Climate Solutions Week: Utilities

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

It’s NPR’s 2025 Climate Solutions Week.

This year’s topic is “Rethinking Home,” and NPR will bring us stories from around the country about ways our homes and communities can be more resilient and offer solutions to the changing climate.

Here at IPR, we wanted to do something a little different by answering some of the questions listeners here in northern Michigan had about energy, climate and community.

Sarah Mills, an associate professor and the director of the University of Michigan’s Center for EmPowering Communities, joined IPR's Izzy Ross to talk through some questions submitted by listeners.

The question and answer have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Listen at the audio player above or read the question and answer below.

Marcia from Traverse City wrote in ...

... and talked about how she hoped local utilities would do more to promote cleaner forms of energy.

"At minimum, the utility should urge its customers to drive EVs, put solar on their roofs, campaign for more alternative energy usage," she wrote. Marcia wanted ot know why a publicly owned utility, such as Traverse City Light and Power, doesn't make clean energy more central in its communications and other efforts.

"Why doesn’t it put solar on all the roofs of the public schools and public buildings in this city?" she asked.

So, we put the idea to Sarah Mills:

IPR: What are some of the complications that utilities face in addressing new forms of energy? Are there differences depending on how big the utility is, and are there utilities that are doing this really well?

Mills: I think that there are two primary challenges. One is inertia and familiarity, right? The ways that things have been done are kind of just built into the system. And utilities generally tend to be pretty risk-averse. They tend to have lots of redundancies built into systems. Because, honestly, people don't want their power to go out, right? It's really important. Our economy is based around the idea that we have reliable electricity, even though it's not as reliable as we know it needs to be, right, especially in light of the the more extreme storms that we're having. But this idea of inertia and the things that are familiar — I think that that's built into a lot of utilities.

The other thing is that some of these solutions really challenge utility business models. So there's not necessarily a built-in incentive to encourage your customers to use less of your product. Right? So there's not an incentive structure for them to encourage energy efficiency. Now, actually, the state has encouraged that. We have energy efficiency requirements for the utilities, and we actually reward them. They can get more profit if they exceed those targets. But you have to create that incentive for them.

The same is true with rooftop solar. Actually, investor-owned utilities make the largest profits for their shareholders when they build things. And so if you are building the solar panels on your roof, they're not making as much money for their shareholders.

So that gets into the second part about the kinds of utilities. Things are a little bit different for a municipal utility or for a co-op where they're not shareholders. They're customers — it's the people. Coming from Ann Arbor, there's a movement in Ann Arbor to privatize, like, let's pull out of investor-owned utilities and have a municipal utility.

If you look nationally across the country, municipal utilities and co-ops are not, on average, any cleaner than investor-owned utilities. They're not. It's not like a built-in function of being a municipal utility or a co-op that makes you cleaner, in part because they tend to be smaller utilities where they don't have access to capital as much as those big investor-owned utilities, right? So that's one of the reasons. But also, if you look across the country, the utilities that are really leading, that are cleanest, tend to be co-ops, and actually municipal utilities, right? And so on average, they're no cleaner, but they really can [be]. And how does that happen? It happens a lot because their customers — right? — demand it.

IPR: [Marcia] said that her utility, which is a municipal utility, does have clean energy programs, and they do have various initiatives. They have a rebate program. But she's wondering why the utility doesn't go further and put solar on all the roofs of the public schools and public buildings in the city. Why aren't solar panels everywhere?

Mills: Things could be a little bit different. But generally speaking, it's not the utility that's going to put the solar panels on the school or the the municipal building. It's the school district, right? Usually they're going to be the ones who invest in those solar panels. The people whose roof it's on [are] the people who pay the upfront cost for that, and they then save on their electricity bill. Utilities can certainly incentivize it. Most of them don't. Again, if they're an investor owned utility, because it's not in their interest to encourage more rooftop solar. A municipal utility could, and so I don't know the kind of specifics.

As a land use planner... a wiser use of land is to stack those uses, right? You already got your building, so let's use that rooftop. You've already got a parking lot. Wouldn't it be amazing if every Meijer parking lot in this state had solar carports? That's a shopping amenity. So the question is: why not?

There's a couple of reasons why not. And one is economies of scale.

So it takes a lot of rooftops to equal one acre, let alone 1,300 acres. And it's not actually that there's that much economy of scale in terms of the buying of the solar panels, like, you can bulk buy rooftop solar panels.

Instead, it takes a lot of building permits. Think about how many building permits you got to pull, right? It takes a lot of engineering study, like drawings, to make sure that your rooftop can handle it.

And you have to talk to a whole lot more people — think about all of those roofs — than you do if you're talking to a farmer who owns 40 acres of ground. And usually it's not just 40 acres, it's like 200.

Mills also had a Traverse City example of the difficult dynamics placing solar around a community.

One of the challenges is that there's both climate goals and goals to increase tree canopy, as I understand it. And you have to balance those. You have to weigh those. And so something has to give, particularly if you're going to do your part and not just push it somewhere else.

And so I think that that's one of the other tricks. You have to have a landowner who's willing to do it and then make the investment. You've got to kind of overcome some of those economies of scale. But also you have to think about like, well, if I've got trees in my front yard that are going to shade my panels, how do we do kind of the accounting associated with that.