Michigan residents face an urgent threat to electricity supplies, the Mackinac Center shows in a new report.

“Shorting the Great Lakes Grid,” first excerpted in The Wall Street Journal in August, provides context for citizens who want to understand why their electricity will become more expensive and suffer more shortages.

“We are retiring dispatchable generating resources at a pace and in an amount that is far too fast and far too great, and it is threatening our ability to keep the lights on,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie testified to the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. Grid operators, grid regulators and electricity reliability watchdog organizations agree on this point.

Michigan will find that replacing reliable coal and nuclear plants with weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels will leave the state without enough electricity to meet its people’s needs, forcing the state to buy from regional electricity markets to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, each state expects to be able to buy from its neighbors’ surpluses. If every state pursues these same net zero policies, there will be nothing to fall back on.

The Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, the grid operator for much of the Midwest, expects that by 2032, not a single one of the Great Lakes states in its territory will have enough electricity supply to meet demand.

“Shorting the Great Lakes Grid” looks at seven of the Great Lakes states (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania) to analyze the policies of their governments and largest utilities.

We published the report with input from several other members of the State Policy Network, including the Center of the American Experiment, MacIver Institute for Public Policy, Illinois Policy Institute, Buckeye Institute, and the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy.

With approachable writing, regional focus and a national release, “Shorting the Great Lakes Grid” offers an on-ramp for interested citizens to understand the problem. Policy change requires an engaged populace, and engaging the populace starts with education. If our energy policies don’t change, the grid will fail us. When the grid fails, when blackouts occur more frequently and utility bills skyrocket, people can turn to the Mackinac Center to understand why — and keep it from happening again.