Consumers Energy to invest $9 billion to reduce and shorten outages - Detroit News
Consumers Energy to invest $9 billion to reduce and shorten outages
Consumers Energy to invest $9 billion over five years to reduce and shorten outages
Candice Williams
Consumers Energy announced a five-year, $9 billion investment plan Monday it says will reduce outages during major storms and shorten the time customers are without power.
The utility’s Reliability Roadmap includes tree trimming, infrastructure upgrades, grid modernization and equity and environmental justice, officials said.
The goals of the plan are for no customer to be without power for more than 24 hours and that no outage will affect more than 100,000 customers at a time.
"We know that demand for energy is increasing and severe weather threats are becoming far too common," said Tonya Berry, senior vice president of transformation and engineering for Consumers Energy during a livestreamed press conference Monday. "Our job number one is to provide safe, reliable and affordable electricity to our customers. This roadmap will allow us to do that, also while considering being clean and equitable for all customers. But this plan, or the roadmap, will require continued investment. We have to put some technology on the system and also we'll need support from our regulators and other key stakeholders."
Officials said the company will file the plan with the Michigan Public Service Commission on Friday, officials said. How the plan impacts customer rates remains to be seen.
“We have a responsibility when we look at affordability for our customers,” Berry said. “To make sure we're efficient with the dollars that we have and continue to spend. And so those things will be vetted out through the annual process that we go through with the commission.”
Berry was joined by Chris Laird, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric operations and Greg Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric distribution engineering.
Salisbury said when the company files its rate case in 2024 to fund 2025, "You’ll start to see things that are outlined in the Reliability Roadmap. It will be a transparent piece each year of the five-year plan that then shows up in the litigated rate case process.”
The rate plan comes after Michigan has experienced major weather events leading to widespread outages. According to Consumers Energy, in the last four years, the state has seen wind-speed averages twice as high as any similar period in the last two decades.
DTE Energy is also expected to submit a grid improvement plan to the commission on Friday, said DTE spokesperson Colleen Rosso. Details about the submission are expected to be released later this week.
Rosso said the plan ties in and accelerates DTE Energy's existing four-point plan, which the company has said focuses on improving grid stability through trimming thousands of miles of trees, updating existing infrastructure, rebuilding significant portions of the grid and accelerating the transition to a smart grid.
Laird said Consumer Energy's plan includes investing $1 billion annually to accelerate the replacement or rebuilding of poles so they can withstand wind speeds of more than 100 miles per hour, expand undergrounding power lines and expand tree trimming. He said the company has hired more than 300 apprentices to become journeymen linemen and is training nearly 100 workers to expand underground work.
"Our nearly 2 million electric customers expect a grid that can power their homes and businesses no matter what Mother Nature throws at them and we're going to give that to them," Laird said.
Salisbury said there are 50,000 miles of low voltage distribution lines for homes and business, with 16% underground. The plan is to ramp up conversion of lines to underground each year.
“We think if we can get another 5,000 miles that we choose strategically to deal with the biggest reliability concerns, that we can just make a massive impact on those customers.”
Consumers Energy provides natural gas and/or electricity to 6.7 million customers in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.
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