Michigan is on a path to shrink its electricity supply while growing its electricity demand, and the people who put us on that path have told us where it ends.
In 2023, with control of the House, the Senate, and the governor’s office, Democrats passed the package Rep. Greene and I discussed on this week’s episode: Public Acts 233 and 235, the state’s own Green New Deal. It mandates 100% “clean” electricity by 2040, and it handed the Michigan Public Service Commission, an appointed board, the final say over where utility-scale wind, solar, and battery projects go, stripping that decision from every township, village, city, and county in the state.
That alone is a problem. What comes next turns it into a danger.
Supply: fragile by design
Michigan’s grid has run for decades on coal, nuclear, and natural gas. Those plants produce continuous power on demand, in any weather. The 2040 mandate replaces most of that with wind and solar, which produce power only when the wind blows and the sun shines. In Michigan, winter is exactly when the sun does the least.
The state’s own estimate says meeting the mandate could require more than 200,000 additional acres of land for wind and solar. My own math, based on realistic demand forecasts and actual capacity factors for Michigan solar and the generation the mandate requires, puts the figure closer to 2 million acres. That is roughly 27% of the state’s 7.5 million acres of cropland. Developers prefer cropland because it is already cleared and does not trigger federal environmental review. In my own commission district, DTE wants 2,700 acres in Marathon Township, including up to eight acres of batteries that volunteer firefighters have no training or means to extinguish.
Demand: growing by mandate
While supply gets less reliable, Democrats are working to push more of daily life onto the grid.
Electric vehicles are the obvious piece. Every EV that replaces a gasoline car moves that energy demand onto the wires. Data centers, which Rep. Greene raised on the show, add loads measured in the hundreds of megawatts each.
The less obvious piece is your furnace.
In March 2026, EGLE released “Clean, Safe, and Affordable: A Policy Roadmap for Efficient and All-Electric Homes in Michigan.” Its stated goal is to eliminate emissions from the residential sector by 2050, and its first policy recommendation is updated building codes. In plain language, that means new homes built without natural gas: electric heat, electric water heaters, electric stoves.
This is not hypothetical. Ann Arbor’s city council passed a resolution in 2023 calling for an ordinance banning natural gas connections in new construction, and in July 2026 it amended its development code to require that buildings seeking certain height exceptions be powered solely by electricity. New York went further. Its All-Electric Buildings Act took effect January 1, 2026, prohibiting gas and propane heating, water heating, and cooking in new buildings up to seven stories, with all remaining new buildings covered in 2029. A federal appeals court upheld it in June.
Michigan Democrats have the roadmap. New York has the law. Ann Arbor has the first ordinance. The direction is not in doubt.
Why this is a matter of life and death
Today, Michigan’s electricity demand peaks in the summer. If the grid fails on a hot afternoon, people are uncomfortable. Some vulnerable people are at risk, but most of us sweat it out.
Move home heating onto the grid and the peak moves to winter. If the grid fails on a January night at ten below, people with no gas furnace, no gas water heater, and no gas stove have no heat at all. Massive property destruction and even widespread loss of life is a likely outcome. That is what a winter blackout means in a state of all-electric homes.
Grid operators already know this. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation has repeatedly flagged the Midwest for elevated winter risk as dispatchable plants retire faster than replacements arrive. Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022 forced emergency measures across the eastern grid and rolling blackouts in several states. That was with gas furnaces carrying most of the heating load. Democrats’ plan is to remove that cushion while removing the plants that provide the power.
The pattern
Take each policy on its own and it can be explained away. A clean energy target. A siting reform. A building code update. A voluntary roadmap.
Put them in sequence and the pattern is plain. First, mandate an intermittent supply. Second, override the local officials who would object to where it goes. Third, move heating, transportation, and cooking onto that supply. Each step makes the next one harder to reverse, and none of them was accompanied by a serious plan for the nights when the wind stops.
Nuclear could fix much of this. It is carbon-free, it runs in all weather, and it does not consume farmland by the square mile. It was barely part of the 2023 conversation.
What to do
Every House and Senate seat in Michigan is on the ballot this November. Republicans hold the House. The Senate is 20 to 18 Democrat. Two seats and a governor’s office stand between Michigan and a second trifecta that Democrats have clearly signaled will advance their destructive agenda.
Rep. Greene said it on the show: this is government hurting people. We need a Republican House, Senate, and Governor John James to be able to reverse this harmful legislation.
Vote REPUBLICAN for a return to common sense and rational leadership.
