Traverse City Light and Power just took a step toward unleashing a powerful jobs and income machine: It installed a new “net metering” policy, allowing TCL&P’s customers to generate limited amounts of renewable energy and sell it back to the utility.
So far, our answers to Traverse City Light & Power’s questions about our “20-20″ proposal have explained that saving a watt is the same as generating a watt and is much cheaper, so spending on efficiency makes way more sense than spending on new power plants.
The cheapest way for Traverse City Light & Power to meet much of its customers’ future demands for electricity is, as I wrote last time, to flat-out buy them things that significantly reduce their demand for electricity.
The most crucial thing Traverse City Light & Power folks asked us about our new special report, 20-20 by 2020: A Clear Vision for Clean-Energy Prosperity, was its call for helping customers cut their energy consumption by 20 percent in just 10 years.
As they thumbed through their copies of our hot-off-the-press report, 20-20 by 2020: A Clear Vision for Clean-Energy Prosperity, board members asked us all sorts of things.
But we call for much stronger energy efficiency efforts, more wind power, inclusion of solar power, and promotion of local energy entrepreneurship, particularly among our region’s schools, community investment groups, and private concerns.