Grid reliability · 2024 · 20 reporting utilities

Power outages in Michigan

The utilities that reported here serve 4,798,405 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 2.7 hr without power in an ordinary year and 8.0 hr once major events are counted. Each figure comes only from the filers that published it, and the counts are below.

What it means

Why there are two numbers

Across the utilities that filed both figures, major events account for 67% of the outage time Michigan recorded once they are counted: 8.0 hr against 2.7 hr without them, a factor of 3.0×. Solar panels alone do not help during an outage, because a grid-tied array shuts down when the grid does, so riding through one is a battery question. This figure will not answer it: it is an annual average across a utility’s customers, not the length or the load of any single outage. What it does say is how much of the outage time here arrives with major events rather than on ordinary days.

The comparison is drawn from the 20 utilities that filed both figures, which is all of them, so both sides of the ratio describe the same set of customers. The two headline figures above are averaged over everyone who filed each one, so dividing them would not give this number.

Ordinary year2.7 hr13 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 20 filings
With major events8.0 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 20 filings
Interruptions a year1.0×Ordinary year; 1.4× with major events
The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Michigan’s figures is a customer-weighted average of the filings that carried that metric, not of the table as a whole: the ordinary-year average is built from 20 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 20 filings, out of 20 filings that published an outage figure at all. Those are the same utilities on both sides. A utility that filed without publishing a metric, or whose two major-event variants contradicted each other, is absent from that metric rather than counted as zero.

Reported interruption metrics for 2024, largest utility first.
UtilityCustomersOrdinary yearWith major eventsInterruptions
DTE Electric Company2,261,0102.7 hr8.0 hr0.9×
Consumers Energy Co - (MI)1,889,3012.6 hr8.4 hr0.9×
Indiana Michigan Power Co132,0493.4 hr6.0 hr1.4×
Great Lakes Energy Coop131,9984.3 hr8.1 hr2.4×
Upper Peninsula Power Company58,8353.1 hr6.7 hr1.3×
Cloverland Electric Co-op44,4476.4 hr8.9 hr3.0×
Cherryland Electric Coop Inc39,15865 min65 min0.7×
Upper Michigan Energy Resources Corp.38,7543.6 hr18 hr1.0×
Midwest Energy Cooperative - (MI)36,1144.5 hr9.8 hr1.5×
City of Holland31,48240 min5.7 hr0.4×
Tri-County Electric Coop (MI)27,230105 min4.0 hr0.9×
City of Bay City - (MI)20,50048 min6.9 hr0.4×
City of Marquette - (MI)17,174103 min3.7 hr1.4×
City of Grand Haven - (MI)15,08329 min4.0 hr0.3×
City of Traverse City - (MI)13,78119 min19 min0.2×
Alger-Delta Coop Electric Assn10,4403.8 hr16 hr1.2×
Northern States Power Co8,923115 min2.8 hr0.7×
Coldwater Board of Public Util7,79629 min29 min0.5×
City of Sturgis - (MI)7,31014 min14 min0.2×
City of Zeeland - (MI)7,0205 min5 min0.1×

What this page is not

It is a state average of utility filings, not a measurement at any address. Each filing is itself an average over a whole service territory, so a rural feeder and a downtown network arrive here as one number, and nothing in this dataset says how far an individual address sits from it. Nothing here predicts a future year either, and a single severe storm can move a utility’s figure by an order of magnitude.

The methodology page states the sources, the definitions, and the limits. Back to the Grid Reliability Index

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861 reliability file, data year 2024, covering 2024-01-01 through 2024-12-31. The snapshot covers no later period.