Michigan electric utilities take longer to restore power to customers following outages than utilities in any other state, while also performing poorly on most other metrics related to reliability, affordability and the environment, according to this year’s edition of the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) of Michigan’s annual Utility Performance Report.
Michigan utilities ranked 51st out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia in their performance on the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI), a measure of average power restoration time. They also ranked 50th on the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), a measure of total outage duration for each customer served, with only Maine utilities performing worse on that metric. The report’s rankings are based on U.S. Energy Information Administration data primarily drawn from 2023, the year with the most recent data available for most metrics.
On average, in Michigan it took about 12 hours to restore power following an outage in 2023, over twice as long as any other neighboring state. The second-worst state in the country was Maine, averaging over nine hours to restore power. But in Indiana, average power restoration time was over five hours, and in Ohio under five.
“CUB has been publishing the Utility Performance Report since 2019, and while Michigan was always lagging most other states, this year’s report has the worst rankings on reliability for Michigan utilities yet,” CUB Executive Director Amy Bandyk said. “Despite the words we hear from our utilities about how they are investing in the grid of the future, Michigan utility performance continues to be unacceptably poor.”
At the same time, the report shows that Michigan residential customers are paying high prices for this unreliable service. At 18.84 cents per kWh, Michigan ranked 41st for the average price of residential electricity, higher than any other state in the Midwest. For example, Ohio residential customers pay 15.38 cents per kWh and Indiana residential customers pay 14.94 cents per kWh, while utilities in those states also perform better on reliability metrics.
In terms of environmental effects, Michigan ranked below average in most aspects. It was 34th for percentage of total generation from clean generation and 32nd for CO2 intensity (kilograms of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity).
The Utility Performance Report offers a trove of data on utility topics ranging from consumer gas prices, to energy efficiency program performance, to water consumption. CUB has also made this data available for analysis by the public through a Tableau portal.
CUB of Michigan was formed in 2018 to represent the interests of residential energy customers across the state of Michigan. CUB educates and engages Michigan consumers in support of cost-effective investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy and against unfair rate increase requests.
Response to Statement from Michigan Public Service Commission
While the MPSC focuses on metrics that exclude major event days, we think the most valuable and telling reliability metrics from our report are those that include major event days. That is because these days – when incidents like thunderstorms or blizzards cause widespread power losses – actually reflect the customer experience. Customers do not get to exclude major event days from their lives – they must live with the long power outages that result.
Major event days account for the majority of the outage time, so excluding them gives a rosier picture of utility performance. For example, the outage duration per customer served (the SAIDI index) for 2023 for Michigan utilities is 162 minutes when excluding major event days, but 1,093 minutes – nearly seven times higher – when including them.
The MPSC noted a “clear trend” in improvements in SAIDI excluding major event days since 2017, but this trend disappears when one looks at Michigan’s performance on the index including major event days. In fact, things overall seem to be getting worse, not better:
Michigan SAIDI including major event days (in minutes)
- 2023: 1,093
- 2022: 513
- 2021: 873
- 2020: 411
- 2019: 555
- 2018: 443
- 2017: 779
We also think it is important to look at Michigan’s performance relative to other states rather than looking at the reliability numbers in a vacuum. Relatively, Michigan continues to be the worst state in the Midwest for reliability performance, and ranked 50th out of 50 states plus DC for SAIDI including major event days (outage duration per customer served) and 51st for CAIDI including major event days (average restoration time). This is the worst relative performance since we started publishing the Utility Performance Report.