Jerry Norcia
President, Chief Executive Officer and Director at DTE Energy
Thanks, Barb, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. On today's call, I'll start off by discussing DTE's strong start to 2022 and provide highlights on our transition to cleaner generation. Dave Ruud will provide a financial update and wrap things up before we take your questions. As shown on slide four, the success that DTE has achieved continues to be the result of our focus on employees, customers and communities. We continue to focus on improving the health and well-being of our team and cultivating deeper employee engagement, which results in being able to deliver service excellence Beginning with our team. For the 10th consecutive year, DTE earned a Gallup Great Workplace Award. When we won our first award, they told us the hardest thing to do would be to win it again. And now we have done it for a full decade. I'm proud of this recognition, which shows the dedication and engagement of our team. And as you know, we've said before, high engagement is the secret sauce that drives our success. Of all said, if we serve each other well, we can deliver for our customers, our communities and our investors, and we're doing just that. On the customer front, one of our top priorities this year is to further harden our system in preparation for the upcoming storm season.
As you know, we experienced extreme weather last year, and we are working toward building an even more reliable grid of the future. DTE's reliability plan is focused on four strategic pillars: tree trimming, infrastructure resiliency and hardening, infrastructure redesign and technology automation, and we are focusing these efforts on the areas that we know are most vulnerable. For tree trimming, we are enhancing our efforts and have greatly increased our investment with a particular focus on the most vulnerable circuits to improve reliability and customer satisfaction. And we know that circuits that have been trimmed have experienced a 70% improvement in interruptions and a 65% improvement in outage minutes. So we know this effort yields results. We are also converting existing electric circuits to a modern distribution system. Circuits, which have been hardened, experienced an 80% improvement in the average number of sustained interruptions and a 43% reduction in wire down events. We continue increasing our investment in remote monitoring and control devices, building an advanced distribution management system, modernizing our system operations center, which started operating in February and enhance cybersecurity.
We remain committed to meeting our long-term reliability targets and improving our customers' experience. Moving on to our communities. We are making strides in providing support through our workforce investment priorities, which include increasing the number of jobs for those with barriers, enhancing job readiness and attracting employers to Detroit and other areas in Michigan. One example of our efforts is the Tree Trim Academy we built right here in Detroit. This program trains individuals to become apprentices and, importantly, it teaches skills to prepare them for the responsibilities of a job. Tree Trim jobs bring prosperity to people who pursue them and also offer a strong pipeline to longer-term opportunities such as overhead line work. Upon completion of the Tree Trim Academy, graduates begin their apprenticeship, which takes about 2.5 years to complete. During this time, Journeyman Tree Trimmers make a good wage with full union benefits for themselves and their families. It's a great example of matching a business need with a community need and that's when we get magic. We're proud that our Tree Trim Academy was recently recognized by Boston College with its innovation award in the category of transformative partnership.
With highly engaged employees customers are satisfied with their service and communities that are resilient and thriving, we will continue to deliver value for our investors. Let's turn to slide five. We delivered a strong first quarter with operating EPS of $2.31, fueled by solid performances across all of our business lines, and we are on track to deliver 7% operating EPS growth from our 2021 original guidance midpoint. At DTE Electric, we filed our first general rate case in almost three years. This rate filing is really about moving our infrastructure investments forward, and we continue to focus on doing this in an affordable way. I'm proud of the work we've done with the Michigan Public Service Commission to develop innovative ways to maintain affordability. And we will continue to focus on keeping rates manageable as we invest in the system. Following a very successful 2021 for MIGreenPower, our voluntary renewables program, we hit an important milestone in early 2022, with over 50,000 residential customers now subscribing to the program.
At DTE Gas, we're accelerating the 35% reduction target of Scope three customer greenhouse gas emissions a full decade, from 2050 to 2040. Advancements in greener technologies like green hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration, renewable natural gas and customer voluntary offset programs will enable the company to accelerate this goal. We also continue our important main renewal work with a target of completing another 200 miles in 2022, ensuring we can continue providing safe and reliable service to our customers. Our natural gas balance program is also progressing, and we have over 6,500 customers described to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. We are proud of how this first-of-its-kind program is growing. Additionally, DTE Gas launched another project that showcases our commitment to a clean energy future in Michigan. We partnered with the City of Grand Rapids to help supply renewable natural gas to fuel their vehicles. This RNG will supply DTE's natural gas fueling stations as well as power buses and fleet vehicles. At DTE Vantage, we have multiple on-site energy projects and dairy RNG projects coming online in the second half of the year. This is in addition to the conversion project I mentioned on our year-end call that goes into service in 2023.
With this new project, DTE and our 50% partner will build a new RNG facility to take biogas from a Michigan-based landfill and convert it into pipeline quality renewable natural gas. Additionally, we have a strong pipeline of projects that support growth in this business, including additional landfill to RNG conversions. We feel great about our strong start to the year, and we're confident in achieving our 2022 operating EPS guidance. Our robust utility capital investment plan of $18 billion over the next five years and $40 billion over the next 10 years supports our future growth. We have a history of achieving the high end of our operating EPS growth target. And as I've said, we continue to evaluate our long-term growth target and expect to provide an update on this later in the year as we update our five-year plan. We're also targeting dividend growth in line with our operating EPS growth. Now on slide six. We're more focused than ever on our environmental initiatives, including several significant milestones in 2022. The Blue Water Energy Center, our new natural gas plant, is on track to go into service later this quarter. This state-of-the-art facility has an 1,100 megawatt capacity and was constructed on time and on budget.
Also this year, our Trenton Channel and St. Clair Power plants will cease operations. After this transition, roughly 38% of DTE's generation mix will be attributable to coal. And by 2028, after we cease coal use at our 1,000-megawatt Belle River Power Plant, coal represents less than 30% of our generation mix. We are well on a path toward our net zero emissions goal. As we highlighted last year, we are filing our integrated resource plan in October this year. We continue to evaluate the opportunity to exit coal use at the Monroe Power Plant earlier than 2040. We hosted meetings for the public to participate in shaping our clean energy plan. Getting our stakeholders' input early in the process ensures that what matters most of them has taken into consideration. As we work to achieve the right balance of energy resources that will provide cleaner, affordable and reliable power for decades to come. I'll just round out my comments by telling you how very excited I am about the position of our company. With the progress we have made and the opportunities we have in front of us.
We are off to a strong start in 2022, and we are in a great position to deliver on our targets. We are seeing favorability at both utilities. We are finding ways to use this favorability to create a highly successful year in 2023 as well as the years beyond that. In the longer term, I've highlighted a number of investment opportunities this morning, including the acceleration of coal retirements and transition to more renewable power, building the grid of the future to combat more severe weather and support the prospect of significant demand growth. And finally, the continued replacement of cast iron main and steel and a gas utility system, preparing that business for long-term success. As you can see, we have a great line of sight of customer-focused investment in our system for the next decade. This puts us in a strong position to deliver for our customers and investors in both the near term and the long term.
With that, I'll turn it over to Dave to give you a financial update.
