The continued investment and infrastructure updates outlined in our updated plan will help us realize a 60% improvement in the average amount of time customers are without power. Sharon: The plan will help us provide our customers with the safe, reliable and affordable energy they deserve. Q: What will the plan achieve for DTE’s customers? Each scenario reflects potential future outcomes to help identify strengths and weaknesses of our current distribution system and provides guidance on future investment needs. We then looked at energy trends and developed three scenarios that describe what might happen in the future: high electrification, increasing severe weather, and high adoption of distributed generation and storage. We started with the planning objectives of providing safe, clean, reliable and affordable energy that is accessible to all of our customers. Sharon: Knowing that our customers’ requirements of the grid of the future are much more complex than in the past, we took a different approach to developing this five-year plan and longer-term vision for the distribution grid. Q: How did you develop a vision for the grid 10-15 years from now? We want all our customers in southeast Michigan to experience this level of safe and reliable service from DTE, so we’re putting in the work to ensure we provide our customers with the same reliability as the top-ranked energy companies in the country. In this new plan, we’re not only planning for the next five years, but looking further out to make sure we’re addressing the infrastructure updates, technology requirements and capacity needs our customers will demand from the grid of the future. In 2018, our company introduced a five-year plan focused on accelerating the investment in hardening and modernizing the grid, and we know it’s working. In areas where work is complete, our customers are seeing 50% to 70% improvement in reliability.

Sharon: Let’s start with a little background. Q: How does the grid plan differ from the past five-year reliability plan? It also addresses how we’ll modernize to add more capacity to support future electric growth for things like electric vehicles, as well as the technology and integration required to support our customers’ increasing adoption of rooftop solar generation and storage. It addresses how we’ll trim trees and harden the grid to be more resilient, especially during severe weather like we’ve experienced this summer. It outlines our plan to modernize the grid to provide safe, reliable and affordable energy to our customers, now and into the future. Sharon: We’ve developed a new detailed grid investment plan for the next five years, and we’ve also laid out our 10 to 15-year vision for the grid. VP Distribution Eng & Construction DO – Distribution Operations

Sharon Pfeuffer, vice president of Distribution Engineering and Construction, is spearheading the grid plan and shares the fundamentals of it below. DTE’s Distribution Operations team submitted a report that outlines how we are rebuilding the grid to be more reliable and resilient in the short term and meet the changing needs of our customers in the longer term. This aging equipment will be challenged to provide reliable power to our 2.2 million electric customers across southeast Michigan for the rest of the 21 st century. Today portions of our electric grid are more than 90 years old and still in operation. Since then, DTE has continued to build and evolve the energy infrastructure to meet the needs of its customers through the years. When the groundwork for DTE Energy’s electric infrastructure system was laid more than a century ago, it was built as a one-way distribution system – moving electricity from power plants to homes, providing customers the energy required for a much simpler day-to-day life. We rely on it each day to work, play and stay connected to loved ones.

Electricity has never been more essential to life than it is today.

Gridded plan