The Michigan Public Service Commission’s 2022 Annual Report released Monday underscores a year in which the Commission intensified its focus on challenges to the reliability of Michigan’s electric grid as the state’s changing climate brought increasingly severe storms. The Annual Report, which is required to be filed on the first Monday of March each year, comes as severe weather over the past two weeks has led to power outages impacting hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, and highlights the focus of improving the reliability of the utilities’ distribution systems that has been a major theme of the Commission’s work over the course of 2022.
Specifically, among the many actions taken in 2022 highlighted in the annual report, the Commission took a number of concrete steps aimed at reducing the number and duration of outages. The MPSC:
- Ordered a first-of-its-kind systemwide audit of the electric distribution systems and operations of Michigan’s two largest electric utilities, Consumers Energy Co. and DTE Electric Co.
- Approved in March 2022 an update of power outage credits for customers who endure long outages, from the current $25 one-time credit to $35, plus an additional $35 each day beyond acceptable thresholds. Importantly, outage credits will be automatic; customers won’t have to request them from their utility.
- Approved other changes to the MPSC’s service quality and reliability rules and technical standards for electric service governing operations of the state’s regulated utilities. The additional updates include shortening required times for utilities to restore long-duration outages; reducing the amount of time first responders must guard downed wires until they’re relieved by a utility lineworker; updating reliability standards to ensure Michigan's performance indicators match industry guidelines; and establishing annual reporting requirements for rural electric cooperatives and all investor-owned utilities to ensure they're reporting service quality and reliability performance to the Commission.
- Continued its support of more aggressive tree trimming and vegetation management and shortened cycles for tree trimming, efforts that are already showing progress as the utilities report that areas with increased tree trimming have seen fewer – and shorter – outages.
- Directed MPSC Staff to create a webpage on the MSPC’s website, www.michigan.gov/mpsc,
focused on distribution-system reliability, outages and storm response as a dedicated resource for addressing those matters. The web page, designed to be a regularly updated resource for ratepayers and others to find the latest information on system reliability, is expected to be published online in the coming weeks.
- Continued its ongoing review of storm outages from the August 2021 storms that left about 1 million Michiganders without electricity — some for more than a week —from winds exceeding 70 mph. Steps included requiring more detailed information from utilities so that the MPSC can have better, more frequently updated reliability metrics that include outage numbers, restoration times, monthly tree trimming updates, amounts spent on restoration efforts and customer outage credits, and data by ZIP code for a more granular look.
In addition to this focus on improving system reliability and reducing power outages, the Commission was also active on a number of other fronts as noted in the Annual Report. Read more at https://bit.ly/3myN8Vq
Categories: Michigan, Business, Energy