Before Garrick Rochow had a company to run, he had a family instruction to remember. When he became chief executive of CMS Energy and Consumers Energy, his father told him to “take care.” Of the company. Of its workers. Of the land. It was a compact brief for a business with rather a lot of wires.
His father had worked at Consumers himself, as an environmental scientist, while also running the family farm. His mother taught mathematics. Rochow grew up in Horton, a small community in Michigan’s Jackson County, with land to look after and numbers to get right. Later, explaining his choice of environmental engineering, he described it as a way to combine his parents’ work.
There is a pleasing tidiness to that origin. The job it led to is considerably less tidy. An electricity company must change equipment that lasts for decades, satisfy customers who need service this evening, and explain the bill that arrives next month. Its chief executive can announce a new direction. He cannot ask Michigan to stop using electricity while he makes the turn.
“Take care.”
HIS FATHER’S ADVICE ON BECOMING CEO
The first promotion took him away from his specialty
Rochow earned his environmental engineering degree at Michigan Technological University in 1996. He went on to build his utility career at the Holland Board of Public Works, working on environmental controls and eventually taking responsibility for maintenance. That move meant supervising tradespeople and managing the practical demands of steam turbines and boilers.
He later remembered the step into maintenance leadership as a departure from the field he knew. “It was uncomfortable for me,” he said. The work required him to draw on engineering fundamentals while learning about union and workplace relationships. Knowing the technical answer was only part of being responsible for the people carrying it out.
He joined Consumers Energy in 2003, the same year he earned an MBA from Western Michigan University. His assignments included site production at the Campbell Generating Complex and managing the combustion turbine business at Zeeland. These are useful places to acquire a sense of consequence. A power plant offers unusually prompt feedback when a theory fails to cooperate with machinery.
Seventeen years to learn the other end of the wire
Over the following years, Rochow’s responsibilities widened from generating power to delivering it and dealing with the people who buy it. He led energy delivery, customer experience, rates and regulation, and quality. Later he oversaw distribution and customer operations, then the broader operations portfolio.
The sequence matters. A generating plant, a distribution network and a customer contact center can belong to the same company while presenting very different versions of its performance. One measures what the system produces. Another knows where it breaks. Another hears how long a household has been waiting. Rochow’s career crossed those boundaries before he inherited responsibility for all of them.
When CMS announced in November 2020 that Patti Poppe was leaving, Rochow had been at the company for 17 years. He became president and chief executive of CMS Energy and its principal subsidiary on December 1. His appointment brought an operations executive into the top job, with a working history across both the electric and natural gas businesses.
He described joining Consumers as feeling like coming home. That is an unusually literal piece of corporate language in his case. His father had retired from the same employer. The family connection gives his idea of stewardship a specific address, though it also leaves him with a demanding audience: people who remember what the company used to promise.
A retirement date meets the real world
One of the central commitments of Rochow’s early tenure was an accelerated departure from coal. In June 2022, Michigan regulators approved an updated Clean Energy Plan that brought the company’s planned coal exit forward to 2025, fifteen years sooner than previously planned. It paired retirements with other sources of supply, including the purchase of the existing Covert natural gas generating station.
The plan also called for nearly 8,000 megawatts of solar by 2040. Its design recognized an awkward feature of replacing power stations: customers need electricity through the replacement process. New generation, existing gas capacity, storage and reductions in energy waste had to fit together. Announcing the end of one fuel was the legible headline; arranging the substitutes was the larger undertaking.
Campbell makes this transition personal as well as technical. Rochow once worked there as a site production manager. Under his leadership, the company planned to retire the coal complex. Few career arcs make the distance between preserving an asset and replacing it quite so visible.
Then the timetable collided with federal intervention. Campbell was scheduled to retire in May 2025, but Energy Department orders required continued operation. In September 2026, a federal appeals court ruled that the department had exceeded its authority. Consumers said it was reviewing the ruling and would keep operating under a subsequent order extending into November. The planned coal exit and the plant’s actual operation had become two different stories.
For Rochow, that leaves a concrete complication inside a long-term strategy. Equipment, employees, regulators and governments move on different calendars. A retirement date printed in a plan does not, by itself, turn off a power station.
The customer’s clock runs faster
Power outages offer no such luxury of a long horizon. After the February 2023 ice storm, Rochow thanked customers for their patience while the company worked to restore service. The language was direct because the situation was direct: people were waiting for their power to return.
For a utility chief, a storm compresses the whole business into a few urgent questions. Where are the crews? Which repairs come first? When will the lights come back? The answers depend on years of maintenance and investment, but customers encounter them as hours. A twenty-year energy plan has to survive that much shorter examination.
Back within 24 hours
Share of Consumers Energy customers experiencing outages whose service returned within 24 hours. Company-reported results summarized by Michigan’s utility regulator. Progress, with work still to do.
There has been measurable movement. Michigan’s utility regulator recorded that Consumers customers experienced an average of 21 fewer outage minutes in 2024 than in 2023. More than 93 percent of customers who lost service had it restored within 24 hours, compared with 87 percent a year earlier. The same regulatory account described independent audits and required improvements. Better results and continued scrutiny belong in the same picture.
In February 2026, Consumers reported completing nearly 2,700 distribution reliability projects during 2025. Its longer-term goals include restoring every customer within 24 hours and limiting the number affected by a single weather incident to 100,000. Those remain goals. Their value is that a customer can understand them without first becoming an electrical engineer.
Who pays for the next version?
Rochow’s assignment also includes the household budget. In January 2023, Consumers announced a $25 million contribution to help Michigan homes and businesses with energy bills. Assistance addresses an immediate difficulty, while investment in the system raises the longer question of what dependable service should cost and how that cost should be shared.
Natural gas adds another set of decisions. In 2022, CMS announced a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its natural gas system by 2050, extending its approach beyond company operations to include customers’ use of the fuel. The announcement also described a ten-year modernization plan. Here, too, Rochow’s portfolio requires managing an existing network while proposing a different future for it.
By the February 2026 earnings call, data centers were another part of the discussion. Rochow argued that large new users should pay the costs associated with serving them, protecting existing customers. The proposition sounds straightforward. Turning it into contracts and approved rates is where a customer-service promise becomes an engineering and financial arrangement.
His outside role at Hubbell, whose board he joined in November 2024, places him on the equipment side of the same broad story. Hubbell manufactures utility and electrical products used in critical infrastructure. The connection is practical: plans for a stronger grid eventually become orders for physical things that somebody has to make and install.
At home, someone still leaves the lights on
For all the machinery in his professional life, Rochow can be briskly funny about its domestic limits. Asked in a 2022 interview who forgot to turn off the lights at home, he pointed to his then teenage son. The electricity chief’s household apparently required the same reminders as everyone else’s.
That conversation supplied a few other small windows. He preferred sweet snacks, chose Macklemore’s “Glorious” as entrance music and named Abraham Lincoln as his imagined dinner guest. When the interviewer introduced the subject of critics, Rochow offered a mock protest before answering. The humor made room for the difficult questions rather than ending them.
His father’s instruction remains a useful way to read the job. Taking care of a utility means maintaining what works, changing what must change and answering to people who experience the results every day. Rochow learned the business from environmental controls, maintenance teams, generating stations and customers. Now those different versions of the company meet at his desk. Every one of them expects the lights to stay on.