test test one two good the senate committee on energy and environment is called to order will the clerk please call the roll chairman McCann Senator McDonald rivet Senator Singh Senator Bayer senator schink Senator Hertel Senator camilleri Senator Chang senator Paul hinke Senator lauers Senator Demus Senator Altman Senator Houck Senator bellino Mr chairman you have 13 members present there is a quorum thank you make a motion to excuse absent members seeing no objection absent members are excused I'll entertain a motion to adopt the March 16 20 23 minutes meeting minutes made by a vice chair McDonald rivet without objection the minutes are adopted uh just as a quick outline of our meeting we're going to try to keep the time and try to keep it um we have three presenters to come before us today the Michigan Public Service Commission DTE Energy and Consumers Energy and we've allocated approximately 25 minutes to each of those uh organizations equally and I'm asking the presenters to try to keep their prepared remarks and presentations as succinct as possible since I know there are a lot of questions that people want to ask so with that said just want to open up with the topic of the storms many people in Michigan suffered greatly due to the effects of the recent ice storms and we all know it's exceedingly frustrating to have these situations repeated and more frequently this legislature and this committee wants to fix it that said we want to First give thanks and gratitude to the thousands of First Responders line workers and others who helped get the power back on for so many as fast as possible and with great sacrifice to their families and themselves again thank you to them the citizens of Michigan owe everyone a huge debt of thanks unacceptable is by far the most frequently used word to describe the performance of The Grid in the wake of the ice storms today this morning there will not be nearly enough time for us to wrap our arms around all the issues but it is a start we'll certainly have more time to work and we'll certainly have more work to do after today as I expect this will be an ongoing effort to get any time everywhere every time service with reasonable rates re-established in Michigan the storms and constant outages have laid bare some very crucial issues and we all owe it to the citizens of Michigan to help achieve better results But ultimately we are legislators we set the standards but talk must translate into policy we are empowered to take good ideas and make them into law and with that I'd like to start with the chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission Mr Dan Scripps if you'd please join us thank you very much for being here today and please proceed thank you chairman McCann and members of the committee appreciate the opportunity to come back um I just want to tee up sort of where where we were a month and a day ago today so starting on February 22nd we had a series of three winter storms that moved through Michigan particularly lower Michigan resulting in significant outages um the February 22nd ice storm truly was historic the worst in 50 years brought two-thirds of an inch um across much of lower Michigan we saw some counties Hillsdale County in particular with more than 90 percent of their customers without power at the the height of the storm and uh notably it took uh more than a week to restore uh some of the the last folks to be brought back um just a couple days later a bit further north we saw additional ice that that led to additional outages and then on March 3rd a snowstorm added more than 200 000 additional outages many of the same folks who had been without power in the ice storm were again facing the prospect of a cold and dark night and the next several days so it's been busy in terms of the response I Echo the chairman McCann's thanks to the line workers and First Responders who were out there in the worst of the weather to try and bring back people as fast as as they could but but clearly a challenging situation what we know though is that it's not the first time that this has happened that when you look at the last 10 years just that snapshot we've had at least 16 storms resulting with uh resulting in a quarter million michiganders uh losing their power five of which impacted more than half a million and at least three storms impacting more than a million people in many of those cases it took a week or longer to fully restore those who had been without power and I'd note that though this is severe weather week and sort of the official beginning of of Michigan's uh Spring weather and thunderstorm season these storms have been scattered throughout the year when you look at that chart there are nine of the 12 months represented in all four seasons so we're finding that this extreme weather is happening more often it can happen in any season with significant impacts in terms of the outages it caused um and of course the outage numbers are only part of the story we have seen fatalities on all too regular and occurrence as folks come into contact with the distribution system including one individual a volunteer firefighter from Paw Paw in the most recent storm and last August a 14 year old girl in Monroe came into contact with a downed wire in her backyard and tragically lost her life so these have real human consequences when the power goes out it is a dangerous situation and it is an unacceptable situation as the chairman mentioned notably these storms even just in the last 10 years feature a lot of worst Evers or worst in 50 years I mentioned the ice storm the Windstorm in 2017 that that brought that had more than a million outages was the worst wind storm that we've seen the summer of 2021 we saw major storm events happening more more frequently than once a week over the course of the summer people barely got back on their feet when the next storm front rolled in but if we're getting historic storms essentially every other year it's hard to say that they're truly historic anymore I think this is the new normal and more to the point Michigan residents don't care about storm trivia they just know that the power's out that it's out again and they want to know when it'll be back on and I think that's the job that's in front of all of us is to make sure that even as extreme weather becomes more frequent and more extreme that we have a grid that can handle the realities of The New Normal so the leading factors impacting reliability and I think it's the combination of all three of these things the changing climate the increasing frequency and severity of storms that we were just talking about inadequate vegetation management the Deferred maintenance on the the basics of tree trimming that's causing too many limbs to come into contact with too many wires and then in aging distribution infrastructure pools wires Transformers substations that need that regular maintenance upgrading and hardening and it's the combination of those three things that is resulting in the outage numbers that we're here to discuss this morning I talked a little bit about this given the time I won't uh dwell on this but you can see clear Trends in the increasing frequency and severity of storms in 1960 the average peak wind during a storm event was in the low 30s today it's in the high 40s and pushing 50 miles an hour that's a different set of conditions than the one that the grid was built for so over the last several years the commission has taken a number of steps we know that there's more work to be done but just to quickly outline a couple of them and then I'll spend a little bit more time on on four particular areas and then stop to take questions um on tree trimming the this we know that most of the outages on the distribution system continue to be the result of trees coming into contact or falling on lines and so in 2019 in the DTE rate case order we ring fenced vegetation management spending allowing certainty of recovery for the utility but also a guarantee that those dollars would only be used for the tree trimming purposes for which they were intended and all of this at a lower cost to customers this was a breakthrough as my colleague former commissioner Norm sorry said at the time it's time to trim the damn trees I think echoing something that we've all heard before as well and it's important because without ring fencing that those dollars we have limited ability to control how the dollars are are used it said that we set rates not budgets that we ultimately approve what the utilities can collect from their customers but there is limited ability to make the management just um decisions about exactly where those dollars go and the courts have found that we're not authorized to make those management decisions for utilities so unless there is a mechanism to ensure that the money can only be used for the intended purposes utilities have fairly broad discretion to shift funds between line items as they see fit and look I'm not saying that that is is always arbitrary or always a bad idea I think preserving some degree of flexibility and management discretion is important but it is a frustration particularly given the reliability challenges when dollars that were allocated for tree trimming are shifted even to worthy things like storm response it means that we're we're still a step behind in getting out of the hole or when funding that's supposed to go towards Capital Improvements is used even for other worthwhile projects and so we've noted this a number of times in our orders but the idea of being able to ring front ring fence or to track those dollars so that they can only be used for the purposes to which they're intended improving the reliability of the system is a critically important piece of how we get to a better place in 2021 following the the storm orders we we also issued a storm response order uh working to collect additional data make that data available uh ground our decisions in in what we're seeing on the system I note that uh we also held a series of two uh technical conferences including reviewing what other states do how they ultimately get to better reliability results particularly those that are similarly situated to Michigan and then also exploring other issues including strategic undergrounding and other reliability options um we are set to launch tomorrow a website that will provide additional information on utility distribution system reliability customer outages and storm response metrics and we're launching a second website focused on the customer providing information on how to stay safe during outage events credit information for those who are eligible and outage maps so that really a place that that customers can get the information that they need but after the storms in 2022 we had had a series of storm orders going back to 2014 and indeed further back than that and at some point we knew that we needed to do something different than simply do one more Storm review come up with a series of of additional steps that needed to be taken and we began to ask ourselves what don't we know that we need to know what are the the things that other states are doing that uh that a fresh set of eyes might help uncover to ultimately get to where we all want to be and so we for the first time used statutory authority to launch an independent third party audit of both the physical infrastructure of the utility Distribution Systems and their programs and processes we issued the RFP for that audit last week on our currently accepted accepting bids except expect to get started later this year with results next year so I want to close with a couple of uh specific things that we're working on uh that we've gotten a lot of questions on over the last uh month and a day the first is on whether tree trimming works and I would say emphatically yes it is the single best tool that we have in the toolbox to get to a better place in terms of the number of outages but as important the freak or the number of customers experiencing multiple outages over the course of the year and the duration of those outages and we've seen real progress consumers last year spent 90.3 million dollars on vegetation management that's up 154 percent from where they were in 2015. and the results for DTE are even more striking they spent 162 million on vegetation management last year and that's 179 increase over the 64.7 million dollars in 2015. and as a result of these actions we've seen customer interruptions reduced 74 percent in the first year of search funding uh in the circuits that were trimmed and the length of the outage is reduced by 67 percent with similar results in the consumer's territory and just to put it in graphic form this tracks the spending in the green line from 2015 between the two utilities and then the average Sadie metrics which is the duration of outages shown by the blue bars and the blue line so the spending's gone up the outage numbers are the outage duration has gone down so tree trimming does work and we need to keep our foot on the accelerator there we've also gotten a lot of questions on the service rules and the the credits uh associated with uh violations of the service rules so a couple of years ago now at this point we began to update uh following our 2019 Statewide energy assessment our service quality rules and the technical standards for electric performance um these uh reflect both a tightening of the acceptable levels of performance uh that that we expect to see both in the the number of hours that we expect power to be restored within following storm events as well as the the thresholds for customers experiencing multiple outages we also worked on wire down relief requests significantly tightening the the time in fact cutting it in half for both Metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas this is the amount of time that police and fire are expected to guard a line before they're relieved by utility personnel and then as has gotten a fair amount of attention we've increased credits for those who have been without power today customers who meet the eligibility criteria for a credit are eligible for a one-time 25 credit and that's it what we've done is to increase That Base Credit amount to 35 dollars to add 35 dollars for every additional day that a customer remains without power once they're eligible to index that amount to the rate of inflation and perhaps most importantly to make the credits automatic instead of having to apply and see if you're eligible you once you're eligible and the utilities have this information uh in terms of the number of hours that you've been without power you will automatically receive that credit these have been pending again for a number of years we ran out of session days last year in the jcar process I'm happy to say that you all have met a lot this winter and spring and so we've actually cleared the number of joint session days earlier this month and this update for our service quality rules and Technical standards is on the commission's agenda for tomorrow's meeting and then finally I mentioned the utility audit but this is really designed to identify Solutions what do we not know that we could ultimately use and leverage and apply in the Michigan context including benchmarking other utilities across the Midwest that are similarly situated that look in some ways similar to the situation that we have in Michigan and so we're looking both at the physical assets of the the utility infrastructure as well as the program and process whether those are sufficient for emergency preparedness Storm Restoration system maintenance investment and really try and uncover an additional set of solutions that we can apply to ultimately get our outage numbers closer to where the people of Michigan expect and deserve so I want to close with the reality that even with these efforts over the last several years additional work is needed one place where we see a real need is on a on increasing customer resilience and this is looking at that sort of the experience of those while we continue to work to improve our outage situation the reality is that that's not going to happen overnight and so how do we particularly for critical facilities for uh care homes for hospitals for vulnerable individuals who are on oxygen or need insulin that that is maintained at within a specified temperature range or have CPAP machines for sleep apnea how do we make sure that those most vulnerable individuals and the most critical facilities on the system have additional resilience even as we work to rebuild the system and we'll have a technical conference on that that we'll be announcing shortly we need to continue the focus on accelerated vegetation management Cycles tree trimming works but we've got to continue to see that that effort through and get onto a tighter cycle continued work on distribution planning and performance-based rate making this is not a new thing it was authorized for us in 2016 by the legislature we've done a report on that and in 2020 we directed both TD DTE and consumers to identify a series of metrics around distribution performance including ties to their financial performance to be filed in 2021 they did so and after taking additional input from stakeholders on their proposals in 2022 we laid out next steps including a specific work group to consider these performance-based regulation issues and the expectation that we would launch that as sort of a Capstone effort to our multi-year my power grid grid modernization effort and that that effort will be launched this spring as well we also need to leverage technology the customer Communications particularly given the the automatic metering infrastructure the smart meters that are out on the system clearly wasn't where it needed to be in this last system people being told that they were reconnected when they weren't and and that sort of thing but that technology on the system with with some additional things that have been developed in the last 10 years can ultimately help in reducing the duration of outages as well isolating where the real trouble is and then through circuits and and uh repowering bring most of the rest of the people back uh who are on that circuit because they're not actually out it's just a couple of folks but if we can isolate where the trouble is and then reroute the electricity to bring others back on that can I think significantly reduce the duration of a number of these outages and then continue to evaluate additional options including strategic underground and grid hardening and the grid upgrades particularly for our old system there this is in Focus today because of the outage challenges and the safety challenges that we've seen and we've seen them all too clearly not only in this last storm but over the last 10 years but we also know that the Grid's changing and that we're expecting more of our distribution grid than we ever have before as we Electrify transportation and potentially other end uses and I will tell you that the commission is Focus both on getting to a better place in terms of the reliability that people expect and deserve as well as making sure that our grid is ready to handle the challenges that are being asked of it and with that I'm happy to ask answer any questions thank you very much Mr Scripps um let me come back to the audit for a moment um just the timeline on that um you the the RFP hasn't even been met yet is that my understanding it's been issued it went out last Monday um there's a several weeks where we're accepting bids and then they'll have to be evaluated with with work starting later this year but it was ordered or your determination to start that audit process was did you say October October of last year and so we're in March and then when will that actually get back to us I think it would well the audit closes uh next month and then or the RFP process sorry closes next month and then we hope to to start as soon as we can after that it's ultimately a process because it's uh above a certain dollar threshold or we expect it will be that it's not just a mpsc thing or even a d or a Lara thing the agency with in which we're housed or the department but ultimately a dtmb piece that involves the administrative board so I'll tell you that we're working to shorten that but I will also say um that this is the first time that we've ever done it so once we decided to use the statutory Authority that that we have been granted but that we haven't used we needed to essentially start from we didn't have uh something that we could simply Plug and Play so uh understanding what the process would be understanding what we wanted to cover in the audit the questions to be asked we want this to be a comprehensive effort but but it has taken longer than than I would have liked Center bear thank you Mr chair and thank you for coming back to see us again um you know it's so knowledgeable uh it's uh nice to be able to talk with you so but one of the things I heard you talking about was the spending on tree trimming because obviously that does have a impact um so I was just thinking about last year 163 million dollars in tree trimming is it seems like a big number um DTE had 1.1 billion dollars in profits so that's seven times what they spent on trying to build reliability into the system so when you talk about flexibility in defining how to direct their funding is there a way we can redirect whether with you or with laws to make sure that their profitability Isn't So grotesque that the reliability money is so minuscule is to almost not be noticed in comparison I I think one of the the goals of the um performance-based raymaking regulation the effort that we've been working on for the last couple of years is is to better align the the utility financial performance with the results that that their customers are seeing from from the system and we've been I think fairly successful at that in some other places on Energy Efficiency spending for example that we found something that's made us Best in Class in in Michigan uh that but where they also have uh Financial upside for not only meeting statutory standards but exceeding them and um so I think there are models that we can use and and be thoughtful about how we implement but I think where we've seen the most dramatic improvements in other places is where we can ultimately get everybody pointed in the same direction that how the utility does best financially is how their customers do best from a reliability standpoint and I think that's that's the goal that we're looking at yeah well but we have seen reports and I know you're doing new one which is great I'm in our utility our Monopoly DTE is got the lowest scores in reliability and the highest scores and cost of customer around sorry didn't mean to be that adamant no um but what was cause you know lowest ratings for performance highest cost to customers and we still haven't been able to do anything about their spending on making it more reliable do you need to change something or do we need to change the laws to make this happen there's probably room for both um I think the we I think we have the authority that we need around performance-based regulation but if there were sort of specific standards that you wanted to direct us to to adhere to or to implement I think we could do that we have clear statutory Authority on resource planning on the generation side but the reality is that we actually spend more on the distribution side and all of the outages are on the distribution side at this point and so looking at how we do distribution planning and whether the five-year plans that currently need to be filed but aren't sort of formally reviewed or approved or or anything else could become the basis for for those Investments might be something else to look at thank you senator bellino thank you Mr chair uh thank you for coming to see us again number two inadequate tree vegetation do I have 30 seconds to tell a story about my city sir 25 20 seconds they did a study on our uh our silver Maples that were planted in the early 19th century in Monroe we used to be known as The Floral City they're beautiful trees until they get 110 to 120 years old and they fall like sticks all the time and that's the biggest problem in my area I've been out of power a lot the last 25 years my home all caused by a tree behind my neighbor's house in a yard in a lot that the owner did not want to take down and DT couldn't go down and trim it because they weren't allowed to so if we want to do tree vegetation and you mentioned it Mr chair maybe we should create a law that says if this vegetation is going to hurt the people around you because it may fall and put Power out that DT or consumers has the ability to trim it up that's one of the problems people went nuts in my city when the city wanted to start taking some of these old silver Maples down and plant new trees and they stopped it so now we still have the 120 year old trees in the streets by the lines and ironically two days after the articles in the paper Mr chair a silver maple came down that wasn't marked to come down it was supposed to be a healthy Silver Maple and totaled my nephew's car but he did get a new car out of it which was nice so if we need to trim the vegetation then we need to have the authority go in and trim the vegetation because right now we're just doing a mouthpiece thing we need to trim it but we can't because it won't let us yeah there's there was a so two really quick responses there was a story in the Lansing State Journal yesterday on the experience that Lansing Board of Water and Light had and if you remember back to 2013 the ice storm that happened and it happened for everybody but it was particularly bad here um and they adopted a strategy that they were going to be very aggressive in trimming trees they haven't made a lot of friends as a result but their outage numbers are much better and so there is a challenge people want to keep their trees but they want the reliability but there's a right tree right place philosophy here that trees are beautiful but they can't interfere with the the grid reliability and I think that's part of what we've got to look at the other piece um to your point that there's a lot of frustration we've done three town halls this week eight hours of testimony 114 comments and a lot of them were focused on the frustration of the Service drop between the pole and the the home being the the responsibility of the the homeowner which is true a lot of people don't understand that but it is true and so I think but that's also a place where there are a lot of outages and where there are a lot of single outages where it's not going out and doing some work can bring a thousand people on or 100 people on it's several hours of people work to bring one person back on and so that may be a place where we need to to take a look at either Authority undergrounding whatever it needs to be but in terms of that Service drop between the poll and the home because the after the storm hits when the wire is pulled down then the utility does have to go out and do some of the restoration work not actually the electrical to connect it back to the house but the trimming and restoration to to get that in a position where it can be hooked back up so we're still spending the time it's just we're doing it after the fact when it's more expensive more dangerous and more difficult thanks senator herzell thank you Mr chair and thank you Dan for being here today and thank you for all the town halls you've done this week allowing the public to come in and share their stories about how they were impacted during this most recent outage but also over recent years uh and I was living part-time here in Lansing in 2013 when that ice storm hit here and a family home was severely damaged with burst pipes because of how long that outage lasted and obviously those temp the temperatures then were I think below 10 degrees during that outage and then now in the community that I live in and most of my district was hit very hard by this past ice storm and the Windstorm last summer you know in looking at what some other states have done and investing in their grids and there's no doubt that certain areas of our state and my community which is an older community they grid is just outdated right the infrastructure is old and it needs to be updated and in doing that and when we look at as you said strategic undergrounding to make sure we get some of those wires that are being impacted today underground and protecting better but tree trimming but grid automation seems to be the place where I think we have the best opportunity to try to isolate those outages affect less people and make repairs much quicker there was an outage in my area this past storm that frankly I mean this is all anecdotal but there were employees of the utility walking around looking for the outage for hours trying to figure out where it was and that was one of the longest outages in my community uh in the Gross Point area how do we balance my understanding is a very small portion of the grid is automated today and it's a large investment to get us to the point where we probably need to be how do we manage or balance those large Investments that need to be made with rate increases that are impacting people across all of our communities today welcome to the world of the Public Service Commission so you're absolutely right and I mean we've seen other utilities the utility that serves Chicago for example has automated a significantly larger amount of their system they get similar storms to some degree I mean our weather's similar but they can through sort of sensors and reclosers isolate the damage on the system and get most of the rest of the folks restored sometimes without even sort of sending a crew out and so um but that takes money the 4.8 kilovolt system that's in your District in large parts of Detroit the oldest part of the system and the most dangerous part of the system clearly needs to be upgraded and we've taken some steps to sort of provide certainty as you're going down this path to to make sure that that you're doing it and and um and making the Investments with with certainty of recovery but that's really expensive and then tree trimming I think is reasonably affordable but but those you know those numbers are hundreds of millions of dollars as well and so it is is that balance of of trying to sort of and I think it's the reason that the sort of consideration of Alternatives and the distribution planning process looking at sort of not what you could do or the laundry list of ideas but how do you optimize those in the most cost effective manner getting the most uh additional uh reliability and resilience for the dollars that are being invested in the system I'm not going to tell you that it's easy or that there's a straightforward answer but that's that is essentially what we do both in the individual investment evaluations contained in rate cases and in the in the five-year distribution plans that again we ask for we don't have authority to approve or anything else but that gives us greater transparency on how the individual Investments saw in a particular rate case tie into a broader at least five-year strategy but but that's the exact right question so again I with apologies I know we have a couple other questions in the queue but I want to thank you chairman Scripps for coming before us today and I know that uh it probably won't be the last time and also certainly members can Avail themselves to you any time as well so thank you very much and if I didn't get to your question Senator shank um please give me a call I'm happy to talk I need to leave I've got to talk to maiso about the other side of reliability but Rika and Mike are going to stay so thank you thanks uh next we have uh Trevor Lauer uh president of DTE Electric thank you for being here today Mr Lauer and as we've said we have you know constrained time and so um please proceed yeah thank you chairman and good morning everybody my name is Trevor Lauer appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning to talk about the weather events minimums that we can go a couple things that I would start with first uh the deepest apology for myself all ten thousand thousand by no means is this the experience that we would want for our customers I can talk about whether I do not need to repeat what we're seeing from a climate perspective fundamentally changed the reason why we develop our distribution planning and why would we have massive massive industry since 2017. we will and remain an advocate is your mic on Sir Mr Lauer I'm sorry let's check that no so I'm really sorry about that did you guys hear me would you like me to start over I think you said a couple of very Salient things I'd like to have you probably just repeat okay well I'll start over just first by apologizing to the customers and the communities for the outages that we had um neither myself nor any of the employees at DTE would wish any of our customers have an outage this is not the the service that we want for our customers I can talk about ice storms I can talk about hurricane force winds at the end of the day the climate has changed we need to change our grid with it that's our responsibility we recognize that and we fully accept the responsibility we have um I would like to thank you chairman for your recognition of the employees during the time we ask our employees to work for 16 hours and then eight hours off we had multiple employees thousands of employees that work for 14 straight days I will tell you that I started most of my mornings at six a.m out in what we call our pull out areas where you'll have hundreds of bucket trucks the level resiliency that I saw in our employees to continue to do the work on behalf of our customers was nothing short of amazing to me Public Safety and employee safety is also extremely important we were able to get through all of this without any injuries to our employees or any injuries to the public and I appreciate what the chairman said operating a high voltage Electric System can be very dangerous for the public and for our employees so I was very proud that we were able to get through the the issues all that said what do we do going forward so I think that there's really two things that I would highlight so we can get to the questions first we have developed a distribution grid plan and the chairman talked about that our distribution grid plan I would say high level does two things it lays out a five-year spending pattern for the electric utility on what are we going to invest in it lays out the categories and it lays out the metrics on why we're going to do that it also lays out scenario planning for a 15-year period on what we think could happen so there's three scenarios that would highlight one in our plan that we submitted in 2021 talks about continued severe weather what are the Investments you need to make in the utility grid for in continued severe weather the second one is a high electrification scenario and the third is a deep distributed generation scenario so we've laid out the work that we believe needs to happen across it in our distribution grid plan we are very clear that we need to continue to accelerate investment there's four main things that we call out in our distribution grid plan that I think are really critical and the chairman touched on a couple of them one is tree trimming over 70 percent of our outages not only the frequency so the number of time customers lose power but the duration is caused by trees not only trees inside of our right-of-way but many trees falling outside of our right-of-ways on top of the utility service I cannot trim every tree inside of the state of Michigan calendar year 21 we spent 160 million dollars on tree trim calendar year 22 we spent 240 million dollars on tree trim I requested permission from from the Public Service Commission in 2019 to go from a 10-year tree trim cycle meaning every 10 years we trim the circuit to a five-year tree trim cycle that is best in class in the U.S by 2014 I will be on a five-year tree trim cycle for all of our circuits across our system that'll fundamentally and is fundamentally making a difference the second is great maintenance you have to maintain an electrical system on our electrical system we do over 50 000 maintenance activities on an annual basis calendar year 21 to calendar year 22 and pull top maintenance which is one of the main ones we've increased our spending from 30 million dollars to 82 million dollars on pull top maintenance we need to continue to invest in great maintenance that is one of the fundamentals the third piece we do and we highlight in our distribution grid plan is the age of the system and rebuilding it in strategic undergrounding I appreciate the comment that you made Detroit was one of the first electrified cities not only in the US but in the world some of our electrical infrastructure we operate is from the night early 1900s it needs to be replaced there's no more upgrading it there's no more hardening it at some point you have to take on some of these major projects to start to replace it I use the analogy unlike roads I can't shut our system down while I rebuild it I have to rebuild it while everything's hot so that customers continue to be served on our system strategic undergrounding is an important piece of it the chairman talked about the service drops that comes from the home to the or from the pole to the home in 2016 we requested from the Public Service Commission to no longer allow overhead service drops 50 percent of all of the issues we have in our system are in people's backyards I'm not blaming our customers but we have an issue with 1.8 million wires that hang in from the pole to people's back backyards all of that goes underground now we need to continue to tackle this issue the last two days of the ice storm we spent restoring fifteen thousand customer services that were in their backyards our customers do not trim these Services we know they do not trim these Services we do not trim the services so when they were put in no trees existed it continues to be an issue so rebuilding the system and using strategic undergrounding has to be a piece of it lastly I would say is automation we talked a lot about automation we have been on a five-year journey to automate our system in order to put automation devices in the field you have to have the right software and the system to control it all of that was completed last year at DTE our goal is to put 10 000 automated devices in the field in the next five years that will fundamentally change the duration of outages for our customers when you look at DTE there's two ways you think about reliability one is the frequency of the number of outages you have we're in the top 50 percent meaning 50 percent of the utilities are worse than us we need to get better that's through tree trimming and maintenance of the system where we really struggle as the lack of automation on our system we will make a fundamental change in automation now that we have the backbone to do the Automation in a simple analogy I use as old Christmas lights versus new Christmas lights old Christmas lights when you lost a bulb everything went out automation you lose a bulb everything stays hot we continue to serve all the customers that ability exists in ninety percent of the utilities across the United States today it's not it's not something new we know how to we know how to do that inside of the utility here we need to continue to invest in that the last thing I'll mention chair and I'll turn it back to you is um accountability um we have requested twice an investment or an infrastructure recovery mechanism that ring fence spend on our electric utility system over half the the states and half the utilities in the country have that today we recognize the concern I am perfectly happy with ring fencing our Capital Investments we want to invest it just like everybody else does ultimately the goal is to get to a great grid I'll finish again with apologizing to our customers and communities not the service that we would ever want to offer and I make no excuses we are responsible I am responsible for increasing the resiliency of the grid I'd be happy to take any questions thank you very much slower we do have some questions start with Senator Chang thank you Mr chair and thank you for your presentation um and the opportunity to ask a couple questions I recently saw a map of DT's hardening of its infrastructure across the city of Detroit that indicated to me that the lowest priority areas in terms of when they will take place for heartening are the areas with the highest poverty rates and the highest levels of unemployment and the areas focused on for modernization of infrastructure tend to be neighborhoods either in downtown or closer to downtown uh rather than areas further away with higher rates of poverty so I was wondering if you could speak to how DTE prioritizes what neighborhoods to focus on and how is equity either considered or not considered in making that kind of determination about where to prioritize thank you Senator Chang for the very direct question five years ago we started to put a very focused effort on where we invest in the most vulnerable communities as the my EJ tool came out we have back cast all of those Investments against the tool for 483 census tracts which are 29 percent of the census tracts we serve Show app as 80 or more and the my EJ in the my EJ screening Tool uh 80 of our hardening is happening in those 483 census tracks so it makes up 29 of our overall system but 80 percent of our hardening is actually happening in that we didn't have the tool up front but I appreciate the tool to be able to Back cast it we've had a very clear focus on our most vulnerable communities and we will continue to have it it is not currently part of our planning process but we do use vulnerable communities as part of our planning process for Investments it's just a quick follow-up on that and then another question um so I'm hearing that you're prioritizing more now than you previously did now that the tool is available I'm guess I'm wondering are you able to shift or is there information that you can publicly share around how you are shifting the time frame of some of the communities that believe that they are sort of a couple years later are you shifting any of that now using the EJ screening tool and then if I could just the other question that I had was there was a recent Bridge Michigan article highlighting that DTE paid out 700 million dollars to investors in 2022 but then pause hiring and maintenance in order to hit Revenue targets and that article pointed out that job openings went unfilled contractors were eliminated and overtime was limited and maintenance work was postponed and then as we know in February more than 450 000 DTE customers lost power so I was wondering if you could speak to how DT prioritizes payouts to investors versus making improvements to the Grid or keeping residential rates more affordable yeah thank you Senator Chang so two questions there I want to I want to unpack both of them so first um we haven't done anything different with the screening tool we made those adjustments well before the screening tool came out so eighty percent of our hardening work today goes to the communities that have been identified by the my EJ screening tool and that was done well before the tool ever existed so I'm pleased to say that as we backcast and look at that that we were making the right investments in the right Community but we commit to continue to use the tool because it's the right thing to do in regards to our stakeholders in the bridge article while I did not read the article we talk about four stakeholders at DTE we start with our employees because we think our employee base is the most important employee the most important stakeholder we have and what DTE has done is we've made a compact with our employees and unlike many companies not only here in Michigan but across the country we're not going to lay our employees off when we run into difficulties the second is our customers if we do the right thing for our employees we fundamentally believe that our employees will do the right thing for our customers all of our employees live in our communities our communities are our third most important stakeholder that we talk about and fourth our investors and they do have an important role so the bridge article I understand highlighted a investor slide that our CFO used with investors and it talked about deferring some maintenance I want to address it very clearly from 21 to 22 we increased maintenance on our distribution system by over a hundred and twenty million dollars I have asked our team to pause a handful of Maintenance activities going into 2023 none of those have happened yet I'll give you two great examples of what they are number one a maintenance activity we do at our substations is how often we mow our substations I've asked our team to go from two every two weeks to every six weeks in our substations the third is all or the second activity that I would highlight is we hire summer students to inspect underground Transformer Pad mounts their concrete bases we have 50 000 of these we look at 20 percent of them every year we did not hire summer students this year neither of these activities cause any concern for me we will not pause any maintenance activity that causes a safety issue for our employees or our public or will cause reliability issues we could not have been more clear with that and I believe our CFO said that in the actual in the actual statement when he went through it so I hope I answered your question senator thank you thank you Senator Shank thank you for coming today and of course I want to thank all the employees that were out working on the outage my family was out of power for for four days um we've talked about the the profits about a billion dollars in profits were posted during that the ice storm outage your CEO makes over 10 million dollars a year you recently put in a request to the mpsc for the largest rate increase in State history about 622 million DTE has increased rates four times in the last five years totaling over 800 million in increases and we're still we have regular outages I would argue that there's not really any increase in reliability from those from from those rate increases you regularly have a return on equity which is about 10 percent um would you be willing to reduce that rate of return to invest in more reliability and before you answer I just want to say um many companies want to offer a high rate of return to their investors when their products suffer typically the rate of return suffers and I don't see that happening here thank you um thank you Senator I will uh I'm going to try to answer all the questions so please tell me if I don't um I'll start with a rate of return the rate of return is set by the Michigan Public Service Commission not by the utilities the rate of return is designed to reflect the riskiness of a utility utilities that have an infrastructure recovery mechanisms and other tracking mechanisms tend to have lower rates of returns across the country because they're seen as less risky to attract Capital our dividend payout which you reflected or somebody asked a question earlier on is three and a half percent which is in the middle of all the utilities in the United States again it's very low relative to other companies that pay a dividend because we're seen as a less risky investment other than government bonds most people will invest in utilities two-thirds of the profitability of a company like DTE or most utilities goes back to the investors because we borrow money every year to run our operations the other third of our profitability goes directly back into operating our system into bettering our system through what you call retained earnings so two-thirds to the to the shareholders and a third goes back back into the customers um the second piece or the the other question that you ask is around uh reliability I can only tell you where we make the Investments the Investments continue to work we have continued to invest in tree trimming pull top maintenance and other maintenance practices when you have a large electric utility system the first thing you need to do is stabilize it so as we see the weather coming we're stabilizing the system utilities that we've benchmarked with in Florida and the Gulf Coast have been seeing this weather and they've been stabilizing and investing in their system for over two decades we are in the first six years of starting to invest in our system I want to make no mistake that the investment needs to continue that is how you get great operating we can make strategic Investments like automation which will fundamentally change the duration of an outage and I think that's something that you should hold us accountable for doing as quickly as possible as we possibly can thank you Senator moose thank you Mr chair thank you for taking the time to testify today and I I really appreciate you taking responsibility for this and I'm sure there are things we can do better but let's not forget that three quarters of an inch of ice would be devastating anywhere so you've laid out um some great plans I mean this five switching to five year tree trimming switching to undergrounding these type of things it sounds like you know things that we can do to improve the system my question is what can we do at the state level to help make this a reality and what types of things would you say we should avoid that would just get in the way of such progress now thank you for the question so I I I've never sat where you guys sit but I'll try I'll do my best to answer the question so the first thing I'd say for the the state is uh increased energy assistance for our customers specifically with DT last year we had a record amount of money that came into our our system for energy assistance it is never enough to help our customers that struggle not only with electric bills but gas bills water bills and everything else that's going on so I'd be remiss if I didn't say that a second I think the most important thing that this body can do is make sure that the Investments that need to be made get made right and there's ways to do that through infrastructure recovery mechanisms performance-based rates are another area where we see states around the country start to lean into this and third and while it may seem somewhat odd I think you need to hold the utilities accountable where they make those Investments when we make these Investments they show positive results and you should expect us and our people to show these positive results last I'd say Workforce we can do all of this but the most important thing or the most important resource we have is our labor Partners to actually be able to do the work we've tripled the number of tree trimmers in the last six years on the DTE system and we've doubled the number of linemen line people working on the on the DTE system we still have a fraction it is a fight between every utility in the country to try to get resources to do this work helping us with workforce planning we have a partnership with the Department of Correction at Parnell Correction Institute where we help returning citizens and we also have started one with the city of Detroit with our Detroit tree trim Academy for graduates these are great jobs that we need to build Workforce where do I think we should not go um it's probably not fair to me to say but um at the end of the day the way to fix this is through your utilities we have a grid we have to work collaboratively together on what the solutions are and those Solutions require us to be strategic in investment in investing in continuing to invest I understand the frustration that customers have and I do not blame them for being frustrated I apologize senator for you being out of power for four days that is unacceptable for you to be out but the most important thing we can do now is continue the investment into the grid that's how it gets better the only way it gets better is continuing the investment in the grid we've seen this across state by state we're not the only state that's had an ice storm I can give you statistics I am so proud of the way our people responded we've responded faster than any other state you'll see with this ice storm this is not these incurrences are happening all over the United States right now thank you for the question thank you sir Paul Hankey thank you Mr chair thank you Mr Lauer um somebody from DTE during the last ice storm called me and and so I put him to work and it wasn't until you know we had I had sent him off on a few jobs that I I realized that it was your CEO Jerry and uh so once I found that out I continued to put him to work um he did a good job we probably texted 50 or 100 times between texts and phone calls but I kept thinking about what about the people who don't have the CEO on the other line and you know he helped me with my district I want to give credit for that but I'm going to tell you what I told him the 25 to 35 dollar credit is a joke it's embarrassing it's embarrassing for me to tell my constituents that that's all they're going to get for all the rotten food you know all the the heartache um I don't think there's any reason that you as a company can't voluntarily up that rate even though it's set by the the Public Service Commission and I and I would definitely urge you to do that I do know that working with United Way you were able to give greater reimbursements to extremely low income people I appreciate that but um a lot of people suffered so in addition to um automating the grid ramping up the tree trimming even further I want to talk about strategic undergrounding much of my district is old neighborhoods I didn't get calls from Canton because Canton is a lot of new neighborhoods I know that six since the late 1960s electric wires and subdivisions must be buried by law um not the situation in Livonia Garden City Inkster Westland I've heard it cost six million dollars per mile to bury you know is that correct first of all and that seems to be the gold standard so for people in my district who have the wires that aren't going anywhere in addition to automating tree trimming how can we lower the cost of strategic strategic undergrounding so that some people in my district in the old neighborhoods can have relief yeah thank you Senator strategic undergrounding is a really important piece and the six million dollars a mile I will say is probably not correct depending on the conditions you operate if you're undergrounding in a in a very rural area where there's not a lot of other infrastructure that's in the road we see that being done for less than a million dollars a mile we've done some of this in the city of Detroit we have two different pilots in the city of Detroit going on right now with strategic undergrounding and it's approaching four and a half million dollars a mile how do you get the cost down you start to do it at scale there's utilities that are doing strategic undergrounding across the United States at scale scale I think you guys know what I'm I mean but do a lot of it all at once Crews get really good at it uh your your supply chain process gets gets ironed out so it's not a once every two year years but it is a once every month activity that you're undertaking we see this across the U.S where costs will come down by 50 percent once you get repetitive Crews that are doing it because you have to learn how to do it and the conditions will be slightly different in each area that you do it there's really interesting Pilots that are happening around the United States I'll mention Florida quickly whether partnering with communities that would like to underground their entire overhead system and they've received permission for the utilities to give up to a 30 percent credit back to those communities because it's not only our wires but they need to take all the telecommunication wires the cable wires and everything else that needs to be undergrounded and the communities actually undertake that work themselves and the utilities just oversee the the safety of the work with their wires going underneath but it's done by a different contractor than even the utility so I think there's a real benefit for us to do this might I suggest piloting in Senate District Five thank you yes yes thank you thank you thank you minority Vice chairlowers thank you Mr chairman um I just I thought uh you know we've it seems like we're talking around the subject of profitability here a little bit and I I want to ask you know there's you've mentioned a couple of things uh Mr Lawrence you know uh when you talk about infrastructure recovery or in Inver government can you explain a little more I mean I think you know I I it stands to reason that that lower profits means less investment so I don't know if you know I I want to make sure that we're not sending a message that that we think DT should have lower mandatory lower profits or something like that and so I have a number of questions just but really want to focus on explaining a little bit more what what you mean when you say recovery and I think you've I think you've addressed a lot of the other areas if you're at 3.5 percent you're in the ballpark then you're in the ballpark of of you know because you have to compete for your investment same as anyone else I would imagine and and uh what we what we're all asking for I think you're what we're all driving is more investment in our in our utility infrastructure and not less so can you uh tell me more about what you're really saying when you talk about the is it a different recovery system you have today or yes so thank you Senator the I apologize I interrupted you um with the infrastructure recovery mechanism the chair of the Public Service Commission was talking about Ring fencing spend so essentially the way it happens is we would come forward and say I want to spend a hundred dollars on undergrounding something right and what it does is the dollars can only be used for that project and if they're not used for that project the dollars go back to the customers so the way that many states have taken it because they want to make sure that they're directing dollars into the infrastructure in very particular infrastructure it could be undergrounding it could be tree trimming you ring fence these dollars so that the utility does not have the opportunity to move those to other projects I appreciate the chairman there's many projects that come up that are critical um critical issues that show up on an electrical system do you also need to address we can do that also so when I think about the infrastructure recovery it's this concept of how do you ring fence to make sure that the most important things are being done on the electric utility and everybody has confidence utility is making those Investments and if we don't make those Investments the dollars go back to the customers the other thing it requires us is to give a whole battery of reporting around each of those Investments so we talk about performance it gives the accountability so you can come back and say we made those Investments did they or did they not perform the way we expected and it could be a district it could be a town it could be a whatever area you define we're very comfortable taking that process because I know when we make the Investments they do work I hope I'm answering the question senator thank you and apologies to members in the queue we just have time for one more before we go to the next presenter which is Senator camilleri thank you Mr chair and thank you for the presentation um so I'm looking at this graph from the mpsc and it's out you know detailing all the major storms of 250 000 outages plus from 2013 until today the thing that I'm really struggling with and I think our residents are struggling with too is understanding what has changed so we are in a position where we just keep having storms continue to happen we keep having you guys come talk about what happened and what we're going to do to change the system and it doesn't feel like things are changing yes we've seen increases in money for tree trimming but it's not working uh so where when can we get to a place where we feel confidence in the changes that are coming and seeing the improvements in our communities I want to just highlight some of my own District uh Wayne city of Wayne as well as city of Trenton our older communities post World War II suburbs that have aging infrastructure we understand that they were the hardest hit and they continue to be the hardest hit in every one of these storms we had massive outages during that time but then similar to senator Paul Henke like in Brownstown Township it's a newer post 2000s uh Community very few power outages and so we see the clear differences we know the answer is undergrounding why don't we ever hear that as a priority for investment going forward right so um thank you senator for the question I want to address the first piece um so we have been working aggressively on the frequency of outages and we've been able to maintain the same frequency of outages which is in the second quartile of utilities across the U.S again not where we want to be we need to continue to improve that where we have not been able to make and or gain traction is on the duration of outages that is what separates DTE from the other utilities that we speak about whether it's ComEd or Pico in Philadelphia they have very similar number of outages that we have but the duration of bringing those customers back this is why I'm stressing automation so much we've laid the groundwork for five years to put ourselves in a position to massively start to automate our system now you should hold us accountable to execute back against that investment assuming that we're allowed to make that investment on our Electric System it is critically important that's how customers will fundamentally see a difference your second question is undergrounding I will tell you that we've brought multiple strategic undergrounding Pilots forward word the job of DTE is to work with our regulators and all the other stakeholders that participate in our regulatory process so that we can receive permission to start to move forward with some of those undergrounding Pilots that we'd like to do so far we haven't been successful on many of those trying to get everybody to agree with us that it's important but I will tell you it is important and we need to continue to look at where we can strategically underground pieces of our system quick follow-up who's in who's getting in the way I wouldn't say that anybody's getting in the way Senator I would say uh it's on DTE to make a better a better argument with everybody's that they understand why it's important thank you all right thank you senators and thank you very much I appreciate your time today next we have from Consumers Energy is Tanya Berry and uh Chris there if you please join us and um you can appreciate your cognizance of the time and appreciate that we have probably some continued questions from Members thank you thank you good morning and thank you chairman and committee members for allowing us to testify before you today I'm Tanya Berry I'm the senior vice president of transformation and Engineering at Consumers Energy I am responsible for our gas and electric Engineering Group our quality and our renewable energy group I am super excited about our transition to renewable energy and coming off a coal and it's exciting to be able to lead in that way but while we're transforming what I think about is our 6.7 million Gas and Electric customers here in the state of Michigan anyone who knows me knows that I work and leave for all people and I think about that every single day and every decision that I make I lead with joy in a way that motivates my co-workers to when they're out there grinding it out in extreme weather conditions for 16 hours a day 10 days across multiple storm waves restoring powers to our customers I empathize deeply with our customers who experience prolonged outages as a result of the ice storm that swept through Michigan I along with everyone from our call center co-workers to our CEO responded and talked to customers with the sole intent to better understand the experience customers faced and provide transparent updates on our restoration progress the team I work with every single day they put the needs of the customers Before Their Own we often see the line workers out there restoring power and they are amazing and thank you for recognizing that but I want you to know there are thousands of additional co-workers behind the scenes working to support our line men and women and reduce the restoration time for our customers at Consumers Energy we can't control the weather but we can control our response our vision is to perform at a world-class level while delivering Hometown service for our customers whether that is a line worker on a pole a dispatcher that's sending the next job to the crew an employee guarding a downed power line or a forestry worker that's clearing the way for that line worker to access that poll we show up for our customers in all weather conditions Cold Wind and Rain customers know we'll be there after storm sweeps through our community however what they might not know is we did file an electric distribution plan in 2021 with the Michigan Public Service Commission which included major investments in our distribution grade to improve reliability for all customers last year we completed over 2 000 electric infrastructure projects cleared over 7 000 miles of power lines replaced ten thousand poles upgraded a hundred substations and continued to incorporate Smart Technologies to improve grid operations through our electric distribution plan this plan is a five-year strategy where we Define the condition of our system we determine the Investments needed we determine where it's needed most and how do we make dramatic reliability improvements that our customers deserve here are the facts in 2022 we invested above and beyond above and beyond the amounts that were included in our rates for forestry and reliability programs that was an additional 35 million dollars in spend to improve our systems these are investments we were required to make these are investments we knew we needed to make to make our system better and we're already starting to see the results in 2022 we saw 20 percent fewer customer outages after we made those upgrades and completed those 2000 projects we also reduced in half the total number of minutes customers are without power compared to the previous year and restored more than 96 percent of our customers in outages in less than 24 hours demonstrating continued investments in the grade with efforts to make it more reliable are paying off despite those Investments there are times in which extreme weather ice freezing rain and wind can create substantial outages on our system like what happened last month I know how frustrating it can be to be without power this is just the beginning and I know our customers deserve better as we learn from this storm and future events we will continue to work with all stakeholders to make the needed Investments across the grid to ensure we are clean reliable and affordable for all our customers this is our commitment I would like to turn it over to Chris Lair our vice president of electric operations who can speak to the company's restoration that we experienced and the challenges we had during the restoration process thank you Miss Barry again Mr Laird we're starting to run up against tight timelines I'll be very brief I'll give you guys a copy of the testimony afterward that's okay so good morning thank you for having us um I'm the vice president of electricops for consumers I'm responsible for operations maintenance and restoration activities I've been in this role since September about 25 years here at the company prior to that work-free municipality and was a former volunteer firefighter I have performed every role in restoration that our company has whether that be sitting on a wire guard whether that be responding as a volunteer firefighter and sitting on a wire down whether that be running or Dispatch Center or performing Line work I've done all those things throughout the course of my career I'm really proud of our folks and I want to just share my appreciation as well for our line workers our dispatchers our folks that responded Monumental storm for us second biggest in company history for us a lot of challenge that we saw throughout the course of it we had nine counties that were hardest hit I talked to all the emergency managers in all nine counties personally I met with the sheriff in Kalamazoo County I had the emergency management team come on site to our mobile command center there Greenville Big Rapids Jackson and Hillsdale so I just want you to know I was personally out 20 hours a day communicating and making sure that those members had a direct line of contact for any emergencies any sport they needed from us as we move forward throughout it the other thing that I want to share is just a couple of challenges we had so outage map is the first one we have a new system that we're using in our dispatch centers we found a defect during the middle of the storm that was inaccurately reporting outages some people were getting notified their outage is going to be six days seven eight days out which was inaccurate other folks are being notified they're actually back on when they weren't throughout the course of the storm we tried to repair that defect as it happened we could not do it without taking the system down we had to wait until the storm was over on March 8th we made that fixed it is fixed going forward the other piece that's sort of tied with that is our estimated time of restoration so that's customers depend on that text mess message that phone call that email to say I'm going to be on at this date and this time we had a similar defect that was causing challenges there that was fixed as well on March 8. I want to acknowledge that that's unacceptable inexcusable that can't happen for our customers they depend on us to communicate with them so they can make plans about their life as they go forward we've got both of those fixed I want to make sure the team's aware of that in addition we have two after Action reviews that are ongoing we stood those up immediately the day after the storm got done one is focused just on system Technologies the work that we need to do there to improve the seconds round of restoration planning so how did we do with having resources planned ahead of time is we brought in the first wave of resources the second wave of resources and how we work through in our hardest hit areas the equipment that we needed to be able to work forward with that we plan to have those done by the end of the month and we'll make better improvements as we go forward so at this time I'd like to open it up to any questions for Tanya and I both very much um so the mpsc has talked a little bit about the um the the audit that's going to be coming down the line um and so my question is going to be do you think uh here today and then we'll want to look sort of after the fact how this aligns that your distribution system maintenance is going to be properly prioritized do you think that audit is going to going to validate that or are we going to have problems when that information comes in first we welcome the audit um we do a lot of benchmarking with other utilities across the country we're happy to have an independent Independent party come in and work through that process specifically go out in the field and validate with us we expect there'll be some learnings from it we welcome that feedback and that'll help us get improved at a quicker rate oh it's interesting thank you and again thank you to all the workers who were involved in getting the power back on one of my concerns is that many residents are extremely vulnerable they may have a CPAP machine they they may be in a in a nursing home and with repeated outages um I'm wondering if if you have any kind of a plan to identify ahead of time the vulnerable people and make sure that they have a backup generator or perhaps solar in a battery that they can flip over to support their household during a time of an outage so that they're not in danger one of my huge concerns during this time was that if the if the temperature went down that people might die not everybody in my district has the money for a hotel or a restaurant or or some place to go and so um given that this situation seems to be normal I'm wondering what your plans are to protect the most vulnerable in our community yeah first let me start with if we're aware and we have a system where we can code if there's anybody that needs issues with their on a breathing machine or CPAP machine or different items like that we code that we know that we can help prioritize that as we go about our restoration we also partner with communities to have warming shelters and make sure that we're supporting in that way so that those folks can get to a place that's free of charge for them to be able to get to and be taken care of during those times information or if if maybe you're all set but it didn't seem like it during the hour we can follow up with you on that process for sure thank you thank you Senator how could you still like to ask a question nope um I know that first of all I it's two part really quick first of all your main lines do the utilities own the right-of-ways to trim underneath them and then the second one is I know that we want to go to buried lines but in my Township it's amazing how many times other people come in and bore into stuff so I think that's something that we got to watch out because if you're born to a sewer line or a water line that's just watery I mean it's not good but somebody doesn't have the possibility of dying so I just want to know how you're looking into that yeah I'll answer both questions so first we do own the right of way in most situations to be able to do that our tree trimming practices are a clearance around them they're not what we consider ground to Sky so in an ice storm of this magnitude anything that's not ground to Sky trimming those limbs are above our lines they get the weight on it they break they fall through our lines so we're looking at tree trimming practices as we go forward but we do own the right away in most situations on our main backbone lines for sure for undergrounding we're looking at a Pilot there's opportunities there for us as we go forward as you've heard from others today we're very interested in that we have an underground Workforce that we're scaling up right now and building to be able to work specifically with that equipment as we go forward it's not an area of expertise for us on the Electric System but it's something we're definitely looking at there's challenges with underground as well as everything goes under there is a risk from a safety perspective still where somebody could bore into that hit an energized line be an issue but our systems are set up to safely de-energize at that point and the other thing is the amount of time it would take to fix that versus an overhead line you know yeah but I'm sure you guys are looking that up Vice chair McDonald I think for your testimony today um I'm glad you started you talked about the workforce because that's where my question is I know um we keep hearing about these um once in a lifetime once in a generation events that seem to happen every two years now and I am wondering how you think about and use predictive modeling related to weather and how that informs your Workforce uh decisions of you know who's working at what times who's who who who goes on layoff who doesn't uh and if you thought that had any um implication on your reaction times in these last two storms yeah we use the models for both planned work and our long-term plan but also for weather that's coming in like the ice storm that we saw so we work with a third-party dtn we work with IBM use their model and then work with the National Weather Service we have multiple calls a day leading up to events for this event as it got closer every day it seemed to get more um more impact forecasted it so we ramped up the resources we would bring in we had all 183 of our crews at Consumers Energy engaged in another 450 Crews inside the state and we brought Crews from across the state line even moved us forward when the second wave of weather came in and hit that Greenville Big Rapids area to bring an additional 100 crews in through our mutual assistance process so we're continuously looking at that as we go forward back to our long-term plans we've added 230 line apprentices over the last two years we have plans to add 300 more we partnered with over a dozen community colleges that work them through the first 12 months of electrical Theory here's what it's like to climb a pole then they come and work for us and we put them through a very robust training program we have a world-class training facility in Marshall we do a lot of great work we have an internal climbing Arena so they can get trained every day of the year year round so we are looking at that we are finding challenges with being able to get folks that want to move into that so I know there was a question asked how can we help we need some help getting our youth involved in those technical skills jobs we need to get more folks involved in that there's a lot of opportunity that's who's going to help build all of this work for us as we go forward I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this but can you just talk about what the salary range of those folks are that you're Desperately Seeking for yeah we can follow up with you on that yeah I I just know that it is a really good paying job and so there's this there is there's a space to open up a line of folks that are desperately needed in really good paying jobs absolutely senator bellino no stories this time thank you thank you Mr chair and I want to double up with what's Senator McDonald rivet said um I have a nephew who's a lineman and there was a forecast of a strong storm coming in at Christmas so my nephew gets a call do you want to be on call if you sign to be on call we'll give you five thousand dollars and all these linemen signed up and it caused DT a lot of money for a storm that didn't happen but they had the people all lined up but he was happier than a clamp he was at Christmas dinner he wasn't working on a line and he got paid for it so thank you absolutely there wasn't a question in there but that's okay Senator Hotel Pat all right anyone else I know what time is close all right uh thank you both very much for being uh in front of us today and for answering our questions certainly know that you're available to our members um at any time and this is again not the end of our conversation by any means there being no further business before the committee and without objection the senate committee on energy environment is adjourned thank you