The following is a transcript of the May 26, 2025, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now.
I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s News director.
Our guest on this episode is Katie Abraham, executive director of the Michigan Municipal Electric Association, which represents all 40 of Michigan's public power utilities.
Katie, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Katie Abraham
Thank you for having me, Paul.
Paul Ciampoli
So Katie, to get our conversation started could you describe the services that MMEA provides to its member utilities and also how is MMEA helping its member utilities in improving or extending various services?
Katie Abraham
Yes, I would love to answer that question, Paul.
I want to thank you again for this invitation and the opportunity to share some of the exciting things that we're doing in Michigan.
As you said, the Michigan Municipal Electric Association or MMEA -- it's much easier to say -- represents all 40 of Michigan's public power utilities and just to give some perspective, we have 12 in the Upper Peninsula and the rest are spread throughout the Lower Peninsula.
Getting into some of those services you asked about, when I started at MMEA about seven years ago now, the association was hyper focused on legislative issues for the membership and they were very, very successful in that area and advocating on behalf of our members in Lansing, which is the capital here in Michigan, is still a huge part of what we do and the primary role of MMEA -- that legislative advocacy is critical.
However, I noticed that there was a gap of unmet needs when it came to the services that you asked about.
And interestingly, although maybe not surprisingly for many, our current services, a lot of them actually grew out of lessons learned during COVID and most of them revolved around making MMEA this main conduit, if you will, of the information sharing between the members and connecting members to members in that sharing of information.
So, for example, we host a monthly membership exchange call, and these are informal virtual calls where members ask each other questions and our members, we've learned, learn best really from each other and from lessons learned.
And so this platform offers an opportunity to share that information and as you can imagine, when it was started during COVID, members were asking each other questions about a pandemic, and how do you handle all these new situations?
But it was so popular that now it's evolved into questions about anything really in the energy industry -- about AMI and billing, vegetative management, EVs, GIS. I mean you name it and it comes up. And I also use the opportunity to give a short update as to what's happening at the capitol and at MMEA and these calls have just proven to be tremendously helpful as that conduit…of information sharing between members.
Now, similarly, we offer monthly membership surveys, and members will email us their questions in advance and they are questions that they want to ask of their peers on any topic at all and we put them into a survey, we email that out on a monthly basis to the membership for the responses and then what I think is really neat is that we catalog those responses on our MMEA website for reference.
So it's not just one moment in time -- you have a question, you answer, it's done, the information dies. We actually have a library now on our website and we have categories and we label things so that members can go back and use that for reference later or whenever that issue arises for them, so that has proven to be really helpful.
Like most APPA member associations, I believe, we also have a large fall conference every year. And again since COVID, that format has changed. It used to be multiple days. We had one day that was designated to breakout sessions with our associate members, but after COVID, our members said no, we kind of want a shorter conference.
So now…we have one day that's focused on the plenary speakers and instead of those breakout sessions, we actually now have monthly webinars with our associate members on hot topics.
And they've become very popular and it also is helping us reach a broader audience. We were always struggling with getting the right people in the room for those breakout sessions, but given our member size, they kept saying, Katie, I can't afford -- not so much monetarily, right? -- but I can't afford to have my office empty of staff in case something happens so I can only bring so many people to the conference.
Well, we don't have that issue anymore, right? So now we have these monthly webinars, they can join in a room, the right person who focuses on that issue for the utility, can listen to that webinar, ask questions and we post those as well on our website and I will say here because I’ve mentioned our associates many times now -- we have over 130 now at MMEA that are part of us and we work with them and we share their information to the membership and again that sharing of information -- so that our members when they need certain services, they know where to go, so we're very appreciative of our associate members in Michigan.
Looking at services, I would of course be remiss not to mention mutual aid.
It's a big service of MMEA, especially lately. If anyone's been following the news, Michigan’s been hit by some nasty storms within the last couple months.
We were hit at the end of March with some severe ice storms, ice accumulation that we haven't seen, maybe ever.
And then just this last weekend, we had some tornadoes hit down in Michigan, very high winds. And so mutual aid, the response, the coordination has just been outstanding and something that should make us all really proud in Michigan and, of course, the APPA membership as well, we had to call in AMP for this latest storm and so just really appreciative of that coordination, but that's also a huge benefit, right? -- of being part of an association.
Lastly, on this topic here, I want to mention our newest push, one of our newest services, is on safety and we're really making gains ensuring that our members are getting the necessary safety training.
And we say it all the time -- safety is so important. It's the most important thing we do is making sure that our workers go home the way they came to work.
But some of our members -- they're very small, they have limited staff. They can only do so much in a day, and unfortunately it's easy to push this one…to the back burner.
It’s, Hey, well, oh yeah, we’ll get to that training tomorrow, oh, we'll get to it next week, and so we're really trying to prevent that from happening and so we have a new partnership with an associate member and a local community college that has actually led to the construction of a new indoor pole yard for training purposes. It's going to be focused on the public power utilities in Michigan, so we're excited about that.
We have now offered two top notch OSHA 10 training courses that are getting rave reviews.
So we're going to do more of that and then -- really exciting -- we've just launched an online safety training course and it's a catalog of courses that's coming together through this local community college and they are specifically geared towards all municipal utility departments.
So not just electric, but also water and wastewater, which is really kind of a one-of-a-kind opportunity, at least in Michigan.
So we are very excited about that and hoping that some of those members who just need to brush up on the safety -- they do some of the online safety courses and these are things like bloodborne pathogens, for example, you don't have to be in person to do that.
So we're focused on that and hoping that as they dip their toe into that online safety training that they'll say, hey, you know, let's bring a trainer in and do some of these bigger topics and really start to tackle this.
Paul Ciampoli
That's all great information, and I think what comes across is that MMEA is very dynamic and not static in terms of what you guys are doing.
I did have one quick follow up question.
So with respect to your partnering with that community college, could you provide a little more detail on that in terms of how that came about?
Katie Abraham
It's Jackson Community College here in Michigan and the associate member is Alpha Omega Utility Services.
It came together really through Alpha Omega and the relationship that they had and just small world, right?
One of one of our former mutual aid coordinators for one of our members retired [and] decided he didn't want to be retired anymore and partnered up with Alpha Omega, remembered MMEA, called me out of the blue and said, hey, Katie, is this something you're still looking to do? You want to ramp up your safety program? I said yes, yes, yes.
And so one thing led to another and they had the relationship with Jackson College and just sort of educated Jackson [and] said, hey, you're focused on this local IOU, but did you know that there are 40 municipal electric utilities in the state and several of them are near your backyard and they would love to partner with you and they were so excited about that opportunity and that was it.
I really think timing -- we were in the right place at the right time with the right people and it's taken off.
Paul Ciampoli
So what would you say are the key challenges facing public power utilities in Michigan and how is MMEA helping its members to successfully meet those challenges?
Katie Abraham
I think APPA knows better than anyone that this industry is changing at a rapid pace, so it's one thing for our members to keep up with those advances in technology and the demands on the system and the load growth and what we're experiencing and our joint action agencies – the JAAs -- in Michigan do a lot to help in that space -- It's the power supply side is what I say.
But it's another challenge when we -- at least in Michigan -- are facing an overwhelming amount of change in the legislative and regulatory oversight area.
And the utilities in Michigan -- public power utilities -- are not regulated by our state commission. That's who we are, right? We're locally governed and so the regulatory creep into our space right now is intense and especially for our smallest members who I said are just trying to get through the day, they're trying to keep the lights on and so to then have this extra regulation on top of that and compliance has been a lot.
And just for some context, a couple years ago now, Michigan was under total democratic control, so all three branches of government you could say were controlled by the Democrats and regardless of which party -- it could have been Republicans. It doesn't matter -- but when one party rules everything, changes happen, for better or worse, and they usually happen pretty quickly because there's not a lot of check on that power, right?
And so that's what happened here. And I'm not going to go into the details of the legislation, but MMEA is really helping the membership work through several new clean energy initiatives and compliance requirements, and it's a heavy lift, it’s a lot.
So again, MMEA is trying to do the educational webinars and trying to do the right communications and build the relationships and put people in touch with who they need to know to make sure that they're complying with the law.
I will say while we're on challenges that another one for the members that we've noticed recently is keeping up with the expectations from our customers now when it comes to communication.
So it seems like before people just wanted to know their lights were coming on right?
The lights came on, people were happy, they moved on with their day, but now with the power of social media -- all forms of social media -- customers want to know about everything. Want to know about everything that's happening at the utility and they want to know now, especially when there is an outage.
And so MMEA continues to offer training in this space in communications and emergency response plans.
We've had presenters on these topics and just making sure that our members are prepared and think through these things and how are you going to communicate? What's the most effective way to communicate before you're in some sort of crisis situation.
So I would say that those two things are, at least at the membership level, two of our challenges that we're working through right now.
Paul Ciampoli
All good points and I guess with communication, even with social media, that seems like there's a lot of dynamic, ever-changing things related to that in terms of communications platforms, especially, I would imagine for smaller utilities there may be some challenges in terms of making sure that they're up to speed with the latest alternatives in terms of communication, right?
Katie Abraham
Absolutely and you know communications, I'm talking to an expert here in that space.
We've found that the customers, even if it's an update to say there's no further update at this time from the last update we gave -- that goes a long way. They just want to know that you are on it, that you're working on it, that you're thinking about them.
We have had members just recently in the last two storms who have made changes and they see improvement in the customer base overnight. I just had a member call me this morning who said hey, they were angry with us -- two days ago we had the storm, we got the power restored. We had excellent customer service and communications and now they want to build a statue for us in our honor.
So overnight, just the response and knowing that we care and that we're on it has gone a long way.
Paul Ciampoli
The genesis of my thoughts related to having you join our podcast originally came from a recent report that was issued by MMEA that details the positive impact of public power utilities in the state, which we covered in our newsletter.
So a couple questions related to that. First, why did MMEA commission the report and what would you say are the report’s key findings?
Katie Abraham
We are so excited about this and I could have included this…in one of the services, but I didn't want to steal the thunder there of this question.
So we're so excited about this inaugural Michigan Public Power Impact Report and it's been in the works now for a couple years. It's finally ready for its debut.
We appreciate APPA support in this and it's the first of its kind report for public power utilities in Michigan and we suspect most states.
I'm excited to share some of the findings on this report and how it came to be and on an anecdotal level, our members have always known that they were doing a stellar job keeping the lights on and the rates low, right?
We talk about it all the time, but our Board of Directors really wanted to be able to quantify the impact with ironclad data in a comprehensive report to prove once and for all, without a doubt, how effective we really are compared to the surrounding utilities in the state.
So we set out and we partnered with Utility Financial Solutions -- specifically Dawn Lund there -- to make it happen. And I have to say she was an absolute rock star taking on the unknown.
She was not entirely sure what she was getting herself into when she agreed to do this with us, but she stuck with us and we are really happy with the result and the MMEA Board of Directors is really excited to use this report as an advocacy tool with both the Michigan Legislature and our legislators in DC and of course our members’ governing bodies and we really just kind of want to shout it from the rooftops.
I can give you some numbers here to explain why we're so excited about it. Our report found that in 2023 alone -- and I can say that we looked at 2022 data and 2023 data -- and when you look at just 2023 alone, Michigan's public power customers collectively saved over $400 million…and that's just in one year. That number is also only accounting for savings from reliability and the rates.
We looked at several factors. We looked at pilot payments and volunteer hours. We initially started with six factors that we were going to analyze and we determined that reliability and the rates were the main drivers and areas of interest when it comes to the regulators locally, nationally at the state level -- everyone wants their power to stay on and to be able to afford their electric bill. So that's why we focused on reliability and rates.
Another neat component, I think, of this report is that we also looked at the average lifetime savings because we wanted to give individuals that perspective, right?
If you live in a public power community, here's what you're going to save, and we found that if you live in a public power community in Michigan, over the course of your lifetime, which today is 75 years, that's what the average lifetime is -- that you would save over $120,000. That's a lot of money. I mean, that's $120,000.
That’s a vacation you might want to go on -- many vacations you might want to go on. It's a car. It's other essential goods and services, right? It's money that you can use or save for other things. So that's a significant savings.
We have a lot of great data in the report including the reliability savings in ‘22 and ‘23 as I mentioned with and without major events.
So again, looking at the reliability, we have this really neat bar graph and if folks want to see the actual report, it's on the website at mipublicpower.org…and we have this neat bar graph and it shows that in 2023 with major events, public power utilities in Michigan had an average outage duration of 111 minutes…compared to 788 minutes for the nearest investor-owned utilities and without major events, it was 41 minutes for our members versus 173 minutes for the investor owned and those are mighty impressive numbers…this is 2022 data, ‘23 data, so we know it’s going to change, right?
It's not always going to be the same. It's going to fluctuate depending on the weather that year and who participates in the study, but still you can even see between the two years it fluctuates a little, but those numbers are still very impressive for public power.
And as we show this to legislators in Michigan, they're already saying how can we get more? How can we get more of that? That's what we want in the state -- and it's also such good data to attract businesses to our local communities.
I don't know a business…that doesn't want low rates and reliable power, and so this report just beautifully demonstrates that that's what public power is all about.
I mentioned when I started talking about this the ironclad data, right?
We wanted this data to be defensible in a court of law if it came to that, and we knew with these big numbers right, people are going to be like, yeah, right, you probably just made that up to look good, right? How do we know?
So that's why I want to mention this really dandy ICE calculator or the interruption cost estimate calculator and it was developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Resource Innovations and it's actually the leading tool that national investor-owned utilities use to calculate the financial impact of outages.
And Dawn called the creator of this tool, never imagining that anyone would answer or respond back, and sure enough, within a day he called her back. They talked for hours on the phone. He verified everything and the DOE has backed this tool up.
And so we figured, hey, we've talked to the creator, we got DOE. We have our national IOUs using this calculator, so we should be using it too, so that is how we figured out those cost savings from the reliability numbers.
Turning to the rates, we found in this report that Michigan's public power residential customers have the lowest rates in the state. Really, really cool.
We suspected that, but we wanted to verify it and now we have and again, looking at a resident’s lifetime, they would save a little over $20,000 just on their rates over the 75-year period that I mentioned before.
And then again, based on the ‘23 data looking cumulatively at our residential public power customers, they saved over $60 million in 2023.
So that's that $60 million plus the cumulative reliability savings is how we got to that $400 million that I mentioned in the beginning -- that's rates and reliability together so just really impressive numbers.
The report so far seems to be a big asset to MMMEA’s membership…as we hoped, Paul. Members are working with their local news outlets to get the press releases out. Members are distributing the report to their local governing bodies and to local businesses.
We had one of our member board members say that they wanted to blow up the QR code on the back of the report and put it on easels and local businesses, so people are excited about it.
We're distributing it, of course, to legislative offices in Michigan and nationally at events like the APPA Legislative Rally, and then what we're really excited to see and what we're pushing is that members are reaching out to Dawn at UFS to get their own local reports because they participated in the study, so Dawn has their data and now they're working with her to get their own local information to have their own local study, so it's really neat to see the state level and then also bring it down to that local level as well, so it's producing tremendous results across the membership.
Paul Ciampoli
This is a great example of -- you're not just issuing a report which has a lot of great detail, but it's a dynamic document in terms of….a lot of uses are flowing from it from the sound of it.
Katie Abraham
And we made a video, as well -- We had some board members in there. We've got all the graphics and we've got the QR code and we're trying to get that out as well.
So really, you're right, dynamic is a great word to use to describe our efforts with this.
Paul Ciampoli
So keeping with the topic of the report, if I was an official with another state public power association, I would imagine I would be interested in potentially producing a similar report.
In that context, what advice would you give that public power association official if they were interested in producing a similar report?
Katie Abraham
Yeah, good question.
So perfect timing. First and foremost, I would reach out to Dawn Lund at Utility Financial Solutions and very conveniently she is going to be presenting on this study at the upcoming APPA National Conference in New Orleans. So if you're planning to be there, please reach out to Dawn, attend that session. She is going to really dig into this report.
It was again, like I said, a first for Michigan, and it was a first for UFS and we learned a lot through this process.
And as many of you know, I know in the audience, I mean Dawn is just a whiz at the financials and so she's really going to go into those details during her session and give some good suggestions at that session at the APPA National Conference.
Now, sitting in my seat personally, if I was going to suggest anything to prepare for something like this I would make sure that your members are actually tracking the data because you can't create the report without it, and in Michigan, working through our report has led MMEA to really push the APPA Reliability Tracker.
And Paul, I know you did not ask me to do a promo for APPA, but I'm doing it anyway because that's what we're doing at MMEA and, in fact, late this fall, APPA is actually going to do a two-part webinar series for MMEA on the tracker, and we're going to have a part one, which is going to be an introductory level followed by part two, which is going to be that more advanced user level.
But the report just highlighted what an invaluable tool it is for collecting the reliability data, and we want to make sure that it's being used to its fullest extent because we are hoping that we're going to update this report -- ’22, ‘23 you have to wait a while to get the new data, but we don't want it to get stale, so we're hoping that we'll update this on a biannual basis and we want to make sure that the members that may not have been able to be included this time around maybe due to the lack of data are prepared for next time, so I really do encourage just looking at that and thinking about that.
I sort of just assumed that everybody was tracking this information and they're not. Not everybody is or not everybody is on a consistent basis or in a format that we can use so that would be my suggestion before -- make sure you're going to have enough data, good data to put into a report, but otherwise reach out to Dawn. She's happy to talk about it, and again, she'll be at the national conference.
Paul Ciampoli
Katie, this has really been an informative and stimulating conversation on so many levels, so thanks again so much for taking the time to speak with us and I would love to have you back as a guest at some point in the future.
Katie Abraham
Oh, thank you so much, Paul and to the whole team at APPA.
I just really appreciate having this platform to talk about our report and all the exciting things that we're doing at MMEA.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks again, Katie.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA.
I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back next week with more from the world of public power.
