Energy Secretary Granholm sends billions to Michigan utility monopolies in final days in office

As a reward for wreck­ing Michi­gan, Joe Biden appoint­ed our for­mer gov­er­nor Jen­nifer Granholm to be his Sec­re­tary of Ener­gy.

Offi­cial­ly, the rea­son was Granholm’s love for “green ener­gy.” But Michi­gan­ders remem­ber our Lost Decade under Gov­er­nor Granholm as one defined by its cor­rup­tion and Granholm’s sup­port for crony-cap­i­tal­ist projects.

Fit­ting, then, that Granholm spent her final days as Ener­gy Sec­re­tary lin­ing the pock­ets of Michi­gan’s biggest ener­gy monop­o­lies.

From the Free Bea­con:

The Depart­ment of Ener­gy, in one of its final actions under Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, ear­marked bil­lions of dol­lars in green ener­gy loans to util­i­ty com­pa­nies based in Ener­gy Sec­re­tary Jen­nifer Granholm’s home state of Michigan—defying the agen­cy’s inspec­tor gen­er­al, who called on the Biden admin­is­tra­tion to sus­pend the loan pro­gram amid con­flict-of-inter­est con­cerns.

Some of Granholm’s largest cam­paign bene­fac­tors dur­ing her Michi­gan guber­na­to­r­i­al cam­paign were among the com­pa­nies receiv­ing the hefty last-minute loans.

The Depart­ment of Ener­gy’s Loan Pro­grams Office announced Thurs­day that it award­ed a stag­ger­ing $22.9 bil­lion in loan guar­an­tees for util­i­ty com­pa­nies to devel­op green ener­gy projects across 12 states. More than $14 bil­lion of that total was award­ed to DTE Ener­gy and Con­sumers Ener­gy, the two com­pa­nies with ties to Granholm, sole­ly for projects in Michi­gan.

Read the full arti­cle here.

Michi­gan­ders are pay­ing high­er ener­gy prices than ever thanks to the util­i­ty monop­o­lies, but Jen­nifer Granholm is — years after retir­ing from being Michi­gan’s gov­er­nor — still giv­ing them sweet­heart deals.