In a recent interview with APPA, Rob Shelley, the general manager of Michigan public power utility Grand Haven Board of Light and Power, discussed the utility’s efforts to add renewable energy to its overall generation portfolio.
The utility has a goal of having renewable energy represent 28% of its overall generation portfolio by 2025.
“Currently we are at 24% and over the last handful of years, I would say the last 20 years or so, we've been growing that portfolio,” Shelley said in an APPA Public Power Now podcast episode.
“We're very lucky here in Michigan. We have a great joint action agency – MPPA....and with them, we've been working for years on evaluating projects and the ability to buy into things and really have been able to grow that,” he said.
“The biggest jump on that happened in in 2020. We had a coal-fired power plant that we shut down and had decommissioned and tore down. So we went from being able to generate all of our electricity to actually having to go out and purchase our electricity which gave us a lot of opportunity to go out and look at things that are available in the marketplace -- can we replace some of this coal energy with wind, solar, et cetera?”
Shelley said “we have everything from landfill gas to wind and solar in our portfolio. And like I said, we started that in like 2010. The state of Michigan has a 15% goal for all utilities. And like I said, we're currently at 24%. And the state of Michigan is now going to 50% in 2030. So we'll be continuing to build that relationship with other partners and maybe some internal work to get to that level. But most of that will be gone through with our Joint Action Agency.”
The utility in September 2024 unanimously voted to name Shelley as its new general manager. Prior to this action, Rob served as the utility’s interim general manager. He's worked for the utility for nine years.
Earlier this year, the utility received APPA’s Gold Standard for Safety award and a Diamond level Reliable Public Power Provider designation from APPA.
Shelley was asked to discuss the steps that Grand Haven Board of Light & Power has taken to achieve these high levels of safety and reliability.
“Safety is of course paramount,” he said. “I think every utility feels that way, but we try to live that model," he said.
"When you talk about the RP3, it's not just looking at your reliability statistics -- are you putting the proper training in place? Are you putting funds aside to reinvest in the system? Are you doing proper tree trimming? All these types of things all roll into that and that's where it's very important to live that and you'll see the results," he said.
"So I would encourage anybody that doesn't participate in a lot of these APPA awards, whether it's the safety awards or RP3 or customer service or customer satisfaction, it really does put you through a process to see" whether there are "things that I could be doing better. What is the standard? What are others doing and maybe it's something you're not doing. But you learn from...filling out the applications that maybe there's something we can be doing better, or maybe there's something we can we haven't even thought about. So that's really where we rely on those APPA designations," Shelley said.
"We're very proud of them because you know it means that we're performing well in our sphere. We're not trying to compare ourselves against the big IOU. We’re comparing ourselves against others and our same class, but it also gives us the opportunity to benchmark ourselves and say, is there something else that we can be doing better?"
In the interview, Shelley also details how the utility celebrated Public Power Week in October.
