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Will Nuclear Energy Help Fill the Gap in Michigan?

By Eric McErlain
In today's Detroit News, the paper reviews the outlook for the electricity market in Michigan -- and the future is looking pretty murky due to regulatory uncertainty. The newspaper talked to DTE Energy's Tony Earley, who also serves as Chairman of NEI:
"Unless there is a stable regulatory environment, nobody -- no marketer, no independent power producer, no regulated utility -- will build another base load plant in Michigan," said DTE Energy Chief Anthony Earley Jr. "Right now there is enough generation to supply us, but two or three years down the road you're going to start having some real reliability problems."

Meanwhile, demand for electricity is growing 1.5-3 percent a year.
Last November, NEI's former President and CEO, Joe Colvin, addressed just this subject in a speech at NARUC 2004.

Meanwhile, back in Michigan, DTE is considering something that would have sounded impossible a few years ago -- building a new nuclear power plant to meet rising electricity demand:
Conventional wisdom says a new plant is likely to be coal-fired. But industry experts aren't ruling out nuclear power, which now supplies 26 percent of Michigan's electricity market. There has not been a nuclear plant licensed in the United States since the near disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979. But President Bush, pointing to France's heavy use of nuclear plants as a clean and reliable power source, is pushing for that option .

"If you had asked me five or six years ago, I would have said it's probably unlikely there'd ever be another nuclear plant, but a lot has happened," said DTE chief Earley. "The big focus around the globe is on global warming, and when you get down to a hard analysis, if you're serious about reducing carbon emissions, the only answer is building nuclear plants."
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