In January, during Winter Storm Fern, the operator of Michigan’s grid did something it rarely does. It told an entire region to cut back on electricity, in the middle of a deep freeze, because the system was running short of margin. The lights stayed on, but the people whose job is keeping them on were openly warning they might not be able to. 

That night wasn’t bad luck. It was the predictable result of an energy policy written in Lansing by people who treated reliability as someone else’s problem and affordability as an outdated idea. 

Last week, the Michigan House said never again. 

We passed Project Lighthouse, and we did it for the people who actually pay the bills. Not the activists. Not the consultants who drew up the mandates. The family opening an electric bill higher than they planned for, in an economy where everything already costs too much. 

For years, families were told to accept a false choice: pay more, get less, and call it clean. Question the bill in your hand and you were branded an enemy of clean energy. That was always backwards. Wanting power you can afford and count on isn’t hostility to clean energy. It’s the only honest test of any energy plan, and the people who wrote these mandates couldn’t pass it. The family doing the math at the kitchen table was never the extremist. The people who wrote mandates on a political timeline and told that family to be quiet were. 

I was raised on my family’s fourth-generation farm in Watervliet, where the work started before sunrise and nobody waited on a bureaucracy for permission to get the job done. That’s the Michigan that built this state. The Lansing Democrats who wrote the mandates forgot those people existed, but last week, the House gave them their voice back. 

The fight isn’t finished. Project Lighthouse now moves to the Senate, and the same crowd that built this mess and profits from it will fight to keep it. 

But for the first time in a long time, Michigan chose the people who keep the lights on over the politicians who nearly turned them off. 

State Rep. Pauline Wendzel

Chairwoman, Michigan House Energy Committee