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…
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.