Clean Energy In the News

Viewers who check out WKAR’s upcoming documentary on green energy in Michigan may wonder whether they’ve accidentally tuned in to a rerun from the ‘50s. 

They’ll be greeted by sights and sounds from the golden era of Michigan manufacturing: steel sheets curling out of giant rollers, men in hard hats walking across factory floors, welders spraying sparks in all directions, CEOs laying out plans for new plants.

What has become of the poignant tear over despoiled water and air, the furrowed brow of concern over owls?

Put ‘em in a waterproof and furrowproof lockbox. This is a brave new world where green really means green.

“Michigan’s Green Energy Economy,” the latest entry in WKAR’s “Michigan at Risk” series, walks the viewer through turbine factories, wind farms, solar panel complexes, ethanol plants and other budding renewable-energy enterprises in a tight tour that never strays far from the bottom line.

Shriberg, director of Environment Michigan and one of the film’s talking heads, says the documentary comes at a unique moment of opportunity for the environmental movement.

“The number one way that the opposition to any type of environmental legislation is by saying ‘jobs killer’ over and over again,” Shriberg says. “This is an opportunity to flip the argument on its head.”

With big money to be made moving the state’s economy into renewable energy, green proponents no longer have to harp on hard-to-track “external costs” of reliance on fossil fuels such as pollution, health problems, global warming, and even national security, issues that have defied political traction for more than 30 years.

“We know that dollar for dollar, investments in efficiency and renewables produce more economic activity than investing in the same old dirty sources,” Shriberg says.

For example, the filmmakers tell us that in Michigan’s Thumb area, wind farms are in the works that could supply up to 30 percent of the state’s energy needs. At a local machine plant, huge wind turbine components dwarf a hard-hatted worker while “help wanted” signs bristle in front of the plant. A farmer muses about the $6,000 per half-acre per year he’ll rake in just for living under moving air.  

“There’s no cash crop I could plant that would make that much money,” he says, wistfully looking into the sky. “I wish they were up today.”

Why wring yourself dry persuading a legislator to care about urban sprawl or asthma when the accountants are on your side?

Dwight Brady, a communications professor at Northern Michigan University and producer of the film, says that’s how the green message has to be presented these days. “Of course it’s a good idea to save the environment,” Brady says. “But tell people it’s the moral thing to do, and they don’t seem to get behind it. Tell them it’s in their economic interest and the reaction is different.”

Brady traveled to 12 Michigan counties to meet a wide range of green entrepreneurs. He started out concentrating on wind power, but found a fascinating range of green activity all around the state. Many of these companies, Brady says, are “just quietly going about their business, doing what we could be doing on a much larger scale.”

A mild-mannered CEO named Subhendu Guha is among the film’s most interesting subjects. United Solar Ovonic, Guha’s massive factory in Auburn Hills, spins out three miles of ultra-thin solar panels each day. The panels, sensitive enough to make energy from moonlight, are exported primarily to Germany, where utility customers pay a surcharge to support the transition to renewables.

In the film, Guha points out that Michigan has about the same amount of sunlight as Germany. With government leadership, he says, solar energy could play a similar role in the state’s economy. As it is, Ovonic plans to build four more plants by 2008, each employing 200 people. Two of the plants will be built in Greenville, a city with 15 percent unemployment.

Few observers seriously maintain that even full-tilt windmills, solar plants and other green businesses will fill the smoking hole left by Michigan’s imploding manufacturing sector. But Jennifer Alvarado, executive director of the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association and another talking head in the documentary, says the filmmakers were right to concentrate on jobs. “We could see thousands of jobs come in from a transition in our energy economy,” Alvarodo says. “I’ve seen it happen in other states like Texas, and I think it could happen in Michigan.”

Although the film isn’t explicitly critical of the federal government, Shriberg says its local focus demonstrates Washington’s lack of leadership. “Our latest federal energy policy act continues to heavily subsidize the fossil fuel and nuclear industry, with paltry amounts given to energy efficiency and renewable energy,” Shriberg says.

The good news for green energy proponents is that states and municipalities are increasingly taking the lead.

Shriberg cites California’s recent global warming pollution caps, Iowa’s biofuels standards, and 21 states that have passed minimum renewable energy consumption requirements.

Such a requirement, a Renewable Portfolio Standard, or RPS, is a key piece of the energy puzzle, and an RPS proposal is likely to come before the state Legislature next year. (Wisconsin’s 10 percent figure is widely cited as a possible model.)

This will give proponents of renewable energy in the state will a much-needed jumpstart, as the film’s final sequence makes clear. The camera follows green-conscious Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell on a stroll through his burgeoning downtown. “The health industry and life-science research here is exploding,” he says. “All these wonderful new buildings are going to be sucking up a lot of electricity.”

Heartwell is trying to lure a Spanish manufacturer of wind turbines to Michigan, and with a state RPS in place, his Spanish windmill scheme won’t seem quite so quixotic. “I’m convinced we can bring this company to Michigan, but they want a guarantee,” he explains. “First, RPS, then we invest $150 million in your state and create hundreds of jobs in your region.”

Such local action by states and cities, Shriberg says, may be the silver lining to federal foot-dragging on renewable energy. “This is something that is clearly going to have to, at least for the next two years, bubble up from the states,” he says. “So far, Michigan has barely had its foot into the gate, and that’s what a documentary like this can draw attention to.”