2024 Electric Infrastructure Maintenance

Published on Tuesday, May 28, 2024 in Electric

Maintaining over 4,000 miles of line and roughly 100,000 poles is no walk in the park, but it’s an important part of what we do. Every day, our team works hard to make sure our infrastructure is built for the future. Here are our plans for 2024.

As part of our normal maintenance each year, we replace electric meters that are nearing the end of their lifespan. The average lifespan of a meter is 7–10 years. This year, we plan to replace about 7,000 meters to ensure they are stable and in good condition.

We continue our smart grid implementation through distribution automation (DA). DA automatically identifies and isolates outages and then reroutes electricity where possible to reduce impact. In non-outage situations, it helps us monitor equipment and identify problems.

We have been actively replacing some of our copper wire with aluminum conductor steel-reinforced wire. This ensures the system can handle additional electric load. Plus, in certain circumstances, it enables us to improve our tie lines between substations, which means we can more readily reroute electricity when there is an outage. Finally, when we replace the old wire, we also ensure that the poles are an ideal distance of 200–250 feet apart.

We’ve also got substation upgrades on the horizon. Our power supplier, Wolverine Power Cooperative, plans to finish work on our Schoolcraft substation in June 2024. Plus, we have plans to start construction on a new Ohio substation in 2025.

These investments are critical to ensuring reliability, and they modernize our grid to help bring you the best service experience possible.