Michigan PSC to hold two technical conferences on grid reliability, resilience
In May, the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) will conduct two technical conferences to improve understanding of the state’s electric grid and its issues, focusing on utility resilience and reliability.
These will be information gathering meetings, checking out who in the state faces the most and longest outages, and how to improve reliability for them, as well as how to provide outage support for customers with disproportionate health and financial impacts, and how best to improve resilience at critical facilities overall. Engineering, technical, regulatory, and cost barriers, together with their solutions, will dominate the discussion.
The first of these conferences will be held on May 22, 2023. It will focus on issues and barriers, extreme weather events in recent years and the challenges they brought, defining grid resilience and its valuation, the electric grid’s impact on critical infrastructure areas, and a mix of regulatory, planning, financial, policy, and other barriers to improving resilience statewide. A follow-up conference will take place on May 26, 2023, in an attempt to nail down solutions for everything from gaps in data collection and understanding of outages’ impacts to the tools and technologies for building resilience and the availability of funding, among others.
Both conferences are a natural progression from the MPSC’s ongoing investigations of the challenges exposed by the late February and early March 2023 winter storms, which cut power to more than 1 million customers combined of Consumers Energy Co. and DTE Electric Co., the state’s largest utility providers. Town halls in March addressed those events more specifically, gathering information from utility customers and providing resources and a list of actions the MPSC is taking to fix known grid challenges.
On top of all this, the Commission last week launched a new Distribution System Reliability site for customers to check detailed reliability and outage information in Michigan.