Overview

• Ann Arbor’s biggest 2026 climate story is the move from designing the new Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) into real-world rollout. The city defines the SEU as an opt-in municipal utility meant to deliver 100% renewable energy through local solar, battery storage, and networked geothermal installations, and it hired its first executive director, Shoshannah Lenski, effective August 25, 2025, to lead implementation into 2026.

• Ann Arbor is scaling several neighborhood-level climate and equity programs in 2026 that are explicitly on the city’s Current Activities list: fully launching the free A2ZERO Home Energy Advisor program, which reporting says is approved through 2026; finalizing and launching the green rental housing initiative and home-energy rating disclosure initiative; and securing resources to expand the Aging in Place Efficiently program.

• On city operations, Ann Arbor’s A2ZERO priorities for the current cycle include a concrete 2026 target to install at least 4 MW of solar at City facilities, with multiple energy-storage systems. This is listed as an active “Current Activities” goal, making municipal solar-plus-storage buildout a central 2026 program lane.

• Transportation electrification is also in a defined execution year: A2ZERO lists deploying 50 more EV chargers as a current priority, and the city’s December 2025 A2ZERO newsletter confirms implementation of a federal Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant with site identification and NEPA reviews already underway heading into 2026.

Transcription

David Fair: This is 89.1 WEMU, and I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again! I wish you a Happy New Year! I’m David Fair, and welcome to the first Issues of the Environment conversation of 2026! We’ve been bringing you this segment for nearly 31 years now and look forward to all the future will bring. As we look to the future, 2030, it’s not that far away. That’s the goal the City of Ann Arbor has set for achieving carbon neutrality. The A2ZERO plan continues to move forward, and we thought it would be a great way to kick off the New Year by looking at what progress will come over the next 12 months. Our guest today is Missy Stults, and she is the director of the Ann Arbor Office of Sustainability and Innovations. And a Happy New Year to you, Missy!

Missy Stults: Happy New Year to you as well! It’s so great to be with you!

David Fair: Well, before we take a more in-depth look at what lay ahead in the New Year, let’s reflect a little on the year that’s just passed. What were the areas of most significant progress in 2025?

Missy Stults: I love that question! And unfortunately, my mind always kind of like implodes at that question. A goal as lofty and big as carbon neutrality requires work across so many different sectors. So, I’m going to popcorn some of the things. If folks really want to see a more thorough recap, our December newsletter was a look back at 2025. And so, you can get 11 pages of bullets of things the team has worked on. But some of the things I would throw forward for folks, we expanded significantly our home energy rebate program. That program is giving out millions of dollars to help residents make their homes and their apartments more comfortable, safer, healthier, and, of course, more sustainable. So, that program’s really critical. Our home energy advisor passed over 500 households helping figure out how they were going to get their homes to zero climate pollution, zero health hazards, et cetera. We continue to expand work on our resilience hubs. We brought new electric vehicles into the community. We’ve added new charging infrastructure. We negotiated the first heating franchise in the country that has a climate commitment from both the utility and the city with actual dollars. And you’ll hear about this when we look forward. We’ve been working on how we’re going to spend those dollars to demonstrably help people improve the affordability of their life. And we’re designing one of the largest networked geothermal systems in the country to help provide all of the heating and cooling load for 262 two homes right here in Ann Arbor.

David Fair: So, when you’re in it day-to-day, it may not feel like you’re making major steps forward, but that certainly sounds like it was a good year.

Missy Stults: You know what? It has been a good year! And thank you for saying that because you’re right. I think, sometimes, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees when you’re looking at that tree right in front of you and thinking about, “How am I going to help it survive?” and “How are we going to help it thrive?” You sometimes lose the fact that there’s a lot of seeds that have been planted that are really taking off.

David Fair: Now that we’ve been very positive, where perhaps did we fall a little short in 2025?

Missy Stults: I don’t think we have programs that aren’t really good. I think we have really strong programs. I don’t think we’re very good at marketing them. And so, we have brought in some expertise to help us figure out how do we get these programs in front of people that could really benefit from them. Almost every day, I take a phone call or an email from a resident who’s struggling with something. And when I tell them, “Did you know we actually have funding to help with that?” or “Did you know we have this resource?” The thing is they don’t. So, we’re missing the market. We’re not getting these programs in front of enough people. And that’s going to be a major focus in ’26.

David Fair: Our Issues of the Environment conversation on what 2026 will bring in advancing the A2ZERO Carbon Neutrality Plan continues on 89.1 WEMU. We’re talking with the director of the city’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations, Missy Stults. I would think right at the top of the list of expected advancements in 2026 would be getting that voter-approved sustainable energy utility launched for–

Missy Stults: I completely forgot! How could I forget that? I spent every day thinking about that!

David Fair: Well, for those who are unfamiliar, describe what it will provide Ann Arbor once operational.

Missy Stults: Yeah, absolutely! Well, the Sustainable Energy Utility–it exists, right? And so, in 2026, our goal is, by the end of the year, we will have assets. We will be breaking ground on new solar assets here in our community. What the SEU, or the Sustainable Energy Utility, is a supplemental, optional, opt-in utility, only authorized to provide renewable energy services to residents in Ann Arbor. In practice, think about if you were really interested perhaps in solar or energy storage systems for resilience purposes, today, in a traditional market, you’d have to buy those yourself. You’d have to go out, you’d have to get a loan, or you’d have to pull from your savings. But the SEU, now that it exists, can actually come in and purchase those assets itself. So, it would put the solar on your roof. You would then pay per “fill in the blank,” which we’re figuring out per unit of production, a flat fee to be determined. But the point here is that you pay your utility for the production of renewable energy that you’re using, just like you pay your utility bill today. You don’t have to expend tens of thousands of dollars to get these renewable assets. You’re able just to get them because the utility is providing them. And it’s a much more equitable way for us to hit our clean energy goals and objectives, all with local power, hopefully great customer service and energy in our communities.

David Fair: Yeah, reliability’s going to be a huge part of that process too, right? Yeah.

Missy Stults: 100%! Yeah, good point!

David Fair: So, there is still a push to not just create the SEU as a supplement and alternative to DTE, but to create a fully owned and operated municipal energy utility. Do you expect that’s going to gain any further traction?

Missy Stults: Hard to say. I mean, it is not a priority of our office, nor is it something we’re planning to spend much of any time on in 2026. We really need to get the Sustainable Energy Utility to wild success. Once that happens, we can explore expansion opportunities. But right now, I think it would be wildly premature for us to think about that. We need to make the SEU just the pinnacle of a utility. And then, we can explore what comes after.

David Fair: Once again, we’re talking with Ann Arbor OSI Director Missy Stults on the first Issues of the Environment conversation of 2026. You touched on this. Climate and equity programs will continue to be a focus in some areas of Ann Arbor’s neighborhoods, most notably the Bryant neighborhood. How far along are we going to move this year on that front?

Missy Stults: I am so excited about the advancements happening this year. We have significant dollars. So, we’re in construction already for things like energy efficiency work, insulation, air sealing in homes. We’re doing solar installations and energy storage, battery storage. Those will all hopefully be done in ’26. So, we anticipate with the funding, barring. Of course, we’re in a wild market, so pricing is kind of fluctuating with tariffs, but we think we’re going to be able to get 100 homes nearly to carbon neutrality, with the one exception being geothermal, the heating and cooling. And that we actually hope to break ground in late ’26 on that system. That system will take quite a while to build, I think, a year to 18 months, but we’ll be really close in Bryant. We’ll be in construction.

David Fair: That’s good! And on the geothermal, that gives you and I something to talk about at the end of next year, right?

Missy Stults: Yeah! Right! Exactly!

David Fair: Now there’s been some progress, as you mentioned, in electrifying the city’s transportation fleet. Is it expected to take another giant leap forward in this coming year?

Missy Stults: I’m not sure if we’ll hit a giant leap forward. For us, we’re at a little bit of a crossroads. The manufacturers for the vehicles left on the market that we need to electrify haven’t brought an electric option. So, an example, we’ve had a snowy winter. We don’t have a chassis–a truck chassis–that can hold a plow yet. No one has electrified that. So, we’re in a kind of a hold until we get that in the market segment. We can’t make that transition. What you’ll see is, statistically, we have from our fleet manager is about 90% of all viable fleet have already been transitioned. So, we’ll close the gap with the remaining vehicles as they come up, but we really need partners in the industry to be producing those last vehicles, so we can get over the hump.

David Fair: The city is also going to continue with its circular economy strategy and its 10,000 trees initiative. How far do you anticipate pushing those programs forward in 2026?

Missy Stults: Yeah, circular economy, if I had to guess, will be the buzzword of 2026. I think you’re going to hear a lot about our electronics programs, our electronic repurposing programs, about our clothing swaps, about textile manufacturing and recycling initiatives we’re working on. We also have been working with the business community to figure out what does it need to really incubate the circularity work, because circularity, if done right, is an economic development opportunity: good paying jobs, local jobs, right, keeping materials out of landfills. Even out of recycling systems, we really want to try to keep them in use as much as possible. And so, we’re getting very creative ideas and a lot of commitment from our business community around this topic. So, I think, if I had to guess when I talk to you in a year from now, we’re going to say 2026 was the year of circularity.

David Fair: I don’t need to tell you there are changes in federal priorities and policies that make accessing–

Missy Stults: You said what?

David Fair: It makes funding for environmental programs more difficult to come by. Other sources have run dry. There’s a good number of Ann Arbor residents who have expressed that they feel overtaxed already. So, how big a barrier to both short and longer-term goals of A2ZERO is money going to be in in 2026?

Missy Stults: Yeah, money is always a challenge. I think we just have to be real about that. The other reality we face is we are all going to pay for climate change and our behaviors and how they’re leading to this fundamental experiment with the planet we’ve never done before. The question is, are we gonna pay in damages? We’re going to pay in lost economic opportunities, we’re going to pay in flooding and remediation, we’re going to pay in higher energy bills because we have wars with this viable fuel source that’s contaminating our air, contaminating our lungs and, of course, contaminating our planet. Or are we going to pay to invest in a future that’s more resilient, one that has a higher quality of life? So, we’re going to pay, and I think we need to be honest about that. There’s no way out of this. What is already true, though, is Ann Arbor voters authorized a 20-year climate millage in 2022. And so, with that gift, we’ve been able to do the programs that we’ve talked about. So, we’re going to keep working on those programs, and we will have a change in federal administration, at some point, that is going to be supportive of this work because there literally will be no choice, right? I mean, when communities flood, you’ve got to help communities. A reckoning is coming, I guess is what I’m going say. This is not a theoretical science. It doesn’t care about our belief systems. The truth is visceral at the local level, and we’re going to have to face it. So, we’ll see a shift in time. This is just a hard, challenging moment, but we’ve been here before.

David Fair: Missy, I thank you so much for the time and the conversation and the look ahead. I appreciate it, and I know you and I are going to talk through the course of the year. That is Missy Stults. She is director of the City of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations, and our guest on Issues of the Environment. For more information, stop by our website at WEMU.org. I’m David Fair, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU-FM Ypsilanti.

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