Cherryland, Consumers, or TCLP: Which One Bills the House You’re Buying?
Traverse City Light & Power holds a public hearing tonight on a 5 percent rate increase. If it passes, it lands on October bills. Cherryland Electric already took its second phased bump in February. Consumers Energy got a $276.6 million increase approved in March, put it on bills May 1, and filed for another $456 million in June.
Three utilities, three separate rate stories, all in the same summer, and most buyers up here couldn't tell you which one is going to send them a bill. That's not a knock on anybody. The lines between them don't follow anything you can see from the road.
Who bills what
Roughly speaking, there are four electric companies you can end up with in the counties we work, and the one you get is decided by the parcel, not by you.
Traverse City Light & Power is the city-owned utility. It serves the city proper plus pieces of Garfield, East Bay, Elmwood and Peninsula townships, about 12,700 customers total. There's a service area PDF on tclp.org (the file is TCLP_Service_Area.pdf, dated August 2025) and the boundary wanders. Two houses on the same street in Elmwood Township can be on different utilities.
Cherryland Electric Cooperative is the big one for the rest of Grand Traverse and most of Leelanau. Their published township list covers Acme, Blair, East Bay, Garfield, Grant, Green Lake, Long Lake, Mayfield, Paradise, Union and Whitewater on the Grand Traverse side, and Bingham, Centerville, Elmwood, Empire, Kasson, Leelanau, Leland, Solon and Suttons Bay in Leelanau. Also Almira, Colfax, Homestead, Inland, Weldon and Joyfield in Benzie, and Clearwater, Kalkaska and Boardman townships in Kalkaska County. About 38,000 members, headquartered in Grawn since the first lines went live in May 1939.
Consumers Energy fills a lot of the gaps. Glen Arbor is Consumers. The bulk of Old Mission Peninsula past the TCLP line is Consumers. The Benzie townships that aren't on Cherryland's list (Crystal Lake, Benzonia, Lake) are mostly Consumers as far as I know. When the Record-Eagle writes about an outage on the peninsula, it's Consumers crews they're quoting.
Great Lakes Energy is the co-op on the Antrim side. Elk Rapids Township, Milton, Torch Lake, Mancelona. If you're looking on the Chain of Lakes, you're likely a GLE member, and I'll admit I know their territory less well than the other three.
Notice what's missing from Cherryland's Leelanau list: Glen Arbor and Cleveland. Notice what's missing from the Grand Traverse list: Peninsula and Fife Lake. Those gaps are where Consumers lives.
Why a buyer should care which one it is
The rates are different, and the shape of the bill is different, and that second part matters more than people expect.
TCLP moved every residential customer to time-of-use pricing starting with December 2025 usage. The spread is wide: something like 7 cents a kilowatt-hour off-peak in winter up to more than 27 cents on-peak in summer, under the proposed schedule. Weekends and holidays are off-peak. If nobody picked a plan, the house defaulted to something called Eco Steady with a four-year phase-in. The old senior rate is gone. And the monthly facilities charge, the part you pay before you turn anything on, would go from $13.50 to $14.55 under tonight's proposal.
Cherryland is a not-for-profit co-op, so the bill is an availability charge plus an energy charge plus a power-supply cost recovery line that floats. They raised rates about 6 percent in 2024 ($4 on the availability charge, four tenths of a cent per kWh), then did a two-phase increase: $2.50 plus half a cent in 2025, and another $2.00 plus half a cent starting with January 2026 usage. They've said out loud that the days of a decade between increases are over. On the plus side, you get capital credits back over time because you're an owner, and their own comparison claims members pay less than the neighboring investor-owned utility (that's Consumers) in both summer and winter. I'd take that with a grain of salt since it's their comparison, but the direction is probably right.
Consumers is the one regulated by the Michigan Public Service Commission, which is why you read about its increases in the news. The March order works out to about $6.46 a month for a 500 kWh household. The June request, if granted in full, would be bigger. My unscientific read after a few winters of watching outage maps is that Consumers customers up here sit on the longest, most tree-lined rural feeders, and their outages run longer. Your experience may differ.
For a second home, the utility also decides whether you can put the place on a seasonal rate. Cherryland's rate book has a Schedule AS, Seasonal Residential Service. TCLP doesn't have an equivalent that I'm aware of. If the cottage is going to sit empty from November to May, that's worth a phone call before you close.
The part that bites on vacant land
If you're buying a lot instead of a house, the utility question gets expensive fast, and it's the thing I'd check before anything else on a wooded parcel.
Cherryland's construction policy (Section III of their member regulations, sheets C-15 and C-16, issued April 2024) charges $6.00 per foot for a residential line extension, measured from their nearest facilities in an accessible right-of-way to your meter base. Standard practice is underground. If the route crosses rock, wetlands, a driveway or anything paved, the directional boring is on you. Anything over 800 feet is handled case by case, which in practice means bring your checkbook.
There's a winter surcharge too: an extra $3.00 per foot for construction between December 15 and March 31, waived only if the job is inspected, paid and ready before November 1. So a 600-foot run priced in October and paid in January just got $1,800 more expensive. And you, not the seller, are responsible for producing recordable easements across any neighbor's land the line has to cross.
Consumers has its own line extension tariff and I don't have those numbers in front of me. Ask them, not me. Either way, "power at the road" on a listing tells you where the nearest pole is, and nothing about what it costs to get from the pole to a meter base 500 feet back in the hardwoods.
What to do with this before you write an offer
Ask the listing agent for a copy of a recent electric bill. Not the average, the bill itself. It tells you the utility, the rate class, the meter's usage history and whether the seller was on a time-of-use plan or a seasonal schedule. In our market the electric bill gets requested far less often than the tax bill, and it tells you more about how the house lives.
If it's a TCLP address, look at what the last twelve months would cost under time-of-use and figure out whether you're a daytime-at-home household or an evenings-and-weekends one. Those two families pay very different amounts for the same kilowatt-hours now.
If it's Cherryland, ask whether the seller has capital credits that transfer or get refunded. Small money, but it's your money.
If it's vacant land, call the utility and get a written line extension estimate before your inspection period ends. All of them will do it, but I've never seen one come back in under a couple of weeks, so ask on day one.
And if you don't know which utility serves the parcel, the assessor's record won't tell you. The bill will, or the meter will (the tag on it has the company name), or a call to Cherryland at their Grawn office will at least tell you whether it's theirs.
Tonight's TCLP hearing is at the regular board meeting. Cherryland's board meets monthly in Grawn and puts out a podcast recap afterward. Consumers files everything with the MPSC under case numbers you can search (the March order was U-21870). If you're weighing a Traverse City house against one in Leelanau and want help figuring out what the utility line does to that comparison, send me the two addresses and I'll pull what I can.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
