Jerry Norcia
President & Chief Executive Officer at DTE Energy
Well, thanks, Barb, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I have a lot of positive updates to share with you today. I'll be giving you an update on our 2021 performance and an overview of our long-term plan. Dave will then provide details on our financials. Then, we'll take your questions. So, let's start on slide 4. On the second quarter call, I said that we were having a strong start to the year. And with three quarters of 2021 behind us, that description is still on the mark as we continue to deliver for our team, customers, communities and investors. This progress in 2021 positions us well for our future growth.
DTE continues to be recognized for our engagement by Gallup with our ninth consecutive Great Workplace Award. In addition, we remain committed to our focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Switching over to our customers, as you know, our service territory experienced some major storms. This summer, we had 12 storms, with five having over 100,000 outages. It is something we have never seen at DTE's history. I would like to thank our entire team for really responding in incredible ways to these historic events. Our crews worked countless hours to restore power to our customers and for that, I am very grateful.
We understand how important it is to provide reliable power and are committed to making continuous improvements as part of our service excellence efforts for our customers now and into the future. We have accelerated our efforts in the most impacted communities, including Wayne, Oakland, and the Washtenaw counties. In an effort to accelerate our preventative maintenance, we are increasing our tree trimming workforce from 1,200 to almost 1,500 people, and our overhead line workforce from 850 to over 1,000 people. We made the decision to invest an additional $70 million in our tree trimming program from 2021 to 2023 as over two-thirds of our outages are tree-related.
Additionally, we have been making significant investments and increasing our focus on grid reliability. We are advancing our efforts to get trees off the wires and deliver clean, safe, and reliable energy, all while focusing on service excellence for our customers. We filed the distribution grid plan with the Michigan Public Service Commission in September. The plan addresses the long-term investment strategy that prepares our grid for the eventual electrification of transportation and addresses the increasingly severe weather patterns that we have seen in our service territory. Moving on to our communities, we are continuing our commitment to provide cleaner, more reliable energy. We have partnered with Washtenaw County to build our first MIGreenPower community solar project.
The 20-megawatt facility will be the largest of its kind in the area. On the investor front, we continue to have a strong financial year and are well-positioned to deliver growth. As you'll see in our 2022 outlook and our five-year plan, we are on track to deliver 5% to 7% EPS growth through 2026 and dividend growth in line with our EPS growth. Now, let's turn to slide 5. 2021 is shaping up to be a very successful year. We are raising the midpoint of our operating EPS guidance from $5.77 to $5.84 per share. This is 14% growth in EPS from our original 2020 guidance. And I feel very confident that you'll see a final 2021 number that is at the higher end of our new operating EPS guidance range.
I am proud that we're able to deliver these results while we continue to keep our electric base rates flat throughout most of 2022.We have not increased our electric base rates since May of 2020, and we don't plan to file our next electric rate case until early next year. For 2022, we are providing an operating EPS early outlook range of $5.70 to $5.97 per share. Even with the area -- earnings rolling off at the end of this year, we continue to deliver 6% growth from the 2021 original guidance midpoint. We will work towards hitting the higher end of that range as we have done in the past.
Today, we are also announcing a 7% increase for our 2022 annualized dividend, in line with the top end of our operating EPS growth target. As I mentioned on the last quarter call, we retired the River Rouge power plant this year and plan to retire Trenton Channel and the St. Clair power plants in 2022. This is nearly 2,000 megawatts of coal retirements or 30% of our coal generation fleet. And in this quarter, we made another significant step toward our goal of reducing carbon emissions. We announced that we'll be ceasing coal use at Belle River by 2028, two years earlier than originally planned, and preparing also to file an updated integrated resource plan in the fall of 2022, almost one year earlier than planned.
We look forward to working with all stakeholders to address ways to further accelerate decarbonization, while always maintaining affordability and reliability for our customers. In order to ensure we continue to have clean, reliable, and affordable power for our customers, we have built or contracted for 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar energy or just 1,200 megawatts of natural gas peaker plants and expect our new state-of-the-art of 1,100-megawatt combined cycle gas turbine plant be up and running in 2022 to coincide with our coal retirements
Now, moving over to non-utility side, we are renaming our Power and Industrial segment to DTE Vantage. Through our unique vantage point, we are helping customers transform the way their energy is produced and manage to be substantially cleaner and more efficient. The name DTE Vantage better reflects our position in bringing an innovative cleaner energy solutions to our customers. Now, let's turn to slide 6 to review our five-year capital plan. Over the five-year plan, our utilities continue to focus on our infrastructure investment agenda, especially investments in cleaner generation and investments to improve reliability and the customer experience.
Our updated five-year utility plan is $18 billion, which is $1 billion higher than the prior plan. Over 90% of our five-year investment plan will be at our two utilities. Investments in our non-utility business are strategically focused on our customers' needs and aligns with our aggressive ESG initiatives. Overall, we have a robust total investment agenda of $19.5 billion over the next five years. And as always, we continue to look for ways to bring more capital into the plan to advance our Clean Vision Plan and further improve reliability for our customers while maintaining affordability.
Now, let's turn to slide 7. At DTE Electric, we announced our plan to accelerate decarbonization by ceasing coal use at the Belle River Power Plant by 2028, reducing carbon emissions by 50% two years earlier than originally planned. This is another step toward our goal of net zero carbon emissions. Additionally, we expect to file our integrated resource plan in the fall of 2022, one year earlier than planned. By making this important generation decision now DTE continues to accelerate our journey toward cleaner energy generation that is affordable and reliable for the customers and communities we serve.
The $1 billion increase in our DTE Electric five-year plan is driven by distribution infrastructure investments, preparing our grid for electrification, and hardening initiatives, an increased cleaner energy investment due to our voluntary renewable program, which is still exceeding our high expectations. This quarter, we have partnered with Washtenaw County to build our first MIGreenPower solar project. Overall, the MIGreenPower program, which is one of the largest in the nation, continues to grow at an impressive rate. So far, we have reached over 950 megawatts of voluntary renewable commitments with large business customers and over 40,000 residential customers.
We have an additional 400 megawatts in advanced stages of discussion with future customers. For our distribution infrastructure renewal, we are supporting electrification and a load growth with infrastructure redesign, improving circuit reliability and reducing restoration times with system hardening and enabling a smarter grid with advanced technology and automation. This $15 billion investment over the next five years supports our long-term operating earnings growth of 7% to 8% at the electric company.
And, now, let's discuss the opportunity at our gas utility on slide 8. At DTE Gas, we are on track to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Earlier this year we announced our new Natural Gas Balance program. This program provides the opportunity for customers to purchase both carbon offsets and renewable natural gas to enable them to offset up to 100% of the carbon from their natural gas usage. We are proud of how fast this program is growing. Earlier we have over 4,000 customers subscribed, and we look forward to seeing it become as successful as our voluntary renewable program at DTE Electric.
Overall, at DTE Gas, we are planning on investing $3 billion over the next five years to upgrade and replace aging infrastructure with potential upside to the plan of $500 million. Along with our pipeline integrity and main replacement investments, we are investing an innovative technology and products that will reduce methane emissions and the carbon footprint for our company. Overall, we expect our long-term operating earnings growth to be 9% at DTE Gas. Now, let's turn to slide 9. As I mentioned earlier, we renamed our P&I business to DTE Vantage. We are planning on investing between $1 billion to $1.5 billion at this segment over the next five years.
We are targeting operating earnings of $85 million to $95 million in 2022, growing to $160 million to $170 million in 2026 with approximately 80% of the operating earnings in this business coming from decarbonization-related projects. As the REF business sunsets at the end of this year, we continue to see additional opportunities in renewable natural gas and industrial energy services. Earlier this year, we told you about a new RNG project in South Dakota, which is now under construction and is slated to start up in the second quarter of next year.
We commenced construction on another Wisconsin RNG project in the third quarter and entered into an agreement for an additional RNG project, which will be our first project in New York. In aggregate, these three projects will serve the vehicle fuel market, producing over 500,000 million Btus of RNG per year, with 100% of the production offtake contracted long-term. There has been strong RNG market growth supported by the Federal Renewable Fuel Standard and California's Low-Carbon Fuel Standard.
We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on a growing preference for efficient energy, with the opportunity to implement coal generation systems, especially as manufacturing plants continue to open up nationwide. This also puts us in a very good position to explore additional decarbonization opportunities, including carbon capture and storage.
And, with that, I'll turn it over to Dave to give you a financial update. Dave, over to you.
