Agriculture Energy Management in the Lansing Region

The Lansing Board of Water & Light is city-owned, which puts Lansing outside Michigan's retail choice program altogether — not capped at 10%, but excluded. State government facilities, Michigan State, and automotive assembly make up most of the commercial load. BWL also supplies steam and chilled water to parts of downtown, which means some buildings carry thermal energy costs alongside electric ones, and those are frequently billed on separate accounts nobody reviews together. Looking at the electric bill alone in downtown Lansing routinely misses a third of the recoverable spend. Michigan's 10% choice cap does not apply here at all, because BWL never entered the program — so the queue conversations happening across DTE and Consumers territory are simply not relevant to a Lansing account.

Agriculture is not the dominant sector in this territory, where state government, university load, automotive assembly and healthcare carry most of the commercial load. That is an advantage worth using: a agriculture load is unfamiliar enough locally that it is routinely priced off generic assumptions rather than off your actual usage. A highly seasonal with weather dependency profile at 150,000-600,000 kWh/month is the specific thing we take to market, and with supply fixed by Lansing Board of Water & Light, the work concentrates on the demand component, the rate schedule and recovering billing errors — which on a load this size is not a rounding error.