Give Me Something To Work With, DTE!
We recently had a series of power outages in Southwest Detroit following a recent storm from our favorite DTE Energy. For several years, we’ve had pretty good luck avoiding power outages, even in severe weather. Various hypotheses abound in our household: maybe we’re close to the critical infrastructure of the Ambassador Bridge and the customs plaza! Perhaps we’re close enough to downtown, where infrastructure is better-developed and more resilient. Or, maybe it’s just a fluke. Anyway, our recent experience highlight both how dysfunctional the regulatory process is and how poor the infrastructure is.
Here are some tradeoffs I was navigating while chatting with DTE’s representative who had the misfortune of calling the one guy who knew what SAIDI metrics are (don’t worry, I was very nice).
We frequently hear about how DTE customers have some of the highest rates in the country. It’s true. But honestly? I’d be fine paying that much– if, and only if, we got any of the following things:
1. Reliability and Power Quality.
DTE has relatively poor reliability and poor power quality. The first one hasn’t gotten much better in the past decade. FERC measures these numbers using a few different standardized metrics, in which DTE underperforms many peers.
The second one seems to be improving, but FERC doesn’t require reporting on it (although you can usually get these data from the grid operator). In the mid to late 2010s, I read a lot of regulatory reports that bemoaned the poor power quality within the DTE service territory, much of which affected the city of Detroit far more than the suburbs, which had newer infrastructure.
Sensitive and unprotected electronics were liable to getting randomly fried by voltage spikes. I’m not talking about power adapters blowing up in your home– but rather, just plugging something in one day and it doesn’t work. We fortunately haven’t had this issue in the past few years. But the reliability failures remain.
2. Clean Generation Mix.
DTE tries to claim credit for making big moves in renewables because of large investments in recent years in renewable energy. For a long time, it argued that it had a high rate of renewable generation in spite of having virtually no solar or wind, because it has a biomass power plant. Now, one might consider giving them some credit for expanding wind– but their solar rate still lags (MISO) grid-wide averages by a large margin.
Remember that NREL says that we could cover about a third of our nationwide utility demand just by having rooftop solar. But DTE lobbied to dismantle the net metering legislation that would have incentivized rooftop solar, which would have also increased grid reliability by decentralizing power production and increasing investment in local infrastructure.
Guess we can’t have nice things as a result of this. Whoops!
3. Energy Efficiency Investment.
This is another thing that could help me be a bit less irritated at our poor power reliability. In civilized jurisdictions, ratepayers can avail themselves of utility rebates on things ranging from electric leafblowers or lawnmowers to Tesla Powerwalls. Electric car charger rebates are pretty popular these days.
Some jurisdictions even offer rebates for things like energy efficiency retrofits of whole houses– insulation and air sealing. Imagine!
My dear friend and fellow energy nerd Kendal Kuneman did actually get rebates from DTE to renovate what Planet Detroit called “one of the most energy-efficient homes in Detroit” (spoiler alert: our house is NOT among that list). But this is a limited program.
In DTE territory, we can get free lightbulbs from Home Depot. (These are, in fact, so bad at delivering energy efficiency– in utility nerd terms, a deteriorating net-to-gross energy savings ratio that results from the fact that, well, pretty much everyone now has only LED lightbulbs in their homes).
Or, None of the above?
Unfortunately, we have none of these things. We have no energy efficiency investments, little clean energy, and no reliable power grid. We just have rate increases every year, a dirty generation mix, no net metering and unfavorable solar policy.
Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift. Fewer outages for the same costs, or perhaps lower costs and fewer outages. What do you think, DTE? Municipalization? I have thoughts.
