The 2024 edition of CUB’s annual Utility Performance Report is out now, and once again it uses federal data on key metrics for gas and electric utilities to compare the performance of Michigan utilities to those in all other states in the three categories of reliability, affordability and environmental impacts.
Across those categories, Michigan utilities tend to be among the worst in the Midwest, and, in many cases, the country as a whole.
On reliability, the introduction of the report explains a key takeaway about how Michigan electric utilities grapple with power outages:
A recurring theme across different versions of this report, reinforced by the latest data, is that Michigan utilities have continually failed to improve their basic reliability performance, a weakness that is likely to be magnified during severe weather, which experts expect will be more common as the climate continues to warm.
In 2022, the year from which most of the report’s data is drawn, Michigan utilities did improve relative to the previous year on several reliability metrics. But this improvement was more of a recovery from 2021, a particularly bad year for reliability, than a sign of sustained progress in the way Michigan utilities deal with power outages. Here are some of the reliability rankings of Michigan out of the 50 states plus DC in this year’s report (a higher number implies a worse placement among the states, and on reliability, implies, for example, longer or more frequent outages):
- Average time to restore power following an outage: 49th (and last in the Midwest)
- Duration of outages per customer: 43rd (and last in the Midwest)
On some key measures of affordability, Michigan came in toward the bottom of the states (a higher number implies a worse placement among the states, such as a higher cost of electricity):
- Energy Expenditures per Household as % of Median Income: 38th (and last in the Midwest)
- Cost of Electricity in the Residential Sector: 41st (and last in the Midwest)
And here’s how Michigan ranked on some important environmental performance metrics:
- Clean Generation as % of Total Generation: 34th
- CO2 Emissions Intensity (kilograms per megawatt-hour of electricity generated): 36th
In contrast, some areas where Michigan utilities performed among the best include:
- Efficiency Programs – Electricity Savings as % of Sales – Commercial Sector: 2nd (and first in the Midwest)
- Efficiency Programs – Electricity Savings as % of Sales – Industrial Sector: 12th
- Efficiency Programs – Electricity Savings as % of Sales – Residential Sector: 13th
Check out the full report here.