AG Nessel Seeks to Slash DTE’s $474 Million Rate Hike Request by 71%

LANSING – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has filed testimony in DTE’s latest electric rate hike case, urging the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to slash the utility’s proposed hike by 71%. DTE filed its latest $474.3 million rate hike request just two months after the utility received approval for a $242.4 million increase. Attorney General Nessel urges the MPSC to increase rates by no more than $134.5 million, cutting DTE’s requested 10% residential rate hike to 2%.

“Throughout my nearly 8 years in office, DTE and Consumers Energy have consistently inflated their rate hike requests with unjustified costs,” said Attorney General Nessel. “This latest filing is no different. Over the past 15 years, DTE’s rates and capital expenditures have spiked significantly, driving massive corporate earnings for shareholders rather than grid reliability for Michiganders. That’s long been their entire business model, and the MPSC is happily helping them along at the expense of ratepayers.”

The Attorney General’s testimony also scrutinizes DTE’s first-of-their-kind large load studies regarding data center development. Attorney General Nessel warns DTE is laying the groundwork to obscure data center costs and expensive infrastructure upgrades and potentially spread those costs across existing customers. When pressed during discovery on whether its cost allocation practices would prevent cost shifting, DTE claimed the term “cost shifting” was unclear and ambiguous.

To shield ratepayers from subsidizing massive data centers, Attorney General Nessel recommended:

• Establishing a separate rate class for large-load data centers;
• Requiring that all incremental generation, transmission, and distribution costs caused by data centers are assigned directly to those entities, and that they also cover their share of embedded costs;
• Mandating robust tracking of all resource addition driven by large-load customers; and
• Establishing modernized modeling standards to protect residential ratepayers from unfair cost allocations.

“DTE ought to be able to directly answer basic questions about cost-shifting, rather than claiming confusion, when this is a central concern across the state,” said Attorney General Nessel. “DTE is prioritizing the demands of billionaire tech giants to boost their bottom line over affordability and reliability for Michigan families. We cannot allow these utilities to force everyday ratepayers to foot the bill for DTE’s prized billion-dollar data center developments, and unless the MPSC insists on these standards, that’s what’s going to happen.”

The Attorney General also recently filed testimony in Google's data center proposal and filed a brief in support of her appeal in the Michigan Court of Appeals challenging the MPSC's “conditional approval” of two DTE special contracts to service a hyperscale AI data center in Washtenaw County.

Attorney General Nessel intervenes in every major utility rate case before the MPSC and has helped save Michigan consumers more than $4.6 billion in proposed rate hikes. Other rate hike cases currently open before the MPSC include Consumers Energy’s natural gas rate hike request (U-21981) and electric rate hike request (U-22070), DTE’s natural gas rate hike request (U-21973), SEMCO Energy Gas Company’s natural gas rate hike request (U-22002), and Upper Peninsula Power Company’s electric rate hike request (U-22032).

DTE sells electricity to approximately 2.3 million customers in Southeast Michigan and natural gas to 1.3 million customers across the state.

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