John G. Russell
Management
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, Ali, you've got the Governor that's come out and said that the law, we like the law, he likes the law. The folks in the legislature, we've seen one bill that's been introduced in the Senate, which was a bill to open up the cap, which was similar to a bill that was introduced last year and no action was taken on it. There's not been any bill, as I know as of today, that's been introduced in the House. The House has -- or the Senate has already gone through hearings on changing the law. Senator Nofs, who runs the energy house -- or the Senate Energy Committee, is supportive of the law, and I think 8 of the 9, or 7 of the 9 committee members he has, which are bipartisan, have been supportive of the law and voted for it in 2008. So if there's work to be done, it's the work that I talked about this year with what the Chairman of the commission is doing, coupled with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, to go out and seek opinions and thoughts about this in these public forums that are being conducted over the next several months. But in addition to that, and the point I want to make very clear is, they've also been very thoughtful about constructing a list of 80 questions that are going out to all parties for responses back, I think it's in the April time frame, April, May time frame. And what they're trying to do is collect data, not opinions necessarily, but also data-driven approaches about regulatory, renewable energy, energy efficiency, what works, what hasn't worked, what's the data behind it, and that's exactly what they're trying to do. We'll be actively involved in those. I expect there'll be some hearings I'll be involved with as we go forward on this. So the point is they're looking at it. We've always thought that a natural time to look at the 2008 law would be in 2015, and that's what the Governor really directed in his energy message because there are some natural fall-offs that occur in 2015. Do we keep doing energy optimization at the levels we have today? Do we keep the surcharge the same? Do we expand renewable energy from what it is today? And so that's kind of a natural process that we go through right now.