DTE Energy is modernizing its power grid to limit the kinds of outages that happened last year.
The utility is replacing sections of the power grid to reduce outages by 30% and improve response time by 50% by 2029. Pontiac and Waterford Township are among the communities benefiting from the changes.
A winter storm on Feb. 22, 2023, left 630,000 customers in the dark. Before power could be fully restored heavy snow on March 2 and 3, caused another 200,000 outages. Many scrambled for alternative shelters, competing for hotel rooms and 4,000-plus utility workers were called to restore service.
In early June, with temperatures soaring into the 90s, an unexpected cable failure caused 800 customers in and around Waterford Township to lose power. Two elementary schools closed for a day as a result.
DTE has four major areas of work to keep the power on: tree-trimming, maintenance or replacement of existing equipment, conversion work – rebuilding the power grid bit by bit – and automating some processes.
One big change this year is the opening of the new service center in Waterford, which replaces a century-old Pontiac Service Center at 1970 Orchard Lake Road that has a Sylvan Lake mailing address but is largely in Bloomfield Township next to the Pontiac border.
The new service center at 435 N. Telegraph in Waterford is on 23 acres of the former Summit Mall site and will host 250 engineers, designers, overhead, underground and substations workers and a warehouse for parts and vehicle maintenance. The parking lot has room for dozens of vehicles.
In Pontiac, improvements include tree trimming, 80 new utility poles, wires and conductors and brand new equipment and a significant expansion at the Catalina substation, which serves more than 3,000 direct customers and anyone working in an area between Telegraph Road, Montcalm Street, The Rev. Martin Luther King Boulevard and Pontiac’s downtown area.
Ryan Stowe, DTE’s vice president of distribution operations capital delivery, said changes underway will take Pontiac and Waterford Township’s service from a “real old voltage system standard, a 4,800 volt distribution voltage, to a new standard: 13,200-volts.”
“We’re looking at some of the best work we have going on to (keep the power on),” Stowe said, adding that DTE updates its distribution grid plan “every couple of years.” The most recent plan was filed with the Michigan Public Service Commission last fall. The MPSC sets utility rates and the distribution grid plan is part of DTE’s rate-increase request, currently under consideration by the commission.
In 2023, DTE asked for a $622 million rate increase to boost infrastructure reliability – for circuit conversions, sub-transmission redesign and rebuild, breaker replacement, underground residential distribution replacements, and 4.8 kilovolt circuit automation.
In December the MPSC approved a $368 million increase – raising monthly bills for a typical residential customer by $6.51.
At the same time, the MSPC instituted a system to track grid improvements by DTE and Consumers Energy. DTE has plans to replace 19,000 miles of power lines – which includes 2,300 miles of underground service – modernize and expand some substations while decommissioning a few very old substations, with plans to re-use that property.
DTE customers include 2.3 million customers: 2,047,960 residential, 28,800 commercial and retail and 836 industrial. In 2023, residential customers paid DTE Electric $2.847 billion; commercial customers paid $2.114 billion. Industrial customers paid $732 million to the utility.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize what goes into keeping the power on,” said Catalina substation operator Kyle Tremberth, a second-generation DTE employee. “The power goes out and people think, ‘Why can’t you just turn it back on?’ A lot of troubleshooting goes on with multiple groups: Us, overhead, underground, primary services are all putting it all together.”
Power from DTE generation plants travel along lines owned by International Transmission Company, to substations, then on to homes and businesses.
“The electrons don’t care one way or the other (who owns the equipment). We have to be good partners,” Stowe said.
For safety reasons upgrades and repairs can’t be rushed, Tremberth said.
The upgrades include more circuits to reduce outages and speed restoration. The new circuits give DTE more options for rerouting electrical service.
The Catalina project, Stowe said, will provide 70% greater reliability of service for customers, adding “this will be transformational.”
The ongoing tree-trimming typically elicits one of two responses from residential customers – anger about the work or an appeal for DTE to trim more. So far about 200 miles of trees in Pontiac have been cut back to avoid snapping transmission wires during storms, with another 30 or so miles planned this year, to get the city to an 85% rate of clearance.
“We try to really communicate when we start to plan our work. We try to talk to everybody, especially if we’re going to be in their backyards,” Stowe said. “When you’re in as many backyards as we are, not everybody is always happy. We try to do our best to listen to their issues and concerns before we start work.”
Shannen Hartwick, DTE’s distribution operations conversion projects director, said some customers are concerned about preserving their trees while others want to avoid power outages.
People concerned about hazardous trees can call DTE for an evaluation. Sometimes a tree is trimmed or cut right away, other times it’s added to a queue of upcoming projects, Stowe said.
Customers who use social media outlets to air concerns about DTE may get a direct response from the utility’s social media team. Stowe said he and others at DTE who have joined the utility’s ambassador program try to respond as quickly as possible or investigate an issue.
Hartwick said expanding the Catalina substation and rebuilding the overhead power grid is a big step forward in technology, though it won’t eliminate 100% of future outages.
“There will be a time where that squirrel gets up into the lines and causes an outage,” Stowe said. The upgrades will cause an alert to be transmitted to downtown Detroit, where computers will produce a fairly specific location to get the repair crew to the problem as quickly as possible.
Traditionally, repair crews drove around looking for the problem, he said.
“Now we can say ‘Go to the fourth pole at Maple and Main and go look.’ It’s not 100% foolproof but it will greatly shorten the time to troubleshoot,” Stowe said.
The grid must be built for peak capacity, especially with a growing number of extreme-weather days and a rise in electric vehicle use.
“The difference in load served on an average day versus the hottest day of the year (is that) the hottest day of the year is probably twice what it is on an average day,” Stowe said.
That’s why utility companies urge people to consider shifting certain tasks like laundry or charging an EV to avoid the peak hours of 3 to 7 p.m. and consider shifting those tasks to overnight hours. Large companies can also shift usage to off hours to limit peak usage, Stowe said.
One of the Catalina innovations is 37 new reclosers, metal arms that function as giant circuit breakers. Unlike a household circuit breaker that has to be manually reset, Catalina’s are automated. If a fault releases a recloser from its connection, the device can automatically recheck the connection to see if the fault is gone, basically resetting itself.
Most of the complete rebuild is invisible to customers, because what they see is an occasional truck or crew replacing a few poles and wires. Nearly every community is seeing some work, though In Waterford, the Camden substation is being upgraded. In Pontiac, the Catalina substation is being modernized.
Historically an old substation required as many as 40 workers. Pontiac’s Catalina site has 40 substations tucked into the power delivery center building in cubicle-like fashion – thanks to low-maintenance, automated equipment.
Stowe said automation doesn’t automatically translate to fewer jobs.
“For example, building out infrastructure is one of the most AI-immune jobs there is,” Stowe said, musing that AI may support and enhance the work, “but it’s still gonna take a person with tools in their hands up on that pole, building it out.”
The age and condition of the infrastructure is such that it’s going to be a long-term set of investments.
“We’ll do things in this 5-year term that will have big benefits, but we’re going to need to invest for quite a while so we can handle 90% EV penetration or whatever the new (technology) is … We’re going to support what our consumers want, whether it’s electrification in their homes, their vehicles, transportation, things like that,” Stowe said. The challenge is anticipating needs five or 10 years into the future and creating an infrastructure to support that, he said.
One shift in recent years – fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic – is the shift from large office buildings to private homes, as remote work becomes more common.
Demand fell in office buildings but spiked in residential areas.
“You have to serve the load at that house, at the transformer, at the lateral, at the backbone, one the whole circuit, at the substation and so on,” Stowe said. “Shifting the load creates opportunities and you have to address that.”
DTE looks at EV sales and analyzes other economic information to develop needs forecasts and help set priorities, he said.
Another Pontiac project is rebuilding 12 underground vaults that contain wires and electrical equipment that powers downtown Pontiac. Eleven have been renovated and the last one will be finished this year.
Founded in 1903 as Detroit Edison, DTE Electric is now the largest electric utility in Michigan and one of the largest in the nation.
