“That’s probably one of the reasons why routine-but-important stuff for maintaining reliability tends to fall by the wayside,” she added. “It was partly that, and, it seemed, a loss of attention to the issue,” he added.ĭTE likely resisted robust tree trimming because the company makes money for shareholders by building major infrastructure like power plants, not by performing preventive maintenance, said Amy Bandyk, executive director of Citizens Utility Board of Michigan. He noted that part of the lax trimming policy resulted from property owners’ resistance to having their trees cut. “They were going with a fairly long trimming cycle, and their trimming standards were modest,” he said. Meanwhile, DTE didn’t trim dead or diseased trees that threatened power lines but weren’t in its right of way, as other utilities often do, Jester said.
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That means they were capable of growing 54 feet between the company’s nine-year trimmings. The silver maple, among the most common trees in southeastern Michigan, can sprout up to six feet of new growth annually. Xcel Energy, Minnesota’s largest utility, operates on a three- to five-year trim cycle.
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On average, Michigan sees about three times more outages per customer and it takes about three times longer to restore electricity after a storm than in Minnesota, a state with a similarly leafy landscape, according to federal data. That has left especially fragile equipment exposed to a high number of branches or trees. It also only trimmed branches within a few feet of lines instead of all that threatened its wires. Thanks everyone, my hot sauces have been salvaged /ZzuVqkuOCw- Art Reyes III Aug‘Modest’ trimming standardsĭTE Energy, formerly Detroit Edison, previously cut branches around segments of distribution lines every nine years, while the industry standard was about five years. “Nobody should have to go through an extended period of time without consistent and stable access to heat, lights and electricity,” Reyes said. Across the region, tens of thousands of residents faced similar expenses as they went without power for over a week. The Reyes family concluded their ordeal by emptying spoiled food from a fridge and spending hundreds of dollars to restock it. It’s more than just an inconvenience to customers.
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“And a significant part of the reliability of an overhead distribution grid is tree trimming.” “The grid in the older parts of DTE’s service area is weaker and less able to avoid outages when there are storms,” said Douglas Jester, a consultant with 5 Lakes Energy who intervenes in utilities’ regulatory cases. Decades of inadequate tree trimming and a failure to replace aging equipment, they say, have left the grid vulnerable to strong storms that are increasingly frequent as the climate changes. While DTE recently blamed Michigan’s growing grid problems on the state’s wealth of “beautiful trees” hitting lines, industry experts and stakeholders say the company and regulators are responsible. Michigan has among the country’s least reliable electric grids, consistently ranking in the bottom quarter for the frequency and length of outages.
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They ended up relocating to a relative’s house an hour away for five days before DTE Energy finally restored power at their home. He and his wife and newborn scrambled for a place to stay - and to store the supply of bottled breast milk at risk of going bad in their thawing freezer. Art Reyes and his family faced an increasingly common summer plight in metro Detroit last month after a thunderstorm knocked out their electricity.