Reliability: How We Keep Your Lights On

Published by Terry Rubenthaler on Friday, January 3, 2025 in Electric

On May 7 this year, I walked into our dispatch room around 5 p.m. to check in with Rylie, our dispatcher. It was calm, sunny, and a perfect day for grilling. She told me a storm was coming, but you know how accurate weather forecasts can be. So, neither of us thought too much of it but planned to keep an eye on things as normal. I then went to my home in Niles to enjoy the beautiful blue sky. She went home about 20 miles north and was greeted by a tornado that ripped a window out of her bedroom and shook her house like a tambourine. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

When that half-mile-wide tornado, packing 95-mile-per-hour winds, hit the Twin Lakes area north of Dowagiac, far too many of you were left picking up from the historical damage. But one thing I have learned in this business is that when storms hit, our people step up to ensure a safe restoration of power in the fastest timeframe possible. I want to share with you a little about how we do that.

It all starts with preventative maintenance. We spend over $4 million annually to remove trees and brush from our rights-of-way. We do this because it significantly reduces the number and length of outages. The next time you are driving around, look at the powerlines. Are there trees growing under them or near them? If so, that could be an outage waiting to happen. All it takes is one tree to fall on powerlines to take a pole or two down and knock many people out of power for several hours. Tree removal isn’t just about preventing outages, though. It also makes restoration faster and safer because crews can find and access the location much quicker.

Yet, we do more than cut trees. Every year, we test about 20% of our poles and replace any bad ones. We also harden and upgrade 20 to 30 miles of lines each year. Our engineering team decides which lines need larger wire or shorter spans, or require undergrounding to improve service and accommodate growth. If you live in the Schoolcraft area, you may have seen that we recently partnered with our power supplier, Wolverine Power Cooperative, to replace our substation just south of town. Rebuilding this 1940s-era station will provide better service to customers in the area for many years to come.

Finally, the fiber we love to talk about does more than allow you to stream the Lions. It made our grid smarter. As part of that, we invest over a half a million dollars annually in automation technology that helps isolate outages to reduce the number of impacted customers; it also enables us to reroute power. In fact, if you have ever lost your power during a storm and had it come back on within a matter of seconds, that could be because our system automatically rerouted power to you from a different location.

Back to that storm that ripped out my colleague’s window. The Michigan Public Service Commission sets standards that we have to meet on restoration times. I’m proud to say that we had everyone restored in just over 48 hours, well within the guidelines. In fact, for every major storm this year—and we had some big ones—we restored power in about 48 hours.

We will always be subject to the whims of Mother Nature. But, by taking preventative measures, modernizing our system, making the grid smarter, and having people who are ready to jump into restoration efforts immediately after a storm, we can make a challenging situation better. We work hard on reliability because we understand that you depend on your service being available when you need it. It is something that MEC will remain dedicated to, no matter how fickle Mother Nature is.