Clearing the Forest for Solar: A Green Mistake in the Making

They haven’t been built yet, so we still have a chance to stop this waste

Here’s my just-published article for IMPACT magazine that gives a quick recap of the work done to stop the naive plans to log 420 acres of Michigan’s state forests to clear room for solar panels. This was a bad plan from the beginning. But, as I note in this piece, the plans to cover hundreds of thousands of acres with inefficient and expensive solar panels are just getting underway.

They haven’t been built yet, so we still have a chance to stop this waste.

This piece was originally published in IMPACT magazine and on the Mackinac Center website on February 17, 2025.

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Clearing the Forest for Solar: A Green Mistake in the Making

Fighting Michigan’s dogged commitment to mandating so-called renewable energy development is at the top of our to-do list in 2025.

We have highlighted the apparent contradictions endorsed by state agencies and monopoly utilities as they push Michigan’s electric generation infrastructure onto an unreliable mix of wind and solar sources.

In January, the state approved plans to log 420 acres of forest near Gaylord and clear the land for solar installations.

I appeared on “The Dave Bondy Show,” “Tom Jordan Live” and “Michigan’s Big Show” to warn about this plan. I also recorded a YouTube video detailing how the plan conflicts with the state’s claimed environmental goals and its environmental practices. Instead of protecting green areas, lawmakers appear more concerned about getting greenbacks into the bank accounts of solar developers and monopoly utilities.

The Gaylord project provides a good example of the contradictory logic used to justify ostensibly green energy policies. Replacing state forests with solar undermines the state’s lofty climate goals. Forests remove carbon dioxide from the air — a key goal of climate change policies — and return oxygen when they photosynthesize. Choosing solar panels over forests halts this basic process.

In an essay for The Detroit News, I explained the environmental and other costs of solar panels. Producing them requires a lot of energy (often made with coal burned in China), involves toxic substances, and creates disposal problems when the panels’ useful life is over.

Our educational efforts help citizens understand and respond to unrealistic energy policies. Media reports indicate that in response to widespread public discontent, Department of Natural Resources officials have “pushed the pause button” on the Gaylord site.

The pause is a momentary reprieve, but it can’t last. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s mandates require 209,000 acres, much of it farmland or forested areas, to be covered by industrial solar and wind facilities. That figure comes from Daniel Scripps, chairman of Michigan’s Public Service Commission, whose comments to legislators at a November 2023 hearing were reported by Michigan Capitol Confidential.

The 420-acre parcel near Gaylord is only the first attempt. Proposals for thousands more acres are under consideration. With your support, the Mackinac Center will continue to call for balanced, free-market energy policies that consider reliability, cost, and genuine environmental stewardship.