DTE to bury power lines in certain Detroit neighborhoods to help curb outages - Detroit Free Press

DTE to bury power lines in certain Detroit neighborhoods

DTE to bury power lines in certain Detroit neighborhoods to help curb outages
Adrienne Roberts

DTE Energy customers living in the Davison and Buffalo-Charles neighborhoods that border Hamtramck may soon experience fewer power outages. The utility is beginning work in the neighborhoods as part of a pilot program to bury five miles of power lines underground.

Victoria Griffin, 53, who lives in the area where the undergrounding will begin, was the first to cheer the project at a town hall meeting Wednesday evening that DTE held at the Lasky Recreation Center to give customers more information about the latest pilot.

"I'm excited about it because I just lost my power a couple of weeks ago," Griffin said, referring to the severe storms in late August that knocked out power for more than 50,000 Michigan residents. "Going underground ... I feel like you've got less of a problem when there are storms, heavy rain and heavy snow."

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That's the bet Detroit-based DTE is making as it embarks on the latest program, expected to begin in October, that also will coordinate electric and gas infrastructure upgrades, aimed at reducing both inconvenience for its customers and costs for the utility.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department plans to replace some water mains and all existing lead service lines in the neighborhood in conjunction with DTE’s project, Bryan Peckinpaugh, a spokesperson for the department, said.

The Davison and Buffalo-Charles neighborhoods were chosen because they have experienced below-average reliability, especially during extreme weather, Collen Rosso, a DTE spokesperson, said.

Undergrounding, the process of burying power lines, is one of the measures DTE is taking to reduce the frequency of power outages, along with trimming trees, putting smart devices on the grid that help to reroute power quickly and pole top hardening (rehabilitating the equipment at the top of the poles).

Customers who have underground services experience more than 30% better reliability compared with customers with overhead lines, according to DTE data gathered between 2019 and 2021 and posted on a blog on its website.

DTE executives have said undergrounding lines isn't a foolproof solution, though. When there is an outage, it can take longer to get the power back on because it's more difficult to locate the issue.

It's also expensive — DTE has said it can cost about six times the cost of installing overhead lines — but so are the costs that come with restoring power after it goes out. The late February ice storm and an early March winter thundersnow that knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across Michigan cost DTE about $70 million, DTE's Chairman and CEO Jerry Norcia said on the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Undergrounding lines is not a new phenomenon. Since the early 1970s, new construction has been developed with underground wires and about a third of DTE's infrastructure is underground.

Older infrastructure that's above ground is found in cities like Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, Birmingham, Royal Oak and Dearborn.

The power lines in the Buffalo-Charles neighborhood are part of one of the older circuits that DTE is replacing. The utility plans to rebuild about 16,000 miles of this circuit that causes the most trouble day to day and during storms.

“That system needs to be replaced and that's going to take about 15 or 20 years ...," Norcia said in an interview with Detroit Free Press staff in May. "While we're doing that, we're going to look really hard at how much of it we can underground."

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DTE is among other utilities around the state and country that are considering undergrounding power lines in order to reduce the frequency of outages. Jackson-based Consumers Energy is embarking on undergrounding pilot programs to study resiliency improvements, targeting circuits in Genesee, Livingston, Allegan, Ottawa, Montcalm and Iosco counties that have frequent, lengthy outages and are in areas with dense trees. The utility's plan is to move about 400 miles of power lines underground annually.

DTE is in the final stages of an earlier undergrounding pilot for its electric service in Detroit’s Bagley neighborhood in northwest Detroit, which began in late 2018 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year. That pilot will be evaluated once the work is complete.

For the Buffalo-Charles pilot, DTE is reaching out to the 436 affected customers, Rosso said. Crews will then install new gas and electric lines in the street or on sidewalks and will drill a channel under customers' properties from the new gas main to the spot where gas enters the home. Another channel will be drilled to provide space for the electric service connection.

DTE said gas service will be turned off for two to three hours and electric service will be brieftly interrupted when the service is switched over.

The utility also said it repairs lawns, sidewalks and driveways back to their original condition.

Griffin said she's excited about the pilot and hopeful that the sidewalk in front of her house will be repaired after the work is complete so that it's in a better condition. Her only concerns are parking — Griffin said many of her neighbors park on the street and there may be fewer spots available with DTE crews present — and the timeframe.

"It's about to get cold outside," she said. "I wish they would have done this at the beginning of the summer ...(because) then you probably have to come back next spring to fix my landscape."

Contact Adrienne Roberts: amroberts@freepress.com.