Consumers Energy announced that nearly 9 in 10 customers who lost power in its service territory last year had their service restored within 24 hours, thanks to the company’s major reliability and resilience investments in Michigan.

Last year, Consumers Energy unveiled its Reliability Roadmap—a long-term commitment to improving reliability and restoring power to all customers within 24 hours, even after severe storms.

Consumers Energy put that plan into action in 2023, reducing the length of the average customer outage during normal weather to 176 minutes, or less than three hours—a 20-minute improvement over the average for the previous five years.

“We are trimming trees, using technology, and burying more power lines to build an energy grid that is reliable in all weather,” said Consumers Energy Vice President of Electric Distribution Engineering Greg Salisbury. “We all saw the threat from severe weather, in the form of intense back-to-back storms just last month, when we restored power to most customers within 24 hours, which makes us even more determined to make outages as infrequent and as short as possible.”

Over the past decade, America’s investor-owned electric companies have collectively invested more than $1 trillion to make the energy grid smarter, stronger, cleaner, more dynamic, and more secure. As severe weather becomes more frequent, electric companies are committed to keeping electricity service reliable and resilient for customers.

“Michiganders are expecting us to provide energy even more dependably than ever, and our performance last year shows we’re able to follow through on our plan,” said Consumers Energy Vice President of Electric Operations Chris Laird. “We’re going to continue following our Reliability Roadmap to ensure the power stays on for homes and businesses that count on us.”

Consumers Energy operates close to 100,000 miles of electric lines and, as Michigan’s largest electric company, serves nearly 2 million homes and businesses.

In the past year, Consumers Energy continued to innovate with new technology and upgrades to the energy grid across Michigan’s entire Lower Peninsula. That work included:

• Carrying out 150 major upgrades across Lower Peninsula communities.
• Clearing tree branches from more than 7,000 miles of power lines—addressing the top cause of power outages in Michigan.
• Upgrading, rebuilding, and expanding more than 100 substations.
• Adding smart technology, including nearly 100 Automatic Transfer Reclosers, which help limit the number and length of power outages.
• Strategically undergrounding power lines to maximize benefits and minimize costs for customers.

Consumers Energy expects to make additional investments to support and strengthen the grid this year, helped by a $100-million federal commitment to its Reliability Roadmap through the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program. Grid upgrades in disadvantaged communities will be a key priority in the distribution of those funds.

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