Legislators grill utility DTE, Consumers Energy over power outage response
LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) – Weeks after severe winter weather knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, leaving them in the dark for days, the leaders of DTE and Consumers Energy faced a grilling from legislators Wednesday over the response.
Both utility companies did a mea culpa, apologizing to their customers for the outages and explaining to committee members what they're doing right now to prevent another.
"I cannot run a city, however small it is, without power," Highland Park Mayor Glenda McDonald.
McDonald laid out a series of examples of how her city coped with several power outages in recent weeks.
"Our fire department went down. The generator didn't kick in, so that is dangerous to the city. They had to lift up the doors if they had a fire. The police department technology went down. We had to go to antiquated in order to make sure that we got our calls. City Hall had to shut down twice," McDonald said.
Her testimony was one of several at Wednesday's hearing which brought DTE, Consumers Energy, and its regulators, the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) into one room.
"We cannot, and we will not accept that this is our new normal," Rep. Helena Scott, chair of the Energy, Communications, and Technology Committee, said.
After offering an apology, DTE President Trevor Lauer said there are three solutions they're working on - tree trimming, doing preventative maintenance and investing in upgrading the system.
There are still portions of the area using infrastructure from the early 1900s.
They'd also like to move more of the utilities underground in the coming years.
"We have a plan we're executing on it. We just need to continue to accelerate that. We started dramatically accelerating it seven years ago. And we're not accelerating at the pace we need to offer the reliability to our customers," Lauer said.
Lauer acknowledged that the $35 credit offered to customers who lost power for several days doesn't cut it.
The Michigan Public Service Commission said they've recently revised their rules for those credits, so customers who've been in the dark for at least 16 hours will get an automatic $35 credit plus an additional $35 for each day they're without power.
"I realize that's not enough to fully compensate customers. But we do think it's a meaningful step in the right direction," said Katherine Peretick, Michigan Public Service Commission commissioner.
"We hold ourselves completely accountable too," said Tonya Berry, Senior Vice President of Transformation and Engineering at Consumers Energy.
That comment drew a chuckle from some in the audience, but MSPC does plan to hire industry experts to conduct a third-party review of the utility companies.
"And it's going to look at the engineering side, so the physical infrastructure that the utilities have as well as the programs and processes that are in place for both distribution system investment, maintenance, and storm response," Peretick said.
"Governor Whitmer wants Michigan to be the leader in electric vehicle technology. I was without power, without electricity, for 10 of 14 days; I would not accept an EV right now if you gave me one," said Cathy Russ, a DTE customer from Royal Oak.
No action was taken at the end of the hearing.
Rep. Scott said they are planning to organize a workgroup of legislators and the Michigan Public Service Commission to develop new policies that they can enforce.
