Consumers Energy continues to make tremendous strides in strengthening Michigan’s grid, enabling us to provide more reliable service to our customers.

These improvements are powered by our Reliability Roadmap, which drives us toward hitting challenging goals while building a modern grid for the future. This ultimate goal is for a modern grid that will stand up to whatever Mother Nature throws at us.

This is no small feat when you consider that Consumers Energy serves every county in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. That’s almost 100,000 miles of electric lines Consumers Energy operates that power nearly 2 million homes and businesses.

“We’re trimming trees, using technology and burying more power lines to build a power grid that is reliable in all weather,” said Greg Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric distribution engineering. “We all saw the threat from severe weather, in the form of intense back-to-back storms in January, where we restored power to most customers in less than 24 hours, which makes us even more determined to make outages as infrequent and as short as possible.”

The End Goal

We’re heading toward an end goal where no single outage affects more than 100,000 customers, and all customers have power restored within 24 hours. We continue to make it a priority to upgrade circuits – sections of the system that serve individual communities – that experience the most frequent outages. Circuits that were upgraded in 2020 through 2023 experienced 12% fewer incidents and 5% fewer outages.

We have also reduced the length of the average customer outage in 2023 during normal weather conditions to just under 3 hours- that’s a 20-minute reduction over the average for the previous five years.

More Investments Coming

Consumers Energy expects to make even more innovative investments in the electric grid this year with $100 million in federal funding.

This includes a pole sensor program that will help us identify broken poles and replace them more efficiently. 

We envision a future where crews made up of three to four people can replace poles more efficiently, which will lead to a significant decrease in outages length.

Currently, crews spend significant time surveying areas for damaged poles. With new pole sensors, they’ll know immediately how many poles are down.

So instead of arriving at the site, then having to go back to pole yard to get proper materials and equipment, they can arrive at the site ready to start work, cutting down on critical restoration time.

Also in advance, crew leaders can notify dispatch of poles down. Dispatch then can call MISS DIG 811, which assigns a person to come and stake anything underground that could interfere with crews safely completing their work.

Safer and More Reliable Future

Other projects we’re working on include the deployment of 2,860 line sensors and 36 Automatic Transfer Reclosers (ATRs). This will top our all-time record of line sensors, set in 2023.

We’re also using machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to detect early signs that an outage is coming so we can take steps to potentially prevent it.