2024, with a phaseout that begins no earlier than 2032 or when U.S. electricity-sector greenhouse gas emissions fall to 25 percent of 2022 levels. The IRS separately describes the Clean Electricity Investment Credit as available for qualified facilities and energy storage placed in service after December 31, 2024, with a base credit of 6 percent of qualified investment and an increase of up to 30 percent for facilities meeting prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements, plus additional bonus credits for domestic content and energy-community siting.
Those provisions do not prove every renewable project is uneconomic. They do prove that the economics presented to lawmakers are often subsidy-sensitive and policy-dependent. If a resource is said to be cheap, lawmakers should ask: cheap before or after federal tax credits, state mandates, renewable-energy credits, accelerated depreciation, transmission cost allocation, backup costs, and reliability services? Michigan should require honest accounting based on total system cost, not a generation-only comparison that understates what ratepayers ultimately pay.
Wind, solar, and batteries carry environmental, labor, and supply-chain costs.
Clean Energy Standards also risk treating “clean energy” as though it is impact-free. It is not. Wind, solar, and battery technologies require major quantities of minerals, metals, land, manufacturing capacity, and global supply chains.
The International Energy Agency reports that supply chains for critical energy minerals remain highly concentrated. Its 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook states that the average market share of the top three refining nations for key energy minerals rose from about 82 percent in 2020 to 86 percent in 2024, with roughly 90 percent of recent supply growth coming from the top single supplier alone: Indonesia for nickel and China for cobalt, graphite, and rare earths. IEA also reports that two-thirds of global battery recycling capacity growth since 2020 has been in China. These are not trivial risks. They are supply-chain, national-security, price-volatility, and reliability risks.
There are also forced-labor concerns in solar supply chains. The U.S. Department of Labor states that there is “extensive evidence of labor abuse across much of the solar supply chain” and that nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, a key solar-panel material, comes from Xinjiang, where ethnic and religious minorities are forced by the Chinese government to work against their will. This does not mean every solar panel is tainted. It does mean lawmakers should not treat solar deployment as a morally or environmentally simple substitute for dispatchable generation.
End-of-life management is another underplayed problem. EPA warns that lithium-ion batteries and devices containing them should not go in household garbage or recycling bins and that, if improperly managed at the end of useful life, they can harm human health or the environment. EPA also reports that 64 waste facilities experienced 245 fires caused by, or likely caused by, lithium metal or lithium-ion batteries.
The bottom line is simple: “clean” energy is not costless energy. Its costs are often shifted upstream to mining and manufacturing, sideways to foreign supply chains, and downstream to recycling and waste management.
Decarbonization requires massive grid upgrades, and those costs land on customers.
Advocates of so-called green energy also understate the grid challenge. A renewables-heavy electric system is not built simply by replacing fossil plants with wind and solar projects. It requires new transmission, new interconnection capacity, additional balancing resources, storage, distribution upgrades, and reliability planning.
DOE has acknowledged the scale of this challenge. In its “Queued Up…But in Need of Transmission” materials, DOE states that independent estimates indicate the United States will need to expand transmission systems by 60 percent by 2030 and may need to triple those systems by 2050 to meet growing clean-electricity demands.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s interconnection-queue work shows the bottleneck in practical terms. Its 2025 “Queued Up” summary states that, as of the end of 2024, nearly 2,300 gigawatts of total generation and storage capacity were actively seeking grid interconnection; it also states that most projects that apply for interconnection are ultimately withdrawn and that projects that are built are taking longer on average to complete studies and become operational. The same summary reports that the median duration from interconnection request to commercial operation has doubled from less than two years for projects built in 2000-2007 to more than four years for projects built in 2018-2024.
Those facts cut against the notion that decarbonization mandates are merely a matter of building more wind and solar. The grid is the constraint. Transmission and interconnection costs are not theoretical. They are capital costs that utilities recover from customers, which means the bill eventually lands on households and employers.
Conclusion
Clean Energy Standards advocates ask Michigan lawmakers to preserve decarbonization mandates without fully confronting the total system cost of those mandates. That is not sound energy policy. Michigan should not evaluate resources only by whether they satisfy a favored political goal. It should evaluate them by whether they provide affordable, reliable, secure, dispatchable, and environmentally responsible electricity.
Michigan should not call an energy policy affordable simply because the fuel is free, and it should not call an energy source clean while ignoring the mining, forced labor, foreign supply chains, battery fires, hazardous waste, land use, and transmission buildout required to make it work. The real test is total system cost, reliability, and ratepayer protection. On that test, Michigan’s decarbonization mandate deserves serious scrutiny.
HB 5710 and HB 5711 can be defended as efforts to restore balance to Michigan energy policy. They need not be framed as anti-renewable. They can be framed as pro-ratepayer, pro-reliability, pro-transparency, and pro-honest accounting. Michigan should not lock families and businesses into an energy transition whose costs are understated at the front end and socialized through rates at the back end.
