The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $100 million to Consumers Energy to help the company implement its Reliability Roadmap.
Consumers spokesperson Brian Wheeler tells us the plan looks years into the future to improve reliability.
“We do a lot of forestry work to keep the trees away from power lines,” Wheeler said. “We’re looking at burying power lines, in some cases, to protect them from Mother Nature, and we’re also putting new and better technology on the system to help us reduce the number of people who lose power when a tree does hit a powerline.”
Wheeler says with 90,000 miles of power lines around the state, Consumers crews will have to do some off-roading to reach all areas. That sometimes requires special tech.
“We have amphibious machines that can go into the water and get line workers out to the middle of a lake, for example, we use drones and helicopters to access those hard to reach areas so that, at a minimum, we can get a good look at our system.”
The goal of the roadmap is to ensure all customers get their power back within 24 hours of any outage and that there are never more than 100,000 outages at the same time, even in severe weather.
Wheeler says the Reliability Roadmap will be implemented over several years, and the $100 million from the Energy Department is just a down payment on it.
