A midwest power grid consisting of 15 states may be forced to impose rotating blackouts during the summer’s hottest days. It’s due to rising demand for energy amid shortening supply, as more nuclear and coal power plants are decommissioned.
“We have the supply needed to provide energy to our customers every day of the summer, every day of the year, even on the hottest days of the summer, coldest days of the winter,” says Josh Paciorek, Consumers Energy Media Relations Specialist. “We don’t necessarily expect any sort of interruptions to their service this summer.”
Consumers and Cherryland, as well as the rest of the state’s providers, are a part of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) grid operation. It consists of over 100 members spanning from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.
Their yearly report suggests supply and demand, as well as extreme weather are causing reliability challenges across the United States.
Paciorek says Consumers plans for events such as this one. They have a 17% ‘cushion’ to ease any reliability issues when it comes to power generation and grid transmission.
They also have a plan in the event a blackout does happen. Power plants would have to operate at 100% output, then the largest businesses and finally homeowners would be asked to reduce energy consumption.
“Even that option is extremely rare,” says Paciorek. “We haven’t had to ask customers to do that since at least 2012.”
Cherryland is also prepared in the event of a blackout, which General Manager Tony Anderson says is “possible, but not probable.”
“That means if the conditions are right, if we lose a power plant on the grid, high weather, or maybe we lose two power plants on the grid, there is the possibility that we don’t have enough capacity,” he says.
And the country is losing its power plants. Just last month alone, in Michigan, the Palisades nuclear power plant in South Haven was shutdown.
Consumers is planning to close the remainder of their coal plants by 2025 to be on track with the MI Healthy Climate Plan introduced by Governor Whitmer in April, calling for more renewable energy dependency.
“[Clean energy plan] details how we are going to transition to a cleaner future while still being able to provide the amount of energy that our customers need here in Michigan. So that plan does call for closing the remainder of our coal plants by 2025,” says Paciorek.
Consumers’ plan calls for adding 8,000 megawatts of solar before 2040. They plan to bridge the gap between solar and coal by purchasing a natural gas in southwest Michigan to avoid disruption.
“We’re constantly looking and not just the near-term future, not what’s happening in the summer of 2022 or summer 2023, but what our energy needs are going to be between now and for the next two decades,” says Paciorek.
The MI Healthy Climate Plan also includes building more infrastructure for elective vehicle charging stations, putting a further strain on the grid. But Consumers has kept that in mind when planning for the future.
“We put together this plan last time in 2018. Then we released another one in 2021,” says Paciork. “It takes about a year long process for the Michigan Public Service Commission to approve it.”
Michigan Public Service Commission requires companies to forecast usage to ensure the energy supply is exists, but it may not be requirement in other states. It’s not required under MISO.
Anderson says the reliance on transmission from the other states could cause a potential problem.
“If there’s a transmission issue or a generation issue out of our state and we can’t get the power in that’s a bigger problem for us because we have less and less in state generation,” he says.
Anderson says we’ve shutdown a great deal of the generating power plants while trying to replace them with renewables, causing concern.
“That’s not to say that’s wrong,” he says. “And that’s not to say that wind and solar are wrong. We’re just not building wind and solar fast enough with the appropriate backup to replace what we’re shutting off. We should build the wind and solar first and then shut off the coal or the nuclear.”
Anderson adds that Cherryland owns enough of their own energy output to serve their members but being a part of a larger grid means the energy isn’t kept at home, it has to be shared.
Looking to the future, it’s possible that rotating blackouts may be even more of a concern as climate change causes summers to stretch on and for temperatures to rise.
The solution to solving energy demand, while also providing clean energy generation, can not come fast enough.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to get ourselves out of this situation,” says Anderson.
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