DETROIT – DTE Energy, Michigan’s largest electric utility, knowingly understates the number of power outages on its widely shared dashboard, according to a recent interview with a company executive.
Speaking to Detroit NPR station WDET’s Eli Newman after this latest winter weather round, the utility’s director of digital experience said the numbers between the company’s outage dashboard, or “splash page,” and the recently released outage map don’t match.
The dashboard only counts counters that have failed. The card counts the same counters and adds other factors, such as phone calls and testimonials, which DTE to Local 4/ClickOnDetroit says are correct in many cases, although higher than the confirmed number of counters.
“But the basic assumption is that there are meters that aren’t connecting to the system because the cause of the outage is preventing the connection,” Newman said in the interview recorded Friday. “Perhaps it is more correct to say that there are at least that many failures?”
“We’re not going to get 100% of the meters back, so you’re right,” said Jackie Robinson, director of digital experience at DTE Energy. “On this splash side, maybe that’s a little low and the map is too big, right?”
But according to utility analysts, the numbers are more than a little low. As of Sunday morning, DTE reported that just over 62,000 customers were without power. However, widely used supply monitoring service Poweroutage.us showed more than 143,000.
Robinson tried to explain the discrepancies.
“For example, if someone looks at the map and looks at their zip code and it says there’s maybe 10,000 outages, is that generally a guess?” Newmann said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a guess,” said Robinson. “It’s a really educated guess. It’s a prediction.”
“The information system that feeds the card pulls information from customer calls, customer testimonials and electricity meters and feeds it into an algorithm to predict an outage area,” DTE spokeswoman Cindy Hecht said in a statement Sunday. “We show the forecast outages on the map. For example, if several of your neighbors report a power outage and some of the electricity meters on the circuit report that they are down, the outage management system can estimate that the entire circuit may be down.
“In many cases this is correct, but when we get a very large number of outage events, the algorithm can overestimate outages in a specific geographic area. We recognize that this can cause confusion and are working to resolve the discrepancy by further calibrating the system. The outage center data (i.e. the total number of customers egress) is pulled directly from the meters and is the most accurate count of the total number of customers without power.”
Both analysts, like Poweroutage.us and the Michigan Public Service Commission, which oversees DTE, have told the utility that the numbers on its systems don’t match. In Michigan, failures must be reported, but there is no policy on how to do this.
The exposure and explanation of underreporting comes because there has been a tightened examination on the reliability of DTE over the course of two winter storm systems in the last 10 days. The outages left hundreds of thousands without power, in some cases for more than a week.
State lawmakers have called for hearings on how to make the utility more reliable, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office has held talks about those hearings, according to a spokesman.
There have also been calls for more information at the Congressional level, with Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Rashida Tlaib both taking to Twitter to seek answers.
READ: Michigan Legislature’s bill would require DTE, consumers to pay customers for every hour of power outage
“Paying some of the highest tariffs in the country (and) still having this kind of instability puts lives at risk,” Tlaib wrote, later arguing for making the utility a government-controlled entity. “It’s time to change who controls these critical services.”
Shortly before the second storm, Slotkin said she requested a briefing on the energy issues that date back further than recent storms.
“Next week I’m due to have a briefing on Michigan’s energy issues, and now we have two major storms to discuss and the long-standing issues behind them,” Slotkin said.
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