CRITICAL: Michiganders, turn up your wood stoves

So at 10:30pm, got one of those emergency alerts that are broadcasted to your cellphone. Usually get them for Amber Alerts. This one was to lower our thermostats to 65 or lower until Friday. Thought that was strange so started researching what was happening. The alert was issued by the State of Emergency center. Not sure how far the alert was broadcasted, but at the very least metro Detroit and beyond, but if you have Consumers Energy or DTE, you're impacted.

Consumers had a fire this morning at one of their NG pump stations, and that station supplies 64% of their NG. So that's a huge hit to supply in the area at the worst time possible. They're tapping reserves due to peak demands, asking DTE (which their NG infrastructure is connected) to help supply the area, and looking at bringing in supply from outside the state. As a result, the Big 3 have cut production at factories in the area in order to save NG...other large commercial clients have cut usage as well, such as all state buildings.

DTE is requesting the same, citing the electrical grid. Everything is ok in the area, but apparently there are reports in other states and Canada that we're connected to having stability issues due to heavy use as a result of the cold.

So, for those of us that have em and are customers of these utilities, crank up the wood stoves and turn off electronics that aren't in use.

Let's stay warm together.

Edit/Update: CRITICAL
For NG use, the need is critical to reduce NG use. They're now saying if enough people don't reduce usage, there could be outages.

Yeah, when mine started buzzing the way it did, I assumed it was an Amber Alert.

The stove here has been going like crazy today. Going to load it now for the night.

Crazy times with this cold.

NaturalCauses said:

I got a good chuckle when that alert came through, as I was loading up the stove for the night.

Click to expand...

Right? I've already told friends and family for their planning that if the shortages happen, doubtful at this point, our house is available to stay warm.

As the news has continued to come out, all of us trolls apparently got the warning.

The Big 3 have shut down or limited operations at 18 facilities across the state to help conserve energy.

Just makes me thankful we made the decision to have wood heat a few years ago. The goal was to heat the basement and serve as a backup heat source. While not a complete outage, just doing our part to keep everyone else warm. We have 2/3 of our thermostats either off or set at 64. The other is still at 68 just because we have a 2.5-month old. Otherwise, the family gets to hang out by the fire.

In southern MI, which is where it's generally been the coldest in the state (the lakes have kept the rest of the state warmer), we'll stay in positive double digits by early Saturday morning. It'll continue up to 52 degrees and raining on Monday. That'll be interesting.