The legislature wants to make them voluntary
COLUMBUS — “Republicans, newly empowered by Trump’s win and dominant at the state level, are only going to ramp up their attacks on clean energy. Michigan Republicans are going after their state’s clean energy standards as we speak.
They tell lots of stories about why they’re doing it. Sometimes they say it penalizes ratepayers. Sometimes they say mandates aren’t needed given ‘the looming omnipresence of this ridiculous U.S. EPA Clean Power Plan,’ as Seitz put it. But of course, the Clean Power Plan is toast now — Trump is going to kill it. (To my knowledge, that has not changed any Republican’s attitude toward clean energy mandates.)
Sometimes they say they oppose mandates out of devotion to free markets. To wit:
State Sen. Bill Coley (R-Liberty Township) compared the requirement to provide a percentage of energy from renewable sources to forcing people to buy kale, which “tastes like plastic” in his view.
‘Let’s let the marketplace work,’ Coley said, wondering whether ‘kale mandates’ would come next.
(If the comparison of renewable energy to kale doesn’t expose the culture-war roots of all of this, I don’t know what could.)
Coley’s plea to allow the marketplace to work is amusing, delivered at a time when his state’s big utilities, supported by Republicans like him, are receiving enormous bailouts for their uncompetitive power plants and are in the midst of pleading with regulators to scrap market competition altogether so they can keep the plants open.”
— David Roberts, Vox
link to article
