Posted Wednesday, September 9, 2015 12:00 am

A far-right tea party conservative could make strange bedfellows with Michigan Democrats (insert Todd Courser joke here) as lawmakers craft a new statewide energy policy.

State Rep. Gary Glenn — the Midland Republican perhaps more known for his longstanding fight against gay marriage and for protecting religious liberties — has introduced legislation in an already crowded energy debate this session that incentivizes “as much as possible” the ability for utility customers to generate their own solar power.

Known as net metering, state law allows utility customers to generate their own solar power at home and be reimbursed for up to 1 percent of the excess electricity they feed back into the grid.

Senate Republicans have sponsored legislation that would dismantle net metering, replacing it with a system in which solar customers would buy all of their electricity needs from the utility at retail and be reimbursed at wholesale for a portion of what they feed back to the grid.

The bill has riled clean-energy advocates, who say it’ll kill the nascent industry here. Bill sponsors and utilities like Consumers Energy and DTE Energy say it’s an issue of fairness, claiming customers who generate solar are not paying their fair share to maintain the grid.

Glenn, on the other hand, wants to keep net metering and eliminate the 1 percent cap, allowing customers with solar to be reimbursed for all of the electricity they feed back into the grid.

Glenn says the state should be incentivizing clean energy “as much as possible,” not mandating it, as has been state policy since 2008 under the 10 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard.

“The fact that there’s not more solar is not because there are more cloudy days in Michigan than other states. We have the least incentivizing policy in the country,” Glenn told the publication Midwest Energy News recently.

Unlike Democrats who generally embrace renewable energy from an environmental perspective, the tea party has embraced self-generating electricity from the libertarian angle and is fighting back against regulated-monopoly utilities.

But despite the differences in approach, more clean-energy generation is the same result.

“If at the end of the day — because of free markets, having things compete on their own and getting rules out of the way — it will mean more renewable and clean energy,” then so be it, said Larry Ward, director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum. The advocacy coalition is made up of various conservative and faith-based groups, including members from Right to Life and the Christian Coalition of Michigan, pushing for more clean energy.

“I’ve always said this: We all get to the same end results but for different reasons,” Ward added. “Glenn is pushing net metering and solar not because he believes solar is the be all end all to stop climate change, but because he thinks it’s right for humans to be able to generate their own power.”

Glenn’s split with mainstream Republicans — who are criticized for carrying water for big utilities — is part of a national trend.

The Atlanta-based Green Tea Coalition is active in pushing solar policies in the Southeast and participated in a similar fight between utilities and their solar-generating customers last year in Wisconsin.

Arizona-based Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed, or TUSK, founded by Republican former Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr., is praising Glenn for his stance on net metering. It is tracking similar battles between utilities and their solar-generating customers in 17 states, including Michigan.

“You could almost call it a conspiracy,” Goldwater said in an interview last week. “Utilities got together and said they’re going to gang up on rooftop solar.”

While Democrats seem to generally embrace the energy transition into more renewables, he thinks Republicans “have got to come to their senses” and unite.

“I think Republicans ought to take a step back and ask them selves: ‘What’s good for Michigan? What’s good for the taxpayer?’ The answer to that is that they should adopt policies that reduce rates and increase choice and independence and not continue an obsolete monopoly utility system,” he said. “We need to get ahead of the curve, we need to be out in front. That’s what Republicans should be doing. I want to be a champion of the future, not a detriment.”

Kelly Rossman-McKinney, spokeswoman for the group Citizens for Michigan’s Energy Future, has criticized Goldwater and his supporters for being “out-of-state special interest groups” looking to profit from Michigan’s policies.

Citizens for Michigan’s Energy Future, whose mobile billboards have been seen downtown promoting “solar without subsidies,” is seen by solar advocates as little more than a utilitybacked front group. Rossman-McKinney has declined to say who’s funding the group. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, it is difficult to track its specific funding sources.

Rossman-McKinney said the approach by far-right Republicans like Glenn is “really being counterintuitive in terms of Republican values.”

“The effort Goldwater has made in Michigan is to try to assure conservatives that promoting solar and creating and maintaining subsidies for solar customers is actually a conservative thing to do, when in fact the only party that generally supports subsidies in any way is the Democratic Party,” she said. “It’s really surprising to me to see someone as staunchly conservative as Glenn embracing the traditional Democratic approach.”

Multiple energy proposals have been introduced in both chambers this session. Gov. Rick Snyder in March unveiled his energy plan, which relies on more energy efficiency, natural gas and renewables as the state plans to close down more than 10 coal-fired power plants in the coming years to comply with the federal Clean Power Plan.

Amid a Republican-dominated Legislature, the question then becomes whether Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans can build enough support to overcome utility-backed interests. According to Glenn, there surely aren’t enough votes to extend renewable and energy efficiency mandates, as Democrats want.

“I think there’s a lot of bipartisan work that can be done here,” Ward said.

State Rep. Sam Singh, D-East Lansing, said he still hopes a bipartisan deal, as was created in 2008 to pass the renewable mandate under former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, can still be reached to expand the renewable and efficiency standards.

“It doesn’t make sense that we’re spending money to import coal from other states when we could be creating more jobs here,” he said. “I’d be really surprised if we don’t have a bipartisan agreement in the end.”