It doesn't just compensate folks adequately for their lost food or medicine or pain and suffering from these outages. Those bills are going to be reintroduced, is what I'm hearing. The other piece of the bill, a frequent outage credit, meaning if your power goes out multiple times in a year, you get a credit for that, too. Because the thing about that $35 we were just talking about, they can rate-base it, meaning they can charge it back to you, to me, and to every other DTE customer out there. There is another bill in the package that stipulates that that money has to come out of corporate profits. The bill that I introduced would create an hourly outage credit that increases every hour that your power is out. But unfortunately, more often than not, they don't do that kind of stuff. The $35 is something that DTE is doing out of their own volition. people that had to throw out medicine that was refrigerated, food that was refrigerated, $35 isn't even going to begin to cover the damages. YR: I drafted that bill, and the $35 credit is insulting. What other regulations would you like to see? As a state representative, you co-sponsored legislation that would have required hourly credits for the length of an outage. In this wave of outages, DTE announced automatic credits of $35 for people who lost power for more than 96 hours. One of the common complaints from customers is the lack of reimbursement after an outage. It is a pure fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation and there's no stopping it.ĭT: I want to note here that both DTE and Consumers Energy are corporate sponsors of Michigan Radio, and I'll note, for the record, that I am a DTE customer and lost power for about two and a half days in the first storm. These are monopoly utilities that have been granted a monopoly by the state of Michigan, and yet they are still allowed to influence the very people that are supposed to be regulating them. These are supposed to be regulated utilities. Washtenaw County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi, who finished six years as a state representative in 2022. And they're able to do that because they use our ratepayer money, and they spend it on influencing elections and on controlling the electoral process and the political process. They are a heavy hand in Michigan politics today. They put millions of dollars into tearing down candidates building up candidates that they like. YR: Having served for six years, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that DTE and Consumers are two of the most influential corporations in Lansing. How influential is the lobbying money that the utilities spend in Lansing? That is money out of the system.ĭT: You were a state legislator until just last year. That is not going to fix poles and wires to do tree trimming.
#Power outage consumers energy upgrade
That is not going to upgrade transformers.
Consumers, earlier in the month, announced an $827 million profit haul. The day after over 700,000 customers were without power, announced a $1.1 billion profit haul. DTE and Consumers have the resources to make those investments.
We need to invest in our electrical grid.
It's the whole systematic underinvestment in our infrastructure and our grid that gets DTE and Consumers Energy zero out of 10 for this. They were doing the best possible job that they could given the circumstances.īut I would rate the overall response basically a zero out of 10. I want to thank the line crews that were actually out on the ground doing work they are doing. Did you lose power? And how would you rate the utility's response to the outages across the region? Morning Edition's Doug Tribou spoke with Washtenaw County Commissioner and former state representative Yousef Rabhi about the outages, the response, and changes he'd like to see.ĭoug Tribou: Washtenaw County was one of the counties hit hardest during the first ice storm. On Wednesday night, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a resolution that instructs the county administrator to look into the possibility of creating a county-wide public power utility, and the board’s ability to issue subpoenas for utility executives to testify. Now there are questions - some new, some old - about what utility companies are doing to prevent major outages and whether the state needs new regulations. Hundreds of thousands of Michiganders lost power in storms last month, some of them for more than week.
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