Affordability tops concerns at DTE’s Detroit listening session: Resident’s winter heat bill ‘devastating’

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DTE Energy hosted a listening session Thursday night in Detroit to solicit input on its forthcoming Integrated Resource Plan, which maps out the utility’s long-term plans for supplying electricity.

The utility must file its IRP with the state by the end of 2026.

Ratepayers were asked to weigh in on how they would like to see the company prioritize its stated goals of reliability, affordability, and clean energy.

Affordability and frequent power outages are top concerns for the dozen or so attendees who gathered at the LA SED Senior and Youth Center in Southwest Detroit. They also brought up issues like a lack of staffed offices where they can seek help from DTE employees and the poor condition of wires in their neighborhoods.

Southwest Detroit resident Angelo Brown told Planet Detroit he experiences frequent power outages and struggles to afford his winter utility bills, which he said use up nearly half of the money he receives from Social Security.

“It’s devastating,” he said of his winter heating bill, although he said the Home Heating Credit provides some assistance. This credit offers assistance for heating costs to income-qualified households.

Data centers increase DTE ratepayers’ affordability concerns 

Brown expressed concerns that data centers being built in the state could add more costs for customers like himself.

DTE said a recent data center deal could improve affordability for other customers by allowing the utility to sell excess generation. 

The Michigan Public Service Commission, Michigan’s utility regulator, adopted new affordability parameters for utilities’ integrated resource plans in December. Read Planet Detroit’s Guide to the MPSC here.

The commission cited “significant potential load growth” from data centers and ordered utilities to consider affordability impacts in their long-term plans and offer mitigation strategies if energy burdens, or the percentage of household income used to pay for energy, exceed 6%.

“We’re moving into these IRPs, where they’re going to be building new resources at an unprecedented pace,” Bryan Smigielski, a Michigan organizer with the Sierra Club, told Planet Detroit in a phone interview before the event.

The expected electricity demands from data centers could lead to a buildout of new gas plants, he said. If the facilities fail to materialize or large users leave the area, other customers could be left to pay for the infrastructure, Smigielski said. An increase in gas use could also drive up wholesale gas prices and costs for customers, he added.

DTE President and CEO Joi Harris said during an October earnings call that a pending data center project in Saline Township would not require additional fossil fuel generation, but each additional 1 gigawatt data center could necessitate a new natural gas plant.

The MPSC approved DTE’s electric contracts for the Saline Township project in December. 

Christina Hajj, DTE director of strategy and corporate development, said Thursday night that the company’s IRP will look at “all resource types” — including renewables, nuclear, and gas with carbon capture and storage — when considering how to meet the demand from large customers like data centers.

When asked how residential customers will be protected from the costs for this generation, which may only be needed for data centers, Hajj said the state has a cost-of-service rate design, with system costs aligning with how customers use the system.

Douglas Jester, a consultant with 5 Lakes Energy who frequently contributes testimony in MPSC cases, told Planet Detroit in October that relying on the state’s existing cost allocation framework could leave other customers paying for a portion of generation needed solely to service large customers, with each 1 GW data center potentially raising residential rates by 5%-10%.

High bills, power outages weigh on DTE ratepayers

Several attendees at the Thursday meeting spoke about the costs of both rising bills and dealing with power outages.

The average DTE and Consumers Energy residential customer is paying $850 more each year in 2025 than they were in 2006, outpacing inflation, according to The Detroit News.

When a customer asked whether the IRP would raise her bill, DTE’s Hajj said the utility is in a period of heavy investment to rebuild the grid and transition to cleaner energy, meaning bills could go up and then come back down.

North End resident Cornelius Harris said residents were previously told that electric rates needed to be raised to improve infrastructure, but the community isn’t seeing the impact from these investments. He said he’s experienced outages when storms were threatening the area, but before they hit.  

Allen Park resident Guadalupe Lara said her community will panic when a storm is coming, with residents remembering previous outages where they were without power for days.

Some attendees at Thursday’s meeting questioned the reliability of renewable energy.

Attendee Rocio Campos said home solar in Puerto Rico allowed areas with the panels to maintain power during an island-wide outage.

Southwest Detroiter Brown said that rooftop solar could potentially help him both lower his bills and keep power on during extreme weather.

He told Planet Detroit before the meeting that a prolonged outage during the severely cold weather Detroit is experiencing would quickly deplete his rainy-day fund.

“I could spend a couple days in a hotel and then I’d have to go to a homeless shelter.”

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