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Mackinac Center presentation warns net‑zero pathway could raise costs and risk outages
Summary
Jason Hayes of the Mackinac Center presented modeling comparing a wind‑solar‑battery pathway and a nuclear‑and‑carbon‑capture pathway, saying the former would be costlier and could produce multi‑day capacity shortfalls while the latter would be cheaper and avoid shortfalls in the model.
Jason Hayes of the Mackinac Center presented the committee with an advance summary of a forthcoming study that modeled two pathways for Michigan to reach statutory clean‑energy targets: a wind/solar/battery (WSB) pathway and a lower‑cost decarbonization (LCD) pathway that relies on carbon capture and expanded nuclear.
"There is no 0, no inexpensive way to meet the CO2 emission reduction targets that Michigan officials have written into legislation," Hayes told the committee, warning that a WSB pathway in the group’s model required extensive overbuild and still produced capacity shortages. Hayes said the WSB scenario carried an estimated construction and system cost of about $360 billion…
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