ANN ARBOR, Mich. (WXYZ) — "I did just go grocery shopping, so I lost all my groceries," said Katharine Pepple about the last power outage that left her family without electricity for two days.
Pepple is one of a number of Ann Arbor residents who like the idea of a publicly-owned power utility.
"I think public utilities would be good. I think they'd be managed a lot better. I think that there would be a lot more voice for people in Ann Arbor."
Ann Arbor for Public Power is a non-profit coalition of residents and organizations whose goal is to see the city split from DTE Energy and transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.
"We have not seen responsiveness from DTE to these power outages and they aren't incentivized to respond to them," said Don Lee, Executive Director for Ann Arbor for Public Power. "Every dollar they spend on resilience is a dollar that comes out of their out of their profits."
Lee said municipal utilities are cheaper and more reliable for residents.
Dr. Missy Stults is Ann Arbor's Director of Sustainability and Innovations and she said everything is on the table that moves their community to clean, safe, and reliable power.
City officials are awaiting a report to help them decide on a number of ways they can achieve their goals for clean energy.
"This is a big decision the community is going to make," Stults said, adding that one possibility is a "sustainable energy utility" or SEU that could be used to provide renewable energy to residents during a DTE outage through solar power stored in batteries.
Stults said the issue isn't just infrastructure, it's also climate change.
"We're having more frequent storms. We're having more outages, and so we've got to think about both of those variables together," she said.
Stults said they expect to have results of the report shortly after Labor Day.
Action News reached out to DTE Energy and they released the following statement:
DTE is in a strong position to help Ann Arbor achieve the community’s clean energy goals. Investor-owned utilities like DTE can deploy capital quickly, at low costs.
Over the past five years, DTE has invested more than $5 billion in our infrastructure, including more than $175 million in our electrical grid in Washtenaw County alone. We’ve been trimming trees, hardening infrastructure, building new substations, connecting new customers and replacing aging equipment. Ann Arbor has a goal to reach 100% renewable energy by 2030. And DTE is committed to helping the city get there.
Between DTE’s wind and solar projects and local participation in MIGreenPower, we’re already 30% of the way toward Ann Arbor's carbon reduction goals. In other words, 30 percent of the energy Ann Arbor receives can be attributed to renewable resources. More than 10,000 residential customers in Washtenaw County are enrolled in our MIGreenPower program as are the University of Michigan, Washtenaw Community College and the Ann Arbor Public School system and numerous local businesses.
Municipalization means that a community purchases the distribution system of the electric company at today’s market value. These costs could be very significant. This does not include the cost of buying or generating electricity for customers or the ongoing costs of running the system once purchased. The community also must factor in costs for ongoing grid modernization investments, grid security, and reliability.
