It’s only been a month since DTE Electric
filed a request to raise its rates for 2026, but the city of Ann Arbor has already intervened against it.
All utilities have to submit proposals for major changes to the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC), the state board that regulates utility companies providing gas, electricity, and telecommunications.
Changes can include how much the utility charges customers or how much it has to pay in outage credits. Other parties, like nonprofits or industry stakeholders, can intervene and submit evidence to support their case before the commission.
Over the past few years, Ann Arbor has emerged as the only municipality in Michigan to regularly and publicly push DTE Energy, which encompasses DTE Electric and DTE Gas, for more action toward carbon neutrality, affordable rates, and reliable infrastructure. Ann Arbor intervenes to advocate for DTE customers who live in the city, says Missy Stults, Ann Arbor's director of sustainability and innovations.
"It's always protecting ratepayers, always," she says. "Always, always, period, full stop. Everything we do is always about protecting our ratepayers."
Green energy options
In 2022, the city intervened to preserve a fixed-price option for DTE’s voluntary green pricing (VGP) program, called
MIGreenPower. Michigan law requires all utilities to provide a VGP, which lets ratepayers choose how much of their monthly bill they want to come from renewable sources.
It’s a way for ratepayers to tell DTE how much renewable energy they want with their wallets, Stults says. And it’s effective, says Valerie Jackson, the assistant city attorney for sustainability.
"The more people that are participating at a higher level, the more that DTE will then have to be powering with renewable [energy] to meet the demand of people wanting the renewables," she says.
DTE’s VGP is the largest in the state and one of the largest in the country,
according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The program provides an affordable option to invest in renewable energy, Jackson says.
"I could get
solar panels for my own home," she says. "But that's an upfront investment that I would have to make."
A fixed rate
MIGreenPower can still cost extra money for ratepayers. Costs for the percentage option fluctuate based on the market value of renewable energy, so it’s hard to budget around. Instead, ratepayers can select a fixed dollar amount – as low as $1 per billing cycle – to contribute to renewable energy.
A fixed rate means residents can contribute without worrying about being charged more than they expected, Stults says. But in 2022, DTE
proposed pausing the fixed rate option. The company argued that the price of renewable energy couldn’t support a flat rate, and keeping it would cost DTE money.
Ann Arbor intervened, arguing that removing the fixed-rate option violated the legal requirement that VGPs be accessible to all residents, Stults says. In 2024, the MPSC
ruled that DTE shouldn’t drop the fixed rate because it's an affordable and consistent option for customers. The commission also said that DTE should explore providing an even lower fixed rate, like $0.25 per month, as Ann Arbor had suggested in its filings.
Changes to the program are important to Ann Arbor because of the city’s
initiative to drop net carbon emissions to zero by 2030, Stults says.
"We always pay attention to this case, because it's a case that's aligned with where the city wants to go," she says. "We do want to see more renewables responsibly put on the grid."
She and Jackson say the city also has a vested interest because so many residents are enrolled in MIGreenPower. A city
report claims that "almost a third" of DTE’s MIGreenPower enrollees are Ann Arbor residents.
Statistics from DTE indicate that the percentage of Ann Arborites enrolled in the program is much lower, although still significant. Almost 100,000 of DTE’s 2.3 million electric customers are enrolled in the program. About 12,000 of those are in Washtenaw County. Wayne County has the largest percentage, with 34,000 ratepayers enrolled.
The increase in ratepayer participation has "fueled the most active period of
renewable energy development in DTE’s history," a DTE spokesperson said in a statement. The company plans to bring three new solar parks online this year.
But that’s not enough, says Derek Miller, the executive director of the Ann Arbor nonprofit
Community Action Network. He says some communities are forging their own paths to carbon neutrality because DTE is moving too slowly.
"[We’re] trying to do what we can to be able to chip away at our own sustainability goals, as well as improve our own grid in ways that include and exclude DTE in that process," he says.
CAN and the city
are collaborating to make the Bryant neighborhood on the city’s southeast side completely carbon neutral. Miller says Ann Arbor’s efforts to work with DTE are important, but multiple solutions are needed.
Unusually unacceptable
For several years, DTE has filed requests for ever-increasing electrical rate hikes. The company argues in filings that the increased rates will cover maintenance and upgrades, increasing reliability for customers.
Miller says he’ll believe it when he sees it.
"I get no shortage of DTE commercials that tell me that they're working on grid resilience," he says. "And yet I see my power go out."
That’s been a major criticism of the utility for years. In 2022, the MPSC ordered an
external audit of DTE and Consumers Energy, the two largest utility providers in the state.
That audit
found that the number and length of outages DTE customers experienced was "greater than usually acceptable for utilities." The audit also found that a lot of DTE’s equipment was older than comparable utilities, requiring more maintenance and likely leading to more outages.
DTE plans to invest $10 billion in its grid over the next five years, a spokesperson said in an email. $250 million of that is for infrastructure that delivers power to Ann Arbor, they said – about $50 million a year.
At a tour in October, DTE showed reporters a new facility that would replace the Argo power substation that serves downtown Ann Arbor. The company plans to complete that project by the end of this year, a spokesperson said.
DTE has been making improvements and investing in its grid, Stults says.
"In some areas the magnitude of investment is large because it has been disinvested in for a long time," she says.
Critics of DTE argue that the company has allowed its infrastructure to languish and is only ramping up maintenance due to pressure from ratepayers and organizations. Ann Arbor is one of several intervenors in cases related to DTE’s rates and reliability.
In the company’s 2024 rate increase request case, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel
argued that DTE asks for more money than it needs to make the improvements it proposes. Stults says the company shouldn’t ask consumers to foot the bill.
"They do not get a blank check," Stults says. "They have to be smart and wise in those investments."
Shifting toward change
Intervention pushes DTE toward Ann Arbor’s sustainability goals, Stults says.
"If you're not in these cases you can't push the utility to get to the future that our constituents want," she says.
She hopes nudging the largest utility provider in the state can lead to change in other companies.
"If we can get DTE to kind of shift, we shift the entire discourse," Stults says. "And if DTE shifts, Consumers [Energy] shifts and [Upper Peninsula Power Company] shifts, and so you start to see a fundamental systems change."
Miller says Ann Arbor’s efforts have been effective.
"The city of Ann Arbor has done a commendable job of putting pressure on DTE as it relates to its sustainability goals and grid resilience," he says. "It is a hard-fought battle."
Most recently, Ann Arbor and DTE Gas
renewed their gas franchise for another 10 years. The agreement includes a climate change clause, which outlines the city's and utility’s commitments to reaching their respective renewable energy goals.
That's representative of how Ann Arbor and DTE work together, Stults says.
"We have a relationship with DTE, just like you have relationships in your life," she says.
Miller says more municipalities need to put pressure on DTE.
"The only way that we [can] improve our utility is by continued collaboration, and really being vocal and putting pressure on actually enforcing these goals," he says.
Jackson says the city’s climate goals give her hope for a better, greener future.
"This city is taking action in so many ways, and so it makes it really hard to sit in despair when you know that things are being acted upon," she says. And by intervening in these cases, Ann Arbor is bringing change to other communities as well.
"Things are happening," she says. "Things are moving forward."