Chair of Energy and Technology Committee
PUF: Tell us about the energy industry in Michigan.
Senator Nofs: Going back to the '08 law, everyone in the country was talking about windmills and clean energy and there was a huge debate going on. Everybody was trying to set the exact same fictitious goals. Like California, and New York, everybody wanted to be thirty to forty percent by a certain date.
So, we decided to do the responsible thing. We selected ten percent by 2015. Seven years later, we were hitting our ten percent.
We jump-started the industry like every other state did. And we found that the more investment everybody was putting in, the more it drove the price down. That's what the subsidy was doing.
We were taking advantage of all that was available to us. A lot of people were happy with that. And there were a lot of people that wanted to see more even though it cost a little more at the time.
It's very competitive today. In the 2016 law, after we conducted that experiment, which we hoped would turn out the way it did, it came out right. Our estimate was correct.
The price was driven down. The energy efficiency, or energy waste reduction, was very important, also, as part of that. We saw the benefits of stopping energy waste.