When my husband and I first became Consumers customers a nice young man came out to the house and did an energy evaluation for us. He replaced all our light bulbs with the latest and greatest energy efficient ones, free of charge. I’m always a bit skeptical about the whole sale changes like this light bulb thing. I’m not sure who demanded we get rid of the incandescent bulb, but here we are. I bought some LEDs myself to light my basement, and they were bright, but they don’t last the 10,000 hours they promised. True to form several of the freebies have followed suit.

What is most apparent as a Consumers customer is that my energy bill is higher than my BLP bill ever was, by a lot.

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In the last year as a BLP customer, our electric bill averaged $68 a month. We are a family of two. Our first year on Consumers the average bill averaged to $115. Our house in the city was a four-bedroom two story; our house in the country is a 3-bedroom ranch; both have a full basement. The main differences in energy usage: we now heat with propane in winter and have a heat pump. The heat pump kicks in when the temps are in the upper thirties to save on propane. It serves as an air conditioner in summer and has run a lot this year.  Our basic lifestyle and temperature settings haven’t changed.

For the most part my electric service with Consumers is good. I did call customer service twice after the last big storm. I kept watching the online progress of restoration and on day four, when 99.6% of the people were back on and we weren’t, I called to see if Consumers knew where we lived. My neighbors say it’s not uncommon for our neighborhood to be last to be restored. All those folks on the west side, the lake side of US 31, had been back on days before. As a BLP customer, my longest outage was three days after the 100-mile per hour straight line winds. The major difference: in town I still had water, here I did not.

Consumers is a for-profit corporate entity; the BLP is community owned. And there are major differences. Consumers has no local office and if you call you never talk to the same person twice. The BLP is governed by a board elected by the people of Grand Haven, making the BLP responsible to the voters. A couple of years ago the Grand Haven Energy Group put before the voters a Charter Change measure to eliminate the elected board and have the city manage the BLP. This went down in flames with over 70% of the voters saying they liked the elected board. The people voted to keep things the way they are.

The BLP board hires a general manager, an at-will employee protected by a negotiated contract. The general manager hires staff to oversee the operation, maintenance, and buying of an energy portfolio to provide service for the rate payers of the BLP.  

In America one does not do much without electricity, and one would think the mission of an electric utility would be to provide electricity to its service area.

On one of my calls to Consumers' customer service, the gentleman I spoke with told me that the purpose of the utility was to fight climate change. That comment was a bit unnerving.

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I thought the company's purpose was to provide me with electricity which I need to not revert to pioneer living standards.

For a while the online face of Consumers website was a lady in a hard hat. The website was all about solar panels and climate change but not much about Consumers’ governance. Consumers presents itself as environmentally responsible and equal opportunity. But in the aftermath of that last storm, that lady in the hard hat had to give way to reality, and we saw pictures of burly service guys getting power restored to customers.  

The bottom line in all of this is that the user has no choice about providers; they are regulated monopolies. The BLP—being community owned, governed by locally-elected board members—is responsible to the people who elect them. A corporate entity is not going to be as responsive as a local board, particularly if the board is politically and financially motivated.

The Michigan Public Service Commission regulates utilities and approves rate increases. The governor appoints the members of the commission. As I looked at the qualifications of Governor Whitmer’s appointees, not surprisingly, several are strong advocates for environmental issues, including electric vehicles.

The BLP recently conducted a customer satisfaction survey, and the results were quite interesting. Over five hundred people responded.

Over 75% of respondents knew the utility was community owned and 87.4% said this was important to them. The very public fight over the attempted charter change made people more aware of the issues involved in a community-owned utility. The survey showed that local control, customer ownership, responsive service, maintaining a local office, and providing good local jobs are all important to the community.

Reliability was the most important aspect for over 84% of the customers. Ninety percent used online outage maps with satisfaction and storm response was over 93% favorable.

Other interesting things in the survey: 80% of respondents were unlikely to install solar panels themselves. Over half of respondents were not looking to buy an electric vehicle, and of those who own them, over 70% charge them at home. Fifty-three percent said carbon reduction was not a concern.

Since the J.B. Sims plant closed in 2020, the BLP no longer produces electricity. One of the most interesting responses on the survey was that 79% would support the BLP owning a small, local, natural-gas-fired plant.

People know what is good for them. They want reliability, affordability, and ownership. The response from the customers shows they overwhelmingly favor a well-run efficient utility that takes good care of its customers.

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As always, the farther you move responsibility away from the customer the farther away accountability is.