Audits of Michigan’s two major electric utilities this week revealed thousands of customers have been plagued by repeated power outages in recent years and the utilities’ service restoration times rank among the worst in the nation.
The consultant hired to conduct the audits of DTE Electric and Consumers Energy, which collectively supply electricity to more than 80 percent of the state, told the Michigan Public Service Commission on Thursday that fixing the laundry list of problems impairing grid reliability would be neither quick nor cheap.
John Antonuk, president of the Liberty Consulting Group, told regulators that the utilities’ five-year plans for improving reliability, plans that would only move them to reaching or slightly exceeding the industry average, “would require improvements so substantial as to have significant impacts on electricity prices.”
“The issue is what is right for companies with fourth-quartile reliability, facing very large work requirements and very large cost expansion to move to levels well ahead of where they have been,” Antonuk said.
