Stories indexed with the term ‘DTE’

A purchase agreement with DTE – to convert 223 mercury-vapor cobrahead streetlights to LED technology – has been approved by the Ann Arbor city council. The up-front cost of the conversion will be $69,555 – but that amount will be reduced to $55,060 after rebates.

The annual electric bill from DTE for the 223 streetlights is currently $45,128. After conversion, the projected annual cost will be $30,910. The savings would result in about a 3.1-year payback period on the net cost of $55,060. City council action came at its June 16, 2014 meeting.

The city is billed for 7,431 streetlights – of which 5,216 are DTE-owned. Of the 2,215 city-owned lights, 1,923 have LED fixtures.

None of the streetlights to be converted under the … [Full Story]

A power outage at 9:50 a.m., leaving several thousand Ann Arbor residents without power, resulted from an open relay in a substation, according to DTE media relations. It’s analogous to a circuit breaker tripping in a household. Once it was reset, power was restored – a bit after 11 a.m, according to DTE.  DTE is following up to determine the cause of the open relay.

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority board meeting (April 6, 2011): Since June 2010, the city of Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor DDA have been negotiating a new contract under which the DDA would continue to operate the city’s public parking system.

While the city and the DDA have achieved much agreement on the non-monetary details of the arrangement, Wednesday’s board meeting left the financial piece still unclear.

The board discussion included a focus on the contrast between the combined fund reserve of the DDA – which includes those funds it collects as a tax-increment finance authority – and the reserves of just the public parking fund. Sandi Smith, who’s a DDA board member and an Ann Arbor city councilmember, stressed throughout the conversation that it’s not just the overall fund balance, but the public parking fund balance itself that needs to be monitored.

Last week, the board had come to a consensus that the public parking system could absorb a payment to the city equal to 16% of gross parking revenues in every year of a 10-year contract, which represented a revision upward from its previous position of 14% in the first two years, followed by 15% in subsequent years.

After lengthy back-and-forth, the only consensus reached by DDA board members was that they were not prepared to revise their position upward (again) to meet the city’s request that the city be paid 16% of the public parking gross revenues in the first two years of the contract, but 17.5% in remaining years. Mayor John Hieftje, who serves on the DDA board, was the lone voice of support for that position.

The mayor also found himself somewhat isolated on another issue in front of the board at its Wednesday meeting – the only action item on the agenda. The board voted to sign a new, more favorable lease agreement for its roughly 3,000 feet of office space at 150 S. Fifth Ave. for a term of five years.

Although the mayor voted with the rest of the board in authorizing the lease agreement, he had announced at the city council’s Monday, April 4 meeting that he would be asking his fellow DDA members to consider moving into space that’s currently being renovated in the city hall building. Two days later, at Wednesday’s DDA board meeting, the mayor appeared to understand that there was little enthusiasm on the board for the move, based partly on the fact that it would cost the DDA more in the short term.

At the meeting, the board also heard its usual range of reports and communications, including an update from DTE on the addition of a new substation near the Broadway bridge, to meet increased demand for electricity. [Full Story]

Latest information from DTE (7:05 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 29) is that the numbers of households without power in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Ypsilanti Township are 23, 1, and 15, respectively. Update: The earlier (lower) numbers provided by DTE proved to be erroneous. As of Monday, Dec. 29, 9:08 a.m. around 3000 Ann Arborites and 400 Ypsilantians are still without power. [Source]

As of 8:45 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 28, DTE media relations said that around 3,000 households in the city of Ann Arbor were out of power, due to damage from high winds. Based on the PDF map file that is updated every 30 minutes, the majority of households out of power are located east of Main Street generally in the 48104 zipcode.

In the whole DTE region, the utility said around 700 workers are on the job restoring power and that by tomorrow an additional 300 workers from Indiana would arrive, putting over 1,000 people on task. DTE indicated that there would be no incompatibilities of equipment that would cause crews from Indiana to experience delays in deployment. … [Full Story]