Michigan House Republicans made their opening move Tuesday against the state’s 100% clean energy standard, bringing two bills before the House Energy Committee that would gut the framework Democrats built in 2023 and send Michigan’s energy policy back to square one.
House Energy Committee Chair Pauline Wendzel, a Republican from Watervliet, and Rep. Pat Outman, who represents Six Lakes, were the authors in the room. Their vehicles: House Bills 5710 and 5711. Their target: Michigan’s clean energy law passed when Democrats held both chambers.
What the Bills Actually Do
Wendzel’s HB 5710 rewrites the rules governing how the Michigan Public Service Commission handles integrated resource planning, which is the process that requires utilities to file long-term roadmaps for meeting customer demand. Her bill guts two specific obligations from that process: the requirement that utilities assess environmental justice impacts and the requirement that they project long-term greenhouse gas emissions in those filings. Gone. In their place, Wendzel wants the Public Service Commission to treat every energy source identically.
“It tells the Public Service Commission, in statute, that reliability and affordability come first,” Wendzel said. “That’s it, plain, clear, simple.”
Outman’s HB 5711 is the bigger swing. It throws out the mandate that energy companies build toward a 100% clean energy portfolio. Outman didn’t frame it as a rollback. He framed it as a free market correction.
“This bill does not ban renewable energy,” Outman said. “Wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas, storage and emerging technologies will continue to be built when they make sense for the grid and when they provide the best value to the ratepayers. What this bill does eliminate is the mandate. Every resource should compete based on performance, reliability and cost of ratepayers, not political preferences written in the statute.”
He’s not wrong that mandates have political origins. But so does the decision to remove them.
Democrats Push Back Hard
The sharpest exchange in committee came over a provision in HB 5711 that didn’t get much airtime in Outman’s opening remarks: a hard cap on distributed generation at 1% of total annual energy sales within a utility’s service territory. Reps. Julie Brixie and Joey Andrew both went after it directly. That 1% ceiling isn’t a minor technical adjustment. It’s a chokepoint. For any Detroit homeowner who’s put solar panels on their roof, or who’s been thinking about it, that cap is the sentence in the bill that matters most. It doesn’t ban rooftop solar outright. It just makes sure it can’t grow.
Outman insisted the bill doesn’t close the door on renewables. The 1% cap suggests otherwise.
Detroit residents already carry a disproportionate pollution burden compared to most of the state. The environmental justice review requirement that HB 5710 strips from the Public Service Commission’s planning process was one of the few formal checkpoints that forced utilities to account for that. It’s gone if this bill passes.
Rep. Tonya Myers Phillips, a Democrat from Detroit, didn’t spend much time on the clean energy debate. She went straight at the affordability argument Republicans kept returning to throughout the hearing. She wasn’t persuaded.
“I don’t see anything in this bill, or anything in this conversation that addresses utility accountability,” Myers Phillips said. “Our bills are high because the utility companies charge us a lot and there aren’t enough guardrails to prevent that.”
That’s the argument Republicans haven’t answered yet. They’re pitching HB 5710 and HB 5711 as consumer-friendly corrections to a Democratic overreach. But the bills don’t cap what utilities can charge. They don’t increase competition in service territories. They don’t add new enforcement mechanisms for the Public Service Commission. What they do is remove the clean energy mandate, strip environmental review requirements, and cap distributed generation. That’s a specific set of choices, and it’s worth saying plainly what those choices do and don’t address.
The 2023 clean energy law wasn’t perfect. Rates have kept climbing since it passed. But the Republican answer so far is to remove the environmental and clean energy provisions while leaving utility pricing structures mostly untouched. Myers Phillips noticed. Whether the full House does depends on what Republican leadership decides to move next.
