When Michigan has power outages, they are more widespread and last longer than the power outages in other states. To combat this, the Michigan Public Service Commission on Wednesday announced the start of a process that could punish energy companies for poor performance. And it’s asking for the public’s help shaping that process.

“The commission remains concerned that Michigan’s utilities continue to perform in the 4th quartile on key reliability metrics, particularly outage duration,” the commission wrote when announcing the proposal. “Furthermore, certain customers experience worse service reliability than system-wide measures would indicate.”

Pictured below is a partial list of the incentives and disincentives being considered by Michigan’s energy regulator:

The idea is to tie utility companies’ financial metrics to their performance, Dan Scripps, chair of the commission, said in a statement.

“We share the public’s frustration with the number and duration of power outages, and particularly those who experience outages over and over again,” Scripps said. “By focusing on the places where improvement is needed most, we’re working to better connect the financial performance of the utilities with the experience of their customers.”

The public comment period for Case No U-21400 ends on 5 p.m. on Sept. 22.

More than half a million homes and businesses in Michigan lost power after last week’s storms. Most of the outages took place in either DTE Energy or Consumers Energy turf in the Lower Peninsula.

This included the governor’s residence, which was without power as recently as Monday.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Monday that the governor’s residence was still without power after last week’s storms.

Whitmer appeared at a Macomb County elementary school for the first day of school in Michigan. There she spoke to WXYZ-TV, a Detroit TV station, on the storms that ripped through Michigan last week. In addition to the thunderstorms, multiple tornadoes hit land. Afterward there were flooded freeways and mass power outages.

“I can tell you at the governor’s residence, we were without power the last few days and still are,” Whitmer told WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. “I’m not complaining. I’m feeling the exact same frustration that I think others are and that’s why we’re going to continue to push to upgrade our grids, to rebuild our infrastructure, and to do our part to mitigate our impact on this climate change that is making us all feel the pain.”

As of Monday, the governor’s official residence was still without power. As of Tuesday, Michigan was the only state in America with more than 10,000 power outages, according to poweroutage.us. There were about 17,000 outages as of 10 a.m. Tuesday.

“I have talked with the leadership at our utilities. I know there is unprecedented investment happening to get lines under the ground as opposed to in the air with all these events,” said Whitmer.

Whitmer did not elaborate as to the scale of those investments. But burying power lines underground is the first thing she responded with, when asked about the path forward.

The governor’s office did not respond to a query about whether the residence has a generator.