LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – DTE President and CEO presented a company update and future goals to the House Committee on Energy, Communications, and Technology Committee on Wednesday morning. 

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“We are changing the way we deliver power with our grid, to make it more reliable.  We are transforming the way we produce power, we put on the grid cleaner sources of energy,” DTE CEO, Chairman, and President Jerry Norcia said, “We are upgrading our gas infrastructure for safe, reliable gas service as well as for emission reductions.  We are doing all this while keeping energy affordable for our customers, and while investing in our state’s economic growth.” 

Norcia addressed three key areas that the company was hoping to focus more on going forward, as well as speaking briefly about the storm outages over the weekend that left more than 60,000 customers without power. 

“At any given moment, 97% of our customers were not impacted by the storm,” he said, “since Sunday we have been laser focused on the 3% of our customers who at the peak of the storm did experience an interruption.” 

The Chairman of DTE also provided the most recent update that nearly 100% of customers had power outages restored. 

“More than 2,000 DTE members were deployed to ensure public safety, assess damage, and make the repairs necessary to restore power to our customers,” he added, “Happy to report that as of 4 am this morning, 99.9% of our customers on the DTE system have power.” 

Several members of the committee asked about why the rates had been increased, including Representative Mike McFall (D-Hazel Park). 

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“The rate increase, it’s our first one in four years,” Norcia said, “and we’ve invested almost $5 billion dollars in the grid, we work really hard to keep our rates flat during COVID, so our customers wouldn’t suffer incremental burden during COVID.” 

“The increase that we’re looking for, you’ve seen some of the staff recommendations, we expect that it will have an impact of about 20 to 30 cents a day on the average customer bill,” he added. 

Others took a more direct approach and asked for more specifics regarding how DTE was going to address the recent outages and prevent future ones. 

“Some people need life saving care, due to this power and this power is a right, it is a right of all of our citizens to have it,” Representative Jaime Churches (D-Wyandotte) said. 

“So for me I go to hear about all these wonderful things DTE is doing, and I appreciate your service and willingness to collaborate, but I guess the reason that you’re here isn’t because of lal the good things you’re doing, the reason you’re here is because the people we represent are suffering and we are watching it happen,” she said. 

The DTE executive offered some insights into the rate of progress within the company in regards to addressing customers needs. 

“What impedes us, what we try to balance is the level and pace of investment with affordability and so that we don’t put too much of a tremendous burden on our customers from an affordability perspective that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.” 

Representative Erin Byrnes (D-Dearborn) inquired specifically about a timeline for the replacement of more than 15,000 miles of grid. 

“That’s the longest part of our plan,” Norcia said, “That’ll take quite a bit of time, 15 to 20 years to build out, fifteen to sixteen thousand miles of grid, we’re planning to ramp up to about 1,000 miles per year and that’s a very large undertaking.”