MICHIGAN, USA — Consumers Energy is taking steps and making investments to upgrade their services across the state this year.
In September 2023, Consumers Energy unveiled their Reliability Roadmap, which is serving as a guide to increase reliability and upgrade the state's power infrastructure. Part of this roadmap is the goal to restore power to all customers within 24 hours of an outage.
Officials say nearly 9 in 10 customers had their power restored within 24 hours in 2023, and now staff are looking to further improve that restoration time through the Reliability Roadmap.
“We are 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 just last month, 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 announcement of the roadmap came a month after multiple severe storms hit West Michigan in August 2023, causing thousands to be without power for several days.
Last year, crews upgraded over 100 substations, trimmed branches, installed smart technology and more in order to improve their restoration times and decrease the chance of outages. Now, Consumers Energy is planning to invest $100 million from the U.S. Department of Energy and upgrade the power grid in underserved communities.
“We’re going to continue following our Reliability Roadmap to ensure the power stays on for homes and businesses that count on us," said Chris Laird, Consumers Energy’s vice president of electric operations.
Consumers Energy provides power to nearly 7 million Michigan residents. To learn more about the Reliability Roadmap and Consumers Energy, click here.
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