MIB Podcast: Clean, natural gas with Consumers Energy's Tonya Berry

I am doing amazing. How are you?

You know, when you put it in context, it is a really large. Let me give you even a little bit more around that. So it's 1.8 million homes and businesses and roughly about four million people. And you know, you think about this cold weather state of Michigan and people are looking for us and depending on us to provide safe, right, affordable and clean energy to their homes at the time they need it. And behind all of that, every day I get to work alongside 2,000 co-workers in the gas business to make sure we're doing just that.

Absolutely. So right, most people they think about clean in terms of the power plants, solar panels, and even wind farms, right? You can go up the freeways here in Michigan and you can see those big windmills turning around. But the real issue we're facing, just in Michigan, globally, right, around the world, is climate change. And we know that if we're serious, we have to decarbonize our natural gas system. So we filed a clean energy plan and it calls for us to be carbon neutral by 2040. Our natural gas goal is a decade ahead of that, so we're saying we're going to be net zero methane emissions by 2030.

That's equivalent to about removing 55,000 vehicles from the road or preserving 30,000 acres of forest. How are we going to do that? You know, you probably see us in some of your neighborhoods replacing the old pipe, tearing up the roads, taking out the new and putting in the new layer. We're rehabilitating and retiring our outdated infrastructure, and we're exploring new technologies to help our customers and suppliers reduce their emissions. You know, we have some big aspirations, but we know we're doing it for the right reasons.

So as I mentioned, we're trying to harden our system, right? And so we're making significant updates in our plan. And so safety is always important to us, reliability, right, are we there when you need us, and is it affordable, right? And so because we know that there will be a need for natural gas to come in the future, it will be a source that people will continue to use and they will depend on us. And so we're hardening, not expanding the system, but we know that natural gas will play a role in the future.

Yeah, so we're not sure, but we're actively looking at it, right? So you can look at and probably read in the media, probably you see other countries, particularly, are a little bit more aggressive in their use. But we are participating now in what is called the Low Carbon Resource Initiative, and it's a five-year effort that is led by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Gas Technology Institute to accelerate and demonstrate the use of kind of low carbon energy technologies. But with hydrogen, in addition to, we are looking at renewable natural gas as another source, in a way we can protect our planet. You know, Michigan, we have a lot of agriculture and there is an opportunity there to get some renewable gas from there. And we can use this in our pipeline to help heat homes and power stoves and get some grain from some farmers to do that. And you know, when we think about even renewable natural gas, it does have a negative methane footprint. But it's a key piece of our plan to achieve net zero. And so it's amazing, and we're exploring and we're learning and we're going to be trying some things really quickly here to see how that would work for our consumers in the state of Michigan.

You know, so you can't live in Michigan, I don't believe, maybe you can, without having some connection to the auto industry. So I am a Wolverine, go blue for all those Michigan fans out there. Industrial engineer, my background, and I've always had this passion for how do we make things better, not only for people that work in processes to serve, but for our customers and community. So regardless of the service or product that's on the other side of that, that is the work that I love to do. And after 15 years in the autos, I got an opportunity to join Consumers Energy. And how fascinating is it to be in a different production arena and around gas. I am on the operation side of that, and so thinking about delivering gas every single day rather than building a vehicle, it's something different, but it does help me get to the side of really making things better for people, all people, not just those that work for the company, but those that receive our products and services.

Yeah, so this is where I'm going to plug Consumers Energy. This is what I want you to do is plug Consumers Energy. Hey, you know, we are a company of 8,500 amazing people, and we are all committed to the same values. And we live that every single day in our jobs, right? We care about the people that we serve, we want to protect the planet, and most importantly as well, the prosperity for the state of Michigan, right? We know that we have legacies here and that we're trying to leave Michigan in a better place for the future generations. Yes, and we have some major tasks in front of us, but we carry our work with purpose. We own our work, we empower everyone every day to bring their best selves to work so that we can deliver on that every single day. And I am always excited and thrilled to be a part of this team and amazed at what we're able to do with the conditions that we face.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so it is, this is probably no surprise, right? We have had some pretty tricky weather here as of late, right? And sometimes Mother Nature will definitely toss us a few surprises, right? And so probably ones when you think about like the business of Consumers Energy, right? We have electric and gas, and typically when we have the challenges of even weather, it doesn't necessarily affect our natural gas pipelines, right? We get the outages, the outages are associated with power lines. But we also have to make sure our system is solid and things can happen around us. I'll give you one, Midland flooding, right? So when we had the flooding and the dam breakage there in Midland, we had to go out and rebuild major parts of our system there. We always need to make sure our system is ready, our storage fields are ready to serve on the coldest days of the year, right? You know, we've had a couple years now, right, where we've had temperatures that we didn't anticipate that were really cold and we want to make sure that we are ready for those days. And so weather gets us, but then even when you think about our system, when we talk about safety of our system, we also have to make sure those that work around the system, and I know we have businesses and homeowners here that are making improvements and upgrades, we also just have to make sure, I'm going to put a plug in, we call Miss Dig, and we're safe when we're even doing our own digging because that can cause disruptions and problems in our system that we got to resolve. We want to make sure not only is the system safe, but the public is safe as well.

Yeah, so we will be cleaner, right? We will see, I believe we will see Consumers meet that goal of net zero by 2030. I think that we will see our customers using energy in different ways. I think customers will be educated on how they'll use those sources of energy to heat and live and operate in this world and climate. You mentioned EVs, so I expect that we'll see more of that on the road. And I'm so excited to see what this will look like. I know sometimes when we're thinking about these goals and aspirations, it's like, will we ever see that? But, and I'm not going to give my age here, but I'll think about kind of this evolution and even cell phone technology and kind of where we were today from the bag phone all the way over to, you know, kind of where we are today with the Samsung, iPhones, and others. So that is possible in this space too. You know, I'll just go back to the autos real quick. I remember day and time where a navigation system going in the vehicle was like kind of a new thing, right? And so when we think about what's in front of us and the possibilities, I know that it will happen. It's just going to be very interesting to see what it looks like as we're figuring that out.

Thank you, you too.