Providing safe, reliable power to our communities is a priority for DTE Energy. That’s why we’ve created a four-point plan to improve reliability for our customers: trimming trees, upgrading existing infrastructure, rebuilding older sections of the grid and accelerating our transition to a smart grid.
We’re investing $21 million to make vital upgrades to the substation that delivers power to nearly 7,000 customers in southeast Dearborn and the Claytown, Michigan-Martin and Springwells neighborhoods of Detroit.
The substation that powers these communities has experienced flooding caused by extreme weather, resulting in some past reliability issues for residents and businesses. Although DTE has placed generators in the area and made temporary repairs to the system to restore power to customers, we’re upgrading the substation for a more permanent fix.
These upgrades include:
- Relocating equipment in the substation
- Installing new transformers, breakers, cabling and equipment that will allow us to remotely monitor and control power flow at the substation, which will help us identify and fix issues faster, helping to keep your lights on.
Although customers may not see work happening directly in their community, these substation upgrades will help ensure we’re able to continue to deliver reliable power to customers in the area, especially during extreme weather events.
Our progress
Flood damage to equipment at the substation caused a decrease in electrical load, which means the substation doesn’t currently have enough capacity to reliably power all the customers previously served by the substation. To ensure all customers in the area receive the power they need, we moved some customers’ service to nearby substations. This helped improve short-term capacity constraints and reliability issues. Finally, we have installed some new conduit outside of the substation in preparation for installing new underground cables.
Upcoming work
This fall, we will relocate equipment from the basement to the second floor of the substation. This will help prevent any future equipment damage from possible flooding. Later we will install the new, modernized equipment inside and outside of the substation.
To stay up to date on the substation updates, visit empoweirngmichigan.com/reliability-improvements.