How can utilities prepare for the next time ice storms hit Michigan? | News, Sports, Jobs

AN ENCASED POWER line near Petoskey on March 31 after an ice storm swept through much of Michigan. The ice is about 3.5 inches across, estimates Interlochen Public Radio engineer Brian Brachel, whose hand is in the shot for perspective. (Brian Brachel/Interlochen Public Radio)

David Thom has one of those jobs where sometimes, unexpectedly, the phone rings late at night. That was the case on the last Saturday in March, when it rang at 11 p.m.

It was the Emmet County Sheriff’s Department, asking if his crew had access to chainsaws.

Thom is the safety and emergency management director for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians in Harbor Springs. He and many others put those chainsaws to use, clearing debris and trees from roads and power lines damaged by ice storms that devastated the region.

“It looked like a plane had come through and just crash landed through the woods because of how evenly the trees had snapped off,” he said.

Thom lives on a horse farm, which lost power for almost a week. During the storm, a generator powered his house. But it wasn’t strong enough to pump water for the horses, so they had to set up garbage pails to catch rain for them.

A SNAPPED-OFF utility pole by the side of the road in Bear Creek Township in Emmet County on March 31. (Michael Livingston/ Interlochen Public Radio News)

The storm was disastrous for people who live here — and for those who bring them power.

That’s in large part because of the ice, which can add hundreds of pounds to power lines and trees.

The damage

“We had a three-inch body of ice around lines” in some areas, said Greg Salisbury, the vice president of electric distribution engineering at Consumers Energy. “We measured a three-foot chunk of that (power line), and it’s over 100 pounds for every three feet.”

Michigan is among the states with the most weather-related outages, according to a 2023 analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central. And climate scientists expect ice storms to become more common here in the coming decades.

So with existing reliability problems and more weather on the way, how should utilities adapt?

In the short term, experts say utilities should focus on forecasting weather and immediate response. In the long term, utilities and lawmakers need to prioritize upgrading the grid. And some say policies need to speed up that change.

The utilities in northwest lower Michigan dealing with the fallout include Great Lakes Energy, Presque Isle Gas & Electric and Consumers Energy.

Great Lakes Energy and Presque Isle, which are smaller, didn’t respond to an interview request in time for this story.

On April 7, Presque Isle said it had “substantially restored” its main lines.

“This is significant progress, because these lines are the backbone of our system, and once they are energized, that allows us to branch out and connect more sections of line to individual neighborhoods and homes,” the update said.

Presque Isle has restored power to more than 70% of its members as of Thursday morning.

“It’s being called the storm of the century, and being compared to a hurricane that wouldn’t leave,” said Shaun Lamp, Great Lakes Energy president and CEO, in a video posted to the utility’s website.

He called the damage “staggering.”

“To put things in perspective, our construction teams typically replace about 800 poles each year. In the last three days alone, we’ve replaced that exact same number,” he said on April 6.

Consumers Energy, the state’s second-largest utility, hired a staff meteorologist last year, and that expertise helps prepare for extreme weather, Salisbury said: The utility was warned of the storm four days in advance, and it was able to bring in extra crews, stage supplies and set up response centers. But it was still hit hard. In all, about 126,000 of its northern Michigan customers lost power during the initial waves of ice and days of falling trees.

“It was just a crushing impact on the trees and the electric infrastructure,” Salisbury said. The heavy ice didn’t melt for days, and along with the high winds, it was “beyond the realm of even our latest and strongest design standards that we’ve now had in place for the last three years.”

Further south in the state, the utility also had to respond to thunderstorms and tornadoes, complicating their operations.

What now?

Consumers Energy is updating its Reliability Roadmap, a more than 180-page, five-year plan that outlines a wide range of prevention measures that include everything from trimming trees to replacing poles to better monitoring for outages.

And prevention is key, Salisbury said: “These are very expensive events for our customers to pay for when we have to fix things after they break. It is much, much cheaper — at least 50% cheaper — for us to do this work of hardening and automating and in some cases, burying electric lines in advance with a plan.”

In rural areas, burying electric lines can be relatively fast and simple, and is often the best approach, he said. And updating their operations needs to happen faster.

Planning for extreme weather allowed them “to restore more under difficult conditions faster than we ever have,” he said. “But we know we’ve got to keep getting better, because the weather is going to change faster than we’re going to be able to make the grid resilient enough to withstand something as extreme as what just happened.”

Upgrades, like burying power lines, are expensive. And utilities have come under scrutiny for poor performance even as they’ve increased rates.

Just last month, the Michigan Public Service Commission approved a rate increase of $153.8 million for Consumers Energy, which is expected to increase customers’ bills by about 3%.

The money will go toward reducing outages and improving the grid. Most of it will pay for “clearing trees from over 8,000 miles of power lines, addressing the No. 1 cause of power outages in Michigan,” according to utility spokesperson Brian Wheeler.

But critics, like Attorney General Dana Nessel, argue that continually raising costs isn’t fair to customers, and that doing so allows utilities to ask for higher rates before people can evaluate the impact of previous hikes.

(Michigan Public Service Commission has information on electric reliability throughout the state.)

Jonathan Overpeck, the dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, said big, investor-owned utilities have to answer to their shareholders, and that doesn’t always align with what’s best for their customers or the climate.

“They have to either provide the service the public needs, or the public has to demand a better model,” he said. “And I think that’s the tension that’s going on right now. And it’s distorted by money, of course. Everyone has their lobbyists, but particularly investor-owned utilities have more money to lobby with.” For instance, in 2023 Bridge Michigan reported that legislators had received $2 million from DTE and Consumers over the previous five years.

That can make it difficult for politicians to tackle climate change more quickly and make power systems more reliable, Overpeck said. He thinks there should be more incentives and regulations for utilities to not only improve reliability, but also move toward electrification.

Making such change affordable could also require more out-of-the-box thinking, such as community power generation and distribution, according to Overpeck, but some of those ideas haven’t really caught on in Michigan yet.

State energy regulators have wrestled with such questions. As part of a clean energy initiative, for example, they just agreed to speed up the review of DTE Electric’s plans to test out programs in areas like reliability and distributed power generation.

Consumers Energy has evaluated the risks posed by climate change before; in 2022, it released a report on those risks, grid planning, and reducing emissions through moves like retiring its last coal plant this year.

Improving the grid in the face of more events like the ice storm will also rely on federal and state funding programs, said Seth Guikema, a professor at the University of Michigan. (Part of his research is funded by Consumers Energy.)

Still, utilities are in a tough position.

“We want cheap power, and it’s a lot cheaper to keep using the above-ground lines than to bury them,” he said. “It’s overhead. If it gets hammered by a storm every five to ten years and we have to fix it and people are without power for a week, okay, that’s a cost-benefit analysis that essentially the Public Service Commission has to do. So part of this is a policy question.”

At some point, somebody’s going to have to spend more money to make a more resilient grid, he said. “The question is, who’s going to spend that?”

Meanwhile, Overpeck, the dean at University of Michigan’s sustainability school, said lawmakers and utilities need to answer questions like that faster, as the climate changes and more storms threaten the region.

———

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Interlochen Public Radio and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization. The article appeared on the website for Michigan Advance, part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit. For more, go to https://michiganadvance.com.