Case Study: DTE Energy achieves expected 500,000 annual outage‑minute reduction and improved distribution reliability with OSIsoft PI System

DTE Improves Distribution Reliability with Smart Fault Indicators

DTE Energy’s electric utility serves about 2.1 million customers across roughly 7,600 square miles with some 46,000 miles of power lines. The company faced a persistent operational challenge: when distribution circuits faulted, crews had to patrol long stretches of line to find the problem, prolonging restorations and increasing customer outage minutes.

DTE deployed a network of smart fault indicators and integrated their proprietary sensor heads into the PI System (using PI Server, Asset Framework, Notifications and PI Interface for DNP, with PI-to-PI and cloud connections) and Esri ArcGIS to visualize real-time fault data on mobile maps. Email/SMS alerts and mapped fault locations let crews be dispatched to the right spot—often within five minutes—enabling faster restores; with ~800 sensors now and plans to double that, DTE estimates eliminating at least 500,000 customer outage minutes annually.

DTE Energy

Cameron Sherding

Sr. Software Engineer