Reliability and preparedness are essential to our cooperative utility’s operations, and PIE&G members have made clear that the ability to withstand and recover from storms must remain a top priority.

This page is dedicated to how we will meet our members’ needs for reliable and affordable service while navigating long-term challenges.

RELIABILITY STRATEGY

We’ve carefully analyzed our response to the March 2025 ice storm and other recent outage events to determine where to invest in our system to prevent outages and how to restructure our outage response to best reduce downtimes when they occur. Possible solutions are upgrading our poles, investing in higher-quality wire that can handle growth into the future and better technology and smartly investing in burying our lines underground where it makes economic sense.

  • Reliability analyses – Ensure we know where to prioritize investments in our system and how to restructure our outage responses to have the least downtime possible.

  • Improve right-of-way clearing – Invest in better clearing on the front end to reduce the likelihood of major outages down the road.

  • Improved Grid Engineering — Speed up reconstruction and enhancements to the system for improved long-term reliability.

  • Enhanced grid monitoring – The faster we can gather and analyze data on our grid, the quicker we can address outages.

  • Organizational Investments – Invest in better software and systems that automate our workloads and improve efficiency to reduce costs and improve response times.

FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS

Just as rising costs are hitting your own households, PIE&G is facing supply chain challenges, rising wages to keep up with the cost-of-living, and higher interest rates.

Supply Chain

  • 50% cost increase on supplies (poles, wires, transformers, etc.) over 5 years
  • $10 million of capital improvements in 2020 costs $15 million today

Wages

  • Need to keep up with the cost of living to attract and retain our people

Interest Rates

  • Overall in the U.S., interest rates rose over the past 1-2 years, which means higher borrowing costs for expansion or operations.

RATE CHANGES

Addressing member needs for reliability and system improvements with rising costs is a careful balancing act. To meet these needs, the PIE&G Board of Directors reviewed a long-term forecast and approved two-phase rate adjustment that will occur in February 2026 and February 2027.

This approach balances two goals: continuing to invest in the reliability you expect while keeping bills as low as possible.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Balancing reliability and affordability is a challenge for every utility. As a rural cooperative, PIE&G serves an average of just seven members per mile of line, compared to hundreds or even thousands of customers for urban utilities. That means we spread infrastructure costs across fewer customers. Despite this, we continue to keep our cost per kilowatt-hour in line with other local providers in Northern Michigan.

  • February 2026: Residential bills would rise by $0.02159 per kilowatt-hour per month.
  • February 2027: An additional increase of $0.02160 per kilowatt-hour per month would take effect.

The $20/month fee is needed to directly pay for the costs associated with rebuilding our grid after the ice storm, which exceeded $150 million. This fee covers just the annual interest on our emergency loan, which was needed to ensure we had the resources to restore power to our members as quickly as possible.

We do not expect to receive an official response detailing which of our $150 million in storm recovery expenses will be covered by federal disaster aid until at least September 2026. Once we have that information, then we will provide an update to our members.

The base charge is everyone’s contribution toward the base cost of having power available to your homes whenever you need it. The distribution charge covers actual energy usage.

PIE&G participates in the State Emergency Relief program through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. It is available year-round, subject to availability of funds, to assist low-income households that have a shut-off notice for heat or electric, or a need for deliverable fuel. For additional information, contact your local DHHS office or call 1-844-464-3447