Power failures like the one that left 150,000 Michigan homes without electricity during this past weekend’s cold have increased in Michigan over recent decades, according to a new report by the nonprofit news organization Climate Central.
But while Michigan has been hit by many severe storms in recent years, including several that caused outages in 2023, ratepayer advocates say the state’s poor performance compared to neighboring states shows a failure by state regulators to ensure that utilities adequately invest in and maintain the grid to prevent power failures.
According to the Climate Central report, neighboring states like Ohio and Indiana experienced 79 and 59 outages between 2000 and 2021, compared to 132 in Michigan. Only Texas, with four times more land area than Michigan and three times the population, experienced more power failures during this period, with 180 outages.
If you need reminding…
With the 2 largest utilities being investor owned, their top priority is to show YoY growth to their shareholders. Due to the nature of being a public utility having competition isn’t really feasible so customers are stuck dealing with being 2nd priority at best. That sucks
Yep and a few years ago (probably more than that) they had a massive power outage in the bone chilling winter below freezing in fact in the negitives.
there was that one particular home depot. that had a portable power generator that was for rent and my parents, specifically my dad that took a real hard pass on it when i told him about such generator avilable to rent. half an hour later my mother told my dad to rent the generator out from home depot. and it was gone. my mother was furious, grabbed my dads ear and yelled at him for not renting out the generator.
as for buying a new generatot, no luck there were all sold out within a 100-150 mile radious.
no matter how many sweaters i put on for layering it was not enough to keep myself warm, the home internet was out after the ups lost its charge after 36 hours of upkeep, just the router itself and could not charge a smartphone, the only other 2 things i had was a anker powercore powerbank (parents using it and would not give it back), and a emergency AA charger (with 32 AA batteries of varying types and charge state) that could charge a smartphone. the silver lining was all of the cellular cell towers were still up, but were painfully slow to the point of dial-up speeds at times.
Thank god for the red cross to opening warming centers otherwise i would of gotten hypothermia and a cold without them. sleeping there for 2 days was a godsend no longer feeling cold, unfutunatly being a insomiac needing to take percribed behind the counter meds to sleep forgot to take some with me, but somehow still slept the usual 8 hours (probaly sheer stuborness or trying to not wake up others in the warming center).
As for DTE (Detroit Edision) they took ~1 week or more for the power to be restored, a whole lot of deteroiters and their surrounding cities were very angry for them not being proactive and not upgrading their infrustructure. they are now but charging us more.
Note this was after 2016 and before covid. You couldn’t get gasoline either.
This is particularly bad because Michigan has largely been spared from the recent severe weather hitting the Midwest. DTE does a shit job at maintaining infrastructure anywhere except the suburbs.
