Since she was 7, Abigail Wallace has been going to her family’s cabin in Grand Marais, on the far eastern edge of Alger County, Michigan. More than once, she remembers walking into a 40-degree house because the power went out in an Upper Peninsula snowstorm. “The power grid up here in general is not super reliable,” Wallace said. “Then it becomes a safety thing.”

Decades later, Wallace is now working to fix this problem. She’s part of the Michigan Environmental Council, a team that has received a highly competitive Energizing Rural Communities Prize from the U.S. Department of Energy, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).

The Upper Peninsula has some of the highest energy costs in the nation, Wallace explained, and renewable energy transitions are a vital strategy for lowering costs, as well as improving power reliability and safety. Their project, Getting (Costs) Down in the UP, has received both a $100,000 Phase I and a $200,000 Phase II prize.

Wallace is working with people like Joan Potter-Sommer, who has been beating the drum for renewable energy since moving to Au Train, Michigan, from Ohio. A former senior center director, Potter-Sommer is chair of ACRES (Alger County Renewable Energy Solutions). 

“The county commission knows me on a first-name basis because I go to so many meetings,” she said. “To promote change, you need to be local. You need to show up, and you need to be persistent.”

Potter-Sommer walks her talk, purchasing an electric vehicle with the help of a federal tax credit and installing a solar array and battery inverter in the fall of 2024. Air-source heat pumps warm their home. “We have to get renewable,” Potter-Sommer said. “It doesn’t mean a decline in the way we’re going to live our lives.”

Potter-Sommer and others in ACRES have organized environmental film showings and brought a tractor-trailer load of electric vehicles and hybrids to Munising for Earth Day. Energizing Rural Communities Prize money has been put to work building a coalition of stakeholders invested in Alger County renewable energy. They’ve presented events like the  “solar 101” kick-off with a utility-scale solar developer, as well as a Michigan Saves workshop on financing options for solar arrays and heat pumps.

Residents and business owners still need information about modern air-source heat pumps and solar panels’ handling of Upper Peninsula winters, Wallace said. Both technologies have improved their winter efficiency tremendously in the past 10 years.

The city of Munising has signed a letter of support for the coalition, and Munising township has installed a solar array on its building.

The Upper Peninsula faces significant energy challenges, but the cost of living here is worth it for more than 8,000 Alger County residents. This jagged, narrow county has a long shoreline on the south side of Lake Superior. About 40 miles of this shoreline is protected as Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, where multicolored cliffs drop hundreds of feet into the big lake. Alger County’s forests are filled with waterfalls and smaller lakes. 

The largest community and county seat, Munising, has a population of a little less than 2,000. It’s a bustling but easy-going tourist town in the summer, where it only takes a few days for a visitor to meet people who are related or connected to one another.

“It’s what called me to move up here in the first place,” Wallace said. “I felt connected to the community. Everybody in Grand Marais and Alger County have such deep connections to the land and place and want to protect the land.”

Renewable energy taps into a strong independent streak in the Upper Peninsula, and Wallace hopes the urge for self-reliance drives more people to take advantage of renewable energy programs. “I’d like to see them capturing some of the opportunities that have come with all the federal funding that has come along, to allow them to become more energy independent,” Wallace said.

Potter-Sommer walks her talk, purchasing an electric vehicle with the help of a federal tax credit and installing a solar array and battery inverter in the fall of 2024. Air-source heat pumps warm their home. “We have to get renewable,” Potter-Sommer said. “It doesn’t mean a decline in the way we’re going to live our lives.”

Potter-Sommer and others in ACRES have organized environmental film showings and brought a tractor-trailer load of electric vehicles and hybrids to Munising for Earth Day. Energizing Rural Communities Prize money has been put to work building a coalition of stakeholders invested in Alger County renewable energy. They’ve presented events like the  “solar 101” kick-off with a utility-scale solar developer, as well as a Michigan Saves workshop on financing options for solar arrays and heat pumps.

Residents and business owners still need information about modern air-source heat pumps and solar panels’ handling of Upper Peninsula winters, Wallace said. Both technologies have improved their winter efficiency tremendously in the past 10 years.