LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Consumers Energy and DTE Energy officials delivered remarks to the Senate Committee about their response and attempted prevention of storm damage to the grid, after a late winter ice storm left more than a million without power for days, offering some advice for avoiding such conditions in the future. 

Michigan Public Service Commission Chair Dan Scripps gave remarks regarding the trends of storms in Michigan, including a decade snapshot through 2022 – which included a historic worst storm Michigan had seen in 50 years which started in late February. 

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The effects of the storm that began on Feb. 22 resulted in approximately 1 million people without power. According to Scripps, Hillsdale County in particular suffered 90% without power.  

The leading factors that are affecting reliability of the grid include the changing climate, inadequate vegetation management, and deteriorating distribution infrastructure according to Scripps. 

“[Tree trimming] is the single best tool that we have in the toolbox to get to a better place in terms of the number of outages, but as important the number of customers  experiencing multiple outages over the course of the year an the duration of those outages,” Scripps said, “And we’ve seen real progress.” 

Later, President of DTE Energy, Trevor Lauer testified and echoed Scripps comments about the positive effects of tree trimming. 

Lauer acknowledged that the company had increased the amount of automatic credits for customers who were without power temporarily – a recommendation that the Attorney General Dana Nessell made shortly after the initial wave of the storm hit – though Senator Dayna Polehanki (D-Livonia) didn’t think they were enough. 

“The $25 to $35 credit is a joke, it is embarrassing,” Senator Polehanki said, “It is embarrassing for me to have to tell my constituents that’s all they’re going to get – for all the rotten food, for all the heartache, I don’t think there is any reason, why you as a company cannot voluntarily up that rate even though it is set by the public service commission and I would urge you to do that.” 

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Lauer instead addressed concerns for communities with outdated electric infrastructure and the claim that it would cost $6 million per mile to bury electric wires in subdivisions through strategic undergrounding. 

“Strategic undergrounding is a very important piece [to decreasing consumer costs] and the $6 million a mile – I will say is probably not correct,” Lauer said, “Depending on the conditions you operate if you’re undergrounding in a very rural area where there is not a lot of infrastructure that in the road we see that being done for less than $1 million a mile.  We’ve done some of this in the city of Detroit and we’re seeing two different pilots in the city of Detroit with strategic undergrounding and it’s approaching $4.5 million a mile.” 

To keep costs down, he suggested doing the project at scale, which means doing a lot of it all at once so crews get good at it, and the supply chain process gets ironed out, as opposed to doing it once every two years, working on it once every month. 

“We see this across the U.S. where costs will come down by 50% once you get repetitive crews that are doing it because you have to learn how to do it and the conditions will be slightly different in each area where you do it,” Lauer said. 

Tonya L. Berry is senior vice president of transformation and engineering for CMS Energy and Consumers Energy also 

“At Consumers Energy we cannot control the weather but we can control our response,” Berry said. 

She cited an Electric Distribution Plan that was filed with the Public Service Commission in 2021 which included investments in the company’s reliability grid. 

“Last year we completed over 2,000 electric infrastructure projects, cleared over 7,000 miles of power lines, replaced 10,000 poles, upgraded 100 substations, and continued to incorporate smart technologies to improve grid operations through our electric distribution plan,” Berry said. 

Vice President of Electric Operations with Consumers Energy, Chris Laird, also mentioned that part of the issue with the response time for those without power was that their new outage map had defects; which have since been fixed. 

“We found a defect during the middle of the storm that was inaccurately reporting outages,” Laird said, “Some people were getting notified that their outage was going to be six, seven, eight days out, which was inaccurate, while other folks were getting notified they were back on when they actually weren’t.” 

Lauer suggested that the way to fix this issue is through your utilities, and through continued investments in the grid which is the “most important thing we can do now.”