Consumers Energy lays out new long-term goals in face of increasingly extreme weather
Consumers Energy released its Reliability Roadmap for Michigan’s long-term future this week, dedicating itself to hemming in outages through a preemptive and proactive mix of tree trimming, upgrades, and grid modernization.
“Consistent with our commitment to improve service reliability, Consumers Energy has established new grid performance expectations that better reflect the reality of what Mother Nature is sending our way,” Tonya Berry, senior vice president of transformation & engineering at Consumers Energy, said. “We are sharing these customer service commitments for the first time, reinforcing our ‘Count on Us’ promise to the nearly 2 million electric customers we have the privilege of serving.”
The plan explicitly called for allowing no customer in the state to be without power for more than 24 hours and to restrict outages to less than 100,000 customers. The call for shorter, fewer outages comes as climate change has wrought its share of ice storms, late summer tornados, and increasingly powerful wind storms in the state – in fact, the last four years brought wind speed averages to Michigan twice as high as any similar period over the past 20 years.
Among its details, the Reliability Roadmap proposed four means of achieving the ambitious goals. In terms of tree trimming, the company intends to significantly increase and stay at the cycle time needed to keep lines clear of tree interference, the most common cause of outages and reliability challenges. At the same time, Consumers intends to reorganize circuits and expand and hasten the replacement or rebuilding of power poles while increasing underground power lines in areas that could benefit.
Grid modernization efforts will also continue. The company seeks to improve the ability of its smart meters, sensors, and automation devices to work together on monitoring, isolation, and automatic response to interruptions. On the less tangible side, Consumers also stated a continued commitment to equity and environmental justice by pledging that all communities would benefit from the effects of the Reliability Roadmap and the clean energy transformation.
“We’ve identified the steps we can take to move forward, and we know the result will be an electric grid that can better withstand extreme weather and serve our customers around the clock,” Chris Laird, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric operations, said.
The next step is filing a five-year plan this week with the Michigan Public Service Commission.
