With hundreds of thousands of Michiganders without lights or heat heading into the weekend, many are asking why this keeps happening when weather strikes and how we can stop it.
Local 4 spoke to an expert who thinks about those answers every day.
It’s all about preventing things like what occurred Wednesday from happening again, which consists of trees going through power lines that then come down.
But the expert told Local 4 it’s not just about trimming trees, although that helps. It’s about being better prepared for storms, and it’s something utilities just aren’t very good at right now.
Every time there’s a strong storm, It seems so many Michiganders are left in the dark and the cold.
This time, the latest winter system brought sleet, snow, and ice to states across the county. Nearly one million households were left without power. At one point, 800,000 of them were in Michigan, which is far and away the most significant outage number in the nation.
So what can be done to fix this? The first answer we’ve heard time and time again was trimming trees.
“Tree trimming is one of the biggest expenses that utilities have and can make a big difference in how resilient the system is in the face of particularly wind events and icing events,” said U of M Industrial Operations Engineering Professor Seth Guikema.
Utilities have poured tens of millions of dollars into doing that in the last few years. Then there’s always talk of burying lines. But at the cost of a million dollars per mile of lines, that total comes to about 31 billion in southeast Michigan.
That means the real answer to preventing it is for utilities to have better plans to get crews out to fix downed lines. Just getting there can take anywhere between 12 to 36 hours. And maybe most important is what happens after the storm blows through. Now that mother nature has done some of the tree trimmings, and It’s up to utilities to ensure the system can handle another storm.
“If you’re in a place that’s getting hurricanes pretty regularly, their system is already adapted to it because it has to be, so when they put the system back together, they do it in a way to try to make it stronger against future events, and I hope DTE is doing that in this case,” Guikema said.
DTE remains among the least reliable in the country despite having some of the highest rates and asking for nearly 400 million in rate hikes last year.
The utility has long said that money goes to grid improvements and tree trimming. It’s also pointed to higher resiliency and more reliable energy in recent years, including a 21% drop in outages last year and $1 billion on making it more reliable.
