Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently signed legislation mandating Michigan utilities use 100% alternative energy sources by 2040. This package of laws allocates billions of taxpayer dollars to various subsidies to accomplish the goal of eliminating traditional energy sources.

The Mackinac Center estimates these bills could cost taxpayers more than an extra $1,000 a year and result in less reliable electricity.

The package will cost the state $124.3 billion through 2035 and another $385.7 billion through 2050. “This would lead to extensive shortfalls in electric capacity,” said Mackinac Center Director of Energy Policy Jason Hayes in testimony submitted to the legislature by in June. “Modeling predicts extended electric system instability and blackouts as long as 61 hours during the winter months of January and February.”

The testimony was just part of a wide range of factual analysis Hayes provided to media as these bills became law.

In a recent opinion piece in National Review, Hayes warned about the harmful policies passed in this bill package.

Michiganders are in for a nightmare. … In the rosiest scenario, effective and affordable carbon-capture technology would be somehow fully implemented and traditional power plants would continue to operate. Even then, however, Michiganders, who are already paying some of the highest electricity rates in the country, would pay $206 billion more than they currently pay over roughly the next 25 years. That would translate to an extra $1,500 in energy costs per household per year.

A Fox News article summarized an interview with Hayes about the Mackinac Center’s analysis.

Under the Clean Energy Future plan, the average monthly electric bill would be nearly double the current average in coming decades, according to a recent report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market think tank which analyzed the package of energy bills. The report further warns that overall grid reliability would be severely diminished under the plan.

“The biggest thing is prices are going to go up, reliability is going to go way down and people are going to be left sitting in the cold in Michigan in January, like our modeling shows, for as much as 61 hours without electric service because of these plans,” Jason Hayes, the Mackinac Center’s director of energy and environmental policy and one of the report’s authors, previously told Fox News Digital.

“Where if we decided to do it with reliable sources of energy like fossil fuels, we could do it for far less and avoid those outages, avoid the blackouts. So, to me, it seems a no-brainer. We should be doing it for less money and more reliability,” he continued.

Hayes’ analysis of this bill package was also quoted by Steven Crowder’s news site.

However, an analysis from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that the new energy mandate will cost residents an extra $2,746 a year while giving them less reliable electricity.

“Michigan ratepayers should know that it’s impossible to achieve net-zero goals on the cheap. Even these amended bills will continue to impose substantial costs on the average Michigan family while achieving little to nothing to actually address the climate change issue politicians claim they want to solve. Estimates show that taking the state of Michigan to net-zero emissions by 2050 would only reduce global temperatures by approximately 1/1000th of a degree Celsius by the year 2100. Meanwhile, people can expect to pay an additional $2,746 in energy costs each year just to experience more blackouts,” a statement from Jason Hayes, director of energy and environmental policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said.

The Mackinac Center has also been cited in the Daily Caller and in the Center Square regarding the energy bills signed by Whitmer.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.