The Metro: Rep. Tlaib says DTE must pay for outages and pollution

More than 450,000 DTE Energy customers lost power in last week’s storms. Many of them will not see a dollar for it.

Michigan requires DTE to credit customers $42 a day when the lights stay off. But the rule, written by the Michigan Public Service Commission, works on a sliding scale: the bigger the storm, the longer the wait. In the largest outages, nothing starts until day four. Power was back for most customers before then.

The storms produced three tornadoes, including one that tore across Detroit’s east side Thursday with 115 mph winds and kept going into Windsor — the first inside the city since 1997.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who represents Dearborn and part of Detroit, has spent this year pressing both the company and the state regulators who set that rule. In February, a federal judge fined DTE and a subsidiary $100 million for air pollution at Zug Island. Two days later, regulators approved a $242 million rate increase. In April, the company asked for $474 million more.

Her bill, the Make DTE Pay Act, would raise Clean Air Act penalties on utilities that seek rate increases within two years of an environmental fine. 

Tlaib joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the storm, the rule and the regulators who wrote it.

The Metro contacted DTE Energy and did not receive a response by airtime.