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Power failures like the one that left 50,000 Michigan homes without electricity during this past weekend’s cold have increased in Michigan over recent decades, according to a new report by the nonprofit news organization Climate Central.
The report found that Michigan experienced the second-highest number of power outages during which at least 50,000 customers or more lost power between 2000 and 2021. Outages increased by 78% between 2011 and 2021 compared to the prior decade.
Climate Central’s report says increasingly frequent severe weather stresses the nation’s aging grid, contributing to increased outages nationally.
But while Michigan has been hit by many severe storms in recent years, including several that caused outages in 2023, ratepayer advocates say the state’s poor performance compared to neighboring states shows a failure by state regulators to ensure that utilities adequately invest in and maintain the grid to prevent power failures.
Michigan’s aging grid and “inefficient practices by utilities to maintain the grid leave Michiganders more exposed to outages from weather events” than people in other states, said Amy Bandyk, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Michigan.
Bandyk added that the weather isn’t significantly different in other Midwestern states. Still, investor-owned utilities like DTE Energy and Consumers Energy have failed to implement best practices like frequent tree trimming to get branches out of the way of power lines, and regulators haven’t held them accountable for these issues.
According to the Climate Central report, neighboring states like Ohio and Indiana experienced 79 and 59 outages between 2000 and 2021, compared to 132 in Michigan. Only Texas, with four times more land area than Michigan and three times the population, experienced more power failures during this period, with 180 outages.
A metric of utility performance that better accounts for differences in size and population between states is the time it takes power companies to restore service following an outage.
According to the Citizen’s Utility Board of Michigan’s 2023 Utility Performance Report, Michigan utilities’ average time for restoring power after an outage was 527 minutes, compared to 185 minutes for Ohio, 211 minutes for Indiana, 307 minutes for Wisconsin, 140 minutes for Illinois and 116 minutes for Minnesota.
Nationally, Michigan is the 4th worst state for restoration time, and among state utilities, DTE Energy took the longest to restore power, according to CUB’s report. On average, the company took 586 minutes to restore power or almost 10 hours.
Michigan’s grid is not in great shape even on fair weather days – a 2021 report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave Michigan’s power grid a D, indicating it was “poor, at risk” compared to a national score of C-.
However, extreme weather is making things worse. Several rounds of severe storms last summer caused outages for hundreds of thousands of residents, along with the February ice storm that cut power to 700,000 Michiganders.
As climate change creates warmer air that can hold more water vapor, it could drive increasingly violent storms. According to the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments program, the frequency and intensity of severe storms have increased in the Midwest, with the amount of precipitation falling in the heaviest 1% of storm events, rising by 42% between 1958 and 2016. Experts project these numbers to increase by 40% or more by the end of the century.
Climate Central suggests strategies like incentives for power users to cut back on usage during high-demand periods, smart grid technologies that allow operators to evaluate problems, hardening the grid to prevent damage and microgrids that can supply small areas with backup power from distributed energy sources or battery storage during a broader outage.
A move by the Michigan Public Service Commission to require utilities to track outages at the neighborhood level could help identify problems in low-income areas and communities of color, which have been disproportionately affected by outages, and create more accountability for these companies.
In a statement to Planet Detroit, DTE Energy said it was continuing with its “four-point plan” to improve reliability, which includes tree trimming, rebuilding older portions of the power grid, updating and hardening infrastructure, and installing smart grid technology.
The company added that it is investing in microgrid projects in Detroit and Port Austin and preparing “the grid for the energy transformation and electrification that are needed to combat climate change.”
Consumers Energy spokesperson Brian Wheeler pointed to the company’s “reliability roadmap,” which sets goals for improving tree trimming, upgrading infrastructure, modernizing the grid, and helping disadvantaged communities benefit from the transition to renewable energy.
“Our twin goals, over time, are that no customer will be without power for more than 24 hours and that no outage will affect more than 100,000 customers,” he said.
Some experts say the MPSC bears responsibility for the problem by allowing residential rates to increase while reliability suffers.
Douglas Jester, a managing partner at the consulting firm 5 Lakes Energy, said residential energy costs, in the form of distribution rates, had increased rapidly in Michigan between 2010 and 2020 compared to the national average.
“Over a 25-year period, MPSC investigations, staff reports, and utility plans and promises have been ineffectual at improving distribution reliability, but distribution rates are increasing faster than nationally,” he said. “If ‘insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result,’ continuing to do this would be regulatory insanity,”
Bandyk said that in recent rate cases for DTE and Consumers, regulators did a better job scrutinizing grid spending by utilities. But she said that putting financial penalties in place for poor utility performance is crucial.
“Implementing those disincentives would be the next big step to create meaningful accountability and remedy the root causes of our current situation with reliability,” she said.
