DTE aims to improve grid reliability 60% over 5 years - MLive.com

DTE aims to improve grid reliability 60% over 5 years - mlive.com

DETROIT, MI – Michigan’s largest utility revealed a $9 billion plan to upgrade the electric grid, setting a goal to improve reliability more than 60% over the next five years.

DTE Energy officials on Friday, Sept. 29, 2023, said they will file with state regulators a new five-year plan to improve reliability through a multi-pronged approach to prevent a continued pattern of frequent power outages that impact hundreds of thousands of Michiganders. This comes after a couple of years of heavy criticism from customers, government officials and politicians.

“We are committed to building the grid of the future, said Matt Paul, DTE’s president and top operating officer, in a released statement.

“Last year, our system operated without incident 99.9% of the time, but we still have work to do to create a more resilient power grid that provides customers with the reliability they expect and deserve.”

Company officials said DTE invested $5 billion in its electric grid during the last five years and would ramp that up to $9 billion for the next five years.

Goals are to focus on work that delivers the most reliability improvements for customers, officials said.

Related: Michigan regulators may tie utility earnings to grid reliability in ‘straw proposal’

That includes trimming more than 30,000 miles of trees along power lines, updating more than 10,000 miles of existing infrastructure, rebuilding some of the oldest sections of the grid including eight new substations, and fully automating the grid by installing smart devices to faster locate damaged areas and reroute service during an outage.

“More reliable. More automated. More resilient. These are our key objectives for the next five years,” Paul said.

“For example, adding more automation technology to our system will enable us to quickly isolate outages and reroute power for many affected customers, so they will continue to have service while our crews are making repairs.”

The company intends to improve reliability by more than 60% within five years, and to update 90% of circuits in Detroit within three years with the last 10% to soon follow.

New substations will be built in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Port Huron, Almont Township, Lenox Township, Van Buren Township, Plymouth Township, and Lapeer. Some overhead lines are expected to be buried.

The company’s announcement comes after the Michigan Public Service Commission last month said agency leaders are considering a “straw proposal” that would tie utility earnings to grid reliability.

Related: Burying power lines, trimming more trees may improve Michigan’s failure-prone electric grid, experts say

State utility regulators said they are concerned about the length of time it takes Consumers Energy and DTE Electric to restore power after outages and the large numbers of Michiganders who have repeat power losses each year.

That was the sole focus of a listening session Aug. 30, 2023, at the Pleasant Ridge Community Center hosted by state Rep. Helena Scott, D-Detroit. A standing room-only crowd packed into the space and nearly all who spoke voiced complaints about lost heat, spoiled food, wasted work hours, and exacerbated health risks all connected to repeated and lengthy power outages.

Nina Abrams of Huntington Woods attended the session and told the crowd she is offended by the utilities’ billion-dollar profits and big shareholder dividends when service reliability is so poor.

“I would put a moratorium for two to five years on any dividends for any of these energy companies,” Abrams said to loud applause from the audience.

Michigan’s utilities in recent years struggled to keep the power on as climate change intensifies, bringing increasingly strong summertime thunderstorms and winter ice storms and blizzards. Utility data shows strong winds, fallen branches, and toppled trees are more often knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents, sometimes for days on end.

In July, Michigan received a nearly $15 million federal grant to improve the power grid and reduce the impacts of extreme weather on the system.

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