I’m very competitive by nature. Just ask my husband—he refuses to play board games with me because apparently, I’m too “intense.” Given my competitive nature, it should come as no surprise to you that I love a good scorecard. Especially when I’m winning.
At Cherryland, there are several key service quality metrics we use to track how we stack up against our members’ expectations, other utilities in our industry, and even our own historical performance.
Here are a few highlights from our co-op scorecard:
Reliability
- 2024 System Availability: 99.989% of the time
- 2024 Average Outage Duration: 104 minutes
In 2024, Cherryland delivered yet another industry-leading year for electric reliability. Our members experienced, on average, about 60 minutes of power disruptions this year. The average across the state is three times that. When the lights did go off at Cherryland, we got them back on pretty quickly. With the improvements we’ve made with our new metering system, our system controls, and the hard work of our employees, we restored power within about 100 minutes, the fastest in Michigan among our peer group.
Affordability
- 2025 Rates: 12-22% lower than neighboring utility
It’s a tough time for electric costs. As I’ve discussed at length, electric rates are rising in Michigan and across the country. Cherryland is not immune to these costs, and we do expect ongoing rate increases in the coming years. These increases reflect the rising cost of electric reliability in a period of high inflation, supply chain pressures, and high interest rates. Still, we’re playing our cards right and proving that even when the odds are stacked against you, strategy makes all the difference. Even with those headwinds, after the rate increase your board approved in February, our bottom line bill continues to be significantly lower than the neighboring investor-owned utility.
Power Supply
- 2030 Power Supply: 100% Carbon-Free
In partnership with our power supplier, Wolverine Power Cooperative, we continue to be on track to be the first utility in Michigan to deliver 100% carbon-free energy before the end of this decade. We continue to work to develop solar projects across the state, in partnership with local municipalities, and are still on track to purchase the output of Palisades Nuclear Power Plant when it returns to service. Palisades is vital to Michigan’s electric reliability, and I am very proud of Wolverine for their commitment to supporting that project.
Whether comparing Cherryland to other utilities or simply comparing us to our historical performance, it’s all good news. That doesn’t just happen—it’s the result of the hard work, dedication, and innovation of our employees and cooperative leadership.
One thing I know from my board gaming prowess is that you can never rest on your past successes and you must always be looking forward toward your next move.
That’s why this year, we are working on strategic planning to ensure that the cooperative continues to lead the way for years to come. Those conversations are likely to center around resilience, physical and cybersecurity, financial management, and member-facing programs such as demand response offerings.
Even as we look to the future, we will always maintain our commitment to our mission: providing high electric reliability and a strong power supply portfolio at competitive costs. It’s something we take tremendous pride in and I hope you’ll agree, we’re pretty darn good at it. Perhaps even the best? Not that it’s a competition.
Well written. I enjoyed it.
Thanks, Wayne!
Rachel:
Well done and truly appreciate all your doing. I’m no expert but I know what your doing is not only important but no small task.
Keep it up and thanks.
Thanks, Mike! We’ll do our best. Our staff greatly appreciates hearing that our members are happy and that we’re meeting your expectations.
I agree that Cherryland is very, very reliable. I’ve been installing solar in this area for 15 years and my most difficult task is talking Cherryland customers out of an expensive battery backup system for their solar installation. An hour per year offline is not worth $8,000!
However, Cherryland is no less expensive than Consumers Energy for most electric customers. No one cares about energy charge, distribution charge or availability charge. Customers only see the bottom-line monthly bill for the energy they use. When you normalize the bills for monthly energy use, here’s what you’ll see:
. A low energy-use Cherryland customer (500 kWh/month) pays more per month than a Consumers Energy customer ($13/month)
. A high energy Cherryland customer (2000 kWh/month) pays less per month than a Consumers customer (-$32/month)
Cherryland rewards high energy use. Consumers rewards low energy use.
Monthly Total Bill Effective rate ($/kWh)
Monthly kWh –> 500 1000 2000 500 1000 2000
Cherryland Now $97 $161 $290 $0.19 $0.16 $0.15
Cherryland 2025 End $106 $176 $315 $0.21 $0.18 $0.16
Consumers Now $93 $178 $347 $0.19 $0.18 $0.17
Both Cherryland and Consumers are experts at obfuscation. Consumers is actually better at it. Cherryland has a fixed $32-36.50/ monthly availability fee plus energy charges. Consumers has those plus 10 lines of things like Kern, securitization, distribution, PSCR, “other”, etc.
Nobody wants to know the details, just the bottom line – How much does it cost me for a unit of energy?
Monthly Total Bill Effective rate ($/kWh)
Monthly kWh –> 500 1000 2000 500 1000 2000
Cherryland Now $97 $161 $290 $0.19 $0.16 $0.15
Cherryland 2025 End $106 $176 $315 $0.21 $0.18 $0.16
Consumers $93 $178 $347 $0.19 $0.18 $0.17
Tom – I completely agree that the bottom line is the most important comparison. The average electric consumer in our region uses 700kWh (not in your calculations), at that level, we beat Consumers by 12 – 20%. Note that they have seasonal TOU pricing which does not seem to be included your calculations. Also, I would be surprised if their rates don’t change between now and the end of 2026, so I suspect our rates continue to stay very competitive.
The different rate structures between Cherryland and Consumers do mean that our bottom line bill is higher for users under the average. That’s because we aim to collect fixed costs in the fixed charge and bill structures that place more fixed cost in the energy charge create subsidization.
I’m very please with CEC’s reliability performance and general efficiency. My only complaint is the rising “availability” fee. I know it helps your budgeting process and insures steady income during low usage periods, but it’s not fair to those of us who don’t use a lot of electricity. People who use more of your product should pay proportionally more of the overhead cost. It’s a simple concept.
I’d rather pay a high enough rate for you to keep reserves on hand and receive a refund for unspent money when usage is high. That’s the business model that treats our membership fairly.
Hi Roger – that is certainly something we will look at. Unfortunately, that would likely mean a VERY, very expensive energy charge. And, that would disproportionately impact our most vulnerable members who are more likely to live in energy inefficient homes. I’m not sure that’s fair, either. While our lower users don’t like the higher availability charge, that doesn’t make it unfair, simply unpopular. As I know you know, the availability charge is actually driven by a goal of fairness and eliminating subsidies in our rates. Lower users don’t pay their proportionate share of the cost of maintaining the grid. Hence, the higher flat fee. If we put all of those costs in the energy charge, higher energy users would be paying more than their actual share and lower users less.
Over the next few years, we are working on a strategic analysis of our rate structure. Our goals for that project are to look at creative rate structure solutions that help us balance fairness and maintain sustainable investment in our system reliability. We will certainly look at ways that we could have more dynamic pricing that sends more price signals to members about their impact on our costs and how they can help us save money, and hopefully save themselves a little money at the same time.
Thanks for your feedback.
I strongly disagree with your concept of fair billing. It appears you’re coming from the perspective that “fair” means charging everyone the same flat fee for grid maintenance. That’s like charging every citizen $10,000 a year for highway maintenance if they register a car regardless of how much they drive.
A fair billing structure would charge a person who uses 10,000 KWh of electricity 10 times as much as a person who uses 1000 KWh for their share of grid maintenance. People who use more of the product need to pay their proportional share for grid maintenance to be fair.
For us, fair isn’t about everyone paying the same amount, it’s about making sure that the basic costs necessary to make electricity available are collected fairly. There is a basic cost that the co-op incurs before anyone uses a kWh and everyone should pay their share of that cost – hence, the availability charge. Roads are an interesting analogy because there are some commonalities there, as you point out. But, I would also point out that roads are primarily funded through property taxes, income taxes, and registration fees – none of which have anything to do with usage or wear and tear on the road. While I am not privy to the negotiations that happen at the state level regarding road funding, I suspect that they are often talking about the fact that high quality, well-maintained roads are necessary for things like public safety and economic development and therefore should be funded through those non-usage, non-volumetric sources I outlined above. Again, the idea is just that having the road there when you need it comes at a cost regardless of how frequently you use it. The one place that our system diverges from roads is wear and tear. It’s not the case that higher users have more wear and tear impact on the electric system. Their primary usage-based impact is line loss costs and capacity (the size of the wire/transformer, etc) and all of that is incorporated into our energy charge right now, as it should be.
Thanks for the comment, I always appreciate the chance to think through these issues as they are really complex and its helpful to me to apply a critical lens to how our rates are structured so I can lead the cooperative in balancing these often competing interests of electric reliability, member satisfaction, and affordability/cost competitiveness.
Thanks for your reply, Rachel. I love that you’re willing to spend some of your valuable time responding to our questions and concerns.
I understand that paying overhead costs is a complex issue in services like electricity and roads. Only 26% of the funding for our roads comes from fuel tax. This has been a frustration to me for many years. I think that should be more like 70-80%. We’re subsidizing the cost of roads to make it cheaper for those who use them the most. I fee the same way about electricity. I know it’s complex and there are reasons for the way things are done, but I feel strongly that we’re subsidizing public services for high volume users way too much. High volume users should pay a much higher share of the cost than they do.
I respect your position, but I respectfully disagree. Thank you for all you do to keep our lights on.
How efficiebt is the delivery of solar array generated power to the customer. is there a subsidy unvolved in the cost of generating powerr? Has the efficency of solar arrays improved these past years and wikk dii solae be a bacbone energy source?
Great questions, George. The efficiency and capacity factor (amount of energy the panels can produce) with solar has improved substantially in the last 10 years. Customer-owned solar has grown steadily over that time and represents a few percent of our overall electric load at Cherryland. We are also seeing significant investment in Michigan in utility-scale solar. We (Cherryland/Wolverine) have about 300MW of solar under development across the state. The challenge is that costs are rising substantially with both inflation and also the potential for tariffs, especially on raw materials. I think solar will continue to become a larger part of our mix but to become the backbone of our energy mix we would need to see significant improvements in battery storage for solar.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for the update and all the work you and your team do.
I am happy to hear you, and hopefully your Board of Directors, are planning to review Cherryland’s rate structure in the not to distant future. I would encourage this review to start sooner than later. I strongly disagree with the current rate structure which places a higher burden of fixed costs, relatively speaking, on low users versus high users of electricity.
Maybe part of the solution is to strategize how to increase the number of customers served by Cherryland. This would help to spread the fixed costs over more customers.
I am happy to be part of this discussion if you need additional input or help.
Thanks for listening.
Paul Spindler
Can you speak to whether/how Ontario’s 25% cost increase on electric power provided to areas including Michigan may impact Cherryland?
Hi Tyler — Cherryland does not import electricity from Canada. Our regional grid operator, MISO, gets less than 1% of its electricity from Canada. We are not concerned about any electric reliability issues from the tariffs. We are keeping a close eye on tariffs for their impact on the raw materials and goods we use for our system maintenance and grid improvements, since those would be most likely to impact our costs. Right now, we don’t have any immediate concerns but it is definitely something we are watching and contingency planning around.