MI Officials Step In As DTE Seeks To Change New Outage Refund Rules

MICHIGAN — Michigan state officials are intervening in DTE Energy's request to change how some customers receive refunds after power outages, according to the Michigan Attorney General's Office.

Right now, the utility is required to automatically refund customers who lose power for a specific time period after officials amended its Service Quality Rules last year.

But DTE is now trying to change that automatic refund system by requiring customers who do not have a smart meter attached to their home to contact the utility to get their credit. The utility argues that traditional electric meters require direct customer action and make it difficult for the company to track outages on its own.

The 90-day deadline for the credit would begin at the time the customer reports the outage, not at the time of the outage, according to officials.

"DTE has an obligation to provide reliable service to all its customers, regardless of whether they have smart meters or not," Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said. "DTE’s desire to erode public accountability measures is unsurprising, but it is an overreach to seek to be permanently excused from complying with the outage credit mandate."

DTE Energy responded saying that they have not requested to be excused from paying outage credits for customers without smart meters, but rather making those customers proactively submit a credit request to help ensure their outage credit is captured and processed.

Customers are eligible for refunds for an extended outage including:

• A power outage of more than 16 hours due to an event that results in an interruption affecting 1 percent or less of DTE's electric customers.
• A power outage of more than 48 hours due to an event that results in an interruption affecting greater than 1 percent but less than 10 percent of DTE’s electric customers.
• A power outage of more than 96 hours under catastrophic conditions. Catastrophic conditions are defined as an event that results in an official state of emergency or an event that results in an interruption of 10 percent or more of DTE’s electric customers.