LANSING — Energy policy experts are raising concerns about the resiliency of Northern Michigan’s power grid, particularly as aging infrastructure is met with harsh weather conditions.
They say that extreme weather events like the March 2025 ice storm put these vulnerabilities on display — but they also argue the grid’s day-to-day performance is already among the worst in the nation.
“There are challenges everywhere that are going to require a lot of investment,” said Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum.
Rivet and other experts say that Northern Michigan’s aging electric grid is already leaving many customers paying more for unreliable service — but they say that a lack of investment today could spell even worse reliability down the road.
“A lot of it is really investment in the infrastructure distribution and our grid, and it’s probably because we delayed it — and now we’re kind of paying the price of having to catch up on updating old infrastructure,” he said.
Nicholas Jansen, a clean energy organizer for Traverse City’s Groundwork Center, said that the pressure on utility customers could get worse in the coming years.
“Bluntly, as the climate crisis increases, we will continue to see more storms like the ice storm,” he said. “We’ll probably see some fires in the next decade or so — that’ll also influence our utilities. And so we really just have a lot of vulnerabilities now, especially as we’re increasing demand so dramatically.”
Jansen says that utility providers need to prioritize upgrades so issues don’t spiral out of control — though he acknowledged it is a difficult balance for providers and customers.
“We really just need to be looking at this as a wholesale approach, putting people first over profit, and address some of these vulnerabilities today — because we know it’s only going to be increasing,” he said.
Trisha Bloembergen, a spokesperson for Consumers Energy, says that more than 126,000 Northern Michigan residents were without power following the March ice storm.
The company now aims for extreme weather events to cause no more than 100,000 outages and for those outages to last less than 24 hours.
“That unfortunately wasn’t the case with the ice storm — so we are back on track to working to improving reliability for our customers,” Bloembergen said.
The storm downed more than 10,000 power lines around Northern Michigan — most of them were weighed down by accumulating ice or tree debris.
Bloembergen says that Consumers has identified some of the region’s most pressing needs following the storm and is working to modernize its energy infrastructure.
“Some of the main projects that we have going on in Northern Michigan include automation improvements, three new substations, and in addition to that, clearing limbs and trees for more than 1,200 miles of power lines,” she said.