In March 2026, 5 Lakes Energy used the Energy Policy Simulator (EPS), developed by Energy Innovation, to predict and analyze the effects of a legislative repeal of Michigan’s 2023 clean energy laws passed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The EPS is a system dynamics model that assesses the economy-wide effects of numerous energy and environmental policies on a variety of metrics of interest to policymakers, including impacts on jobs and GDP growth, public health effects due to changes in pollution levels, changes in energy prices, and greenhouse gas emissions.
The 5 Lakes Energy analysis consists of two scenarios, run in EPS Michigan desktop version 4.0.4:
- Business As Usual (BAU): accounting for the latest developments in federal and state energy policy (as of March 2026).
- 2023 Repeal: identical to BAU, but the Michigan clean energy laws are removed starting in 2027, reverting to a pre-2023 policy baseline.
The results show that, even with the repeal of many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives, keeping the 2023 clean energy laws in place results in better outcomes than removing them. Specifically, as shown in the charts below, repealing the 2023 laws would slow job growth, hinder GDP growth, increase premature mortality, and raise energy bills.
The full output dataset for this analysis is available here.
