Neal Rubin: Behind scenes at DTE: Progress and a riveting past, but watch for squirrels

DTE Energy's Temple Substation looks like the playscape at Elroy Jetson's elementary school, all coils and spires and intimidating metal mechanisms that do things most of us don't quite understand and few of us would want to live without.

Spread across most of a 2.25-acre plot within cheering distance of Little Caesars Arena, it's part of a $1.2 billion infrastructure project called the City of Detroit Initiative, or CODI to save time. A key component, a worker told us, is a series of flat, fanlike discs screwed into poles atop silver-gray coils.

Their role is to fend off squirrels.

Unleash money, technology and years of planning across downtown, Corktown, Eastern Market, a chunk of the riverfront and all the way up to New Center, and thousands of people's lights and flat-screen TVs can still be at the mercy of a rodent.

'A 500% increase in capacity'

Energy is a tricky business, and at its most devilish in Detroit, where some pieces of the electrical infrastructure have been around since Ty Cobb was a promising rookie with the Tigers. That was 1905, if you're keeping score at home, and DTE invited Free Press photographer Eric Seals and me to take a last look at some of the working antiques and a first look at some of the CODI modernization.

The new construction is impressive, in a befuddling sort of way for a pair of laymen. The older equipment might be even more impressive, when you consider Model T-level or later Edsel-era technology handling the demands of a computerized, air-conditioned age.

If your power goes out every time someone sneezes too hard in Royal Oak, or if you've ever waited days just for a return-to-service estimate in Grosse Pointe, you might understandably be unmoved by either sight. As our Keith Matheny reported in March, DTE and Consumers Energy rank far below average nationally in getting customers up and running after an outage.

The repair crews working overnight or in stifling heat deserve thanks regardless, and, according to DTE, an improved Detroit should theoretically ease the burden elsewhere.

"We're quoting something like a 500% increase in capacity," said Ryan Stowe, a vice president in distribution operations — enough to accommodate the arena and the eventual high-rise on the J.L. Hudson site, plus whatever else pops up in the next half-century or so.

More: DTE, Consumers Energy report higher 2nd quarter earnings as power outages are repaired

A van ride through Midtown and a session with DTE's Aaron Balch, who didn't make the road trip, illuminated enough topics to fill a manhole — of which, come to find out, DTE has 18,000.

Detroit's bankruptcy, the utility said, inspired the development and youthful population influx that made CODI necessary in the areas that have the oldest chunks of electrical underpinnings. Project managers expected to have to deal with asbestos, but sinkholes were a surprise; a 30- to 40-foot deep specimen at John R and Kirby was a particular joy. No, DTE does not anticipate system issues as more EVs populate the roads.

Before those conversations, though, we had to step into flame-resistant jumpsuits.

Old, new and sizzling

The safety briefing was properly blunt. Keep your head beneath your hard hat and your hands in your pockets. Treat orange pilons like a brick wall. There's a defibrillator in every truck, and 120,000 volts is a lot.

Older parts of the system top out at 24,000 volts, Stowe said, still more than you'd want to touch but decidedly old-school, with extra monitors and breakers that must be maintained. That's how it was done in the early 1900s and tweaked as the decades passed, and it's what's gradually being replaced with a system that can be controlled from DTE headquarters downtown.

A wall of new breakers in a Temple side building, a few dozen in a double stack, radiates enough heat to feel from a foot away. Throw one switch and an entire neighborhood goes dark.

A bit north, off Woodward near a check cashing store, a newly constructed cement cube known as a vault handles all the equipment for an apartment complex whose owner donated the space and paid for construction because it made things more convenient for all concerned.

It's another whitecap in the wave of the future, but what's riveting is the past.

'These things will last another hundred years if you keep them up'

Temple will ultimately take over pieces of the duties of four older substations. For now, in the Charlotte station on the same lot, up a set of stairs too narrow to pass inspection today, across from a weathered wooden backboard and basketball hoop, a few massive oil-fed breakers remain on duty.

"These things will last another hundred years if you keep them up," said Lewis Hoskins II, a substation operations manager who started with DTE 28 years ago in a phone room. "But you want to get out of the oil business."

On the dimly-lit third floor, two retired generators that look like relics from a shipwreck bear markers from 1915. They used to power Detroit's trolleys.

Near Wayne State University, at what's known as the Garfield Underground Project, contractors had replaced crumbling 5-inch clay conduits with PVC. They were extending the fresh pipes northward before capping them until the last stretch is needed.

The CODI refurbishing includes 60 miles of cable for current and future use. Some of what they're finding underground, a DTE engineer said, is so old it's routed through squared brick pipes, probably relics from two turns of the century ago. As long as it worked, it stayed.

At the bottom of the contractor's trench, a worker whacked a length of PVC into place with a less than modern piece of equipment, a wooden paddle.

From street level, engineer Nou Lor watched almost gleefully. The child of Laotian immigrants, she was a DTE intern from Lawrence Tech when CODI began a decade ago.

She'd seen the design on paper, she said, but "it's so exciting to come out and see it being built."

A shift from the suburbs

A few yards from the trench, Stowe was looking well into the distance.

"Someday," he said, "somebody's going to be talking about this as 'way back when.' My daughter's daughter — 'Can you believe that's how they did it?' "

Methods will surely change, Balch acknowledged, but he's confident the project will keep pace with need.

Post-bankruptcy, he said, the arrival of Dan Gilbert's operation and everything that followed "kind of put us on our heels."

As two generations of population before that had drifted to the suburbs, infrastructure spending took the same route. It's not that Detroit was intentionally neglected, Balch said, "it just wasn't where the load was."

Now the Ford Mobility Campus has taken over a wreck previously lit with flashlights, and at least some of the load is coming back.

The city's grid will be ready, Balch said, and that comes from the top. As we pulled back into the circle drive at DTE headquarters, CEO Jerry Norcia's car was waiting — a Hummer EV.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or via Twitter at @nealrubin_fp.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: DTE's CODI project upgrades Detroit's grid, highlights aging remnants