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Voices: Detroit’s DTE shutoff crisis has a face, and it looks like mine
Amani Sawari, Planet Detroit
June 27, 2026
Editor’s note: Amani Sawari is an energy justice strategist at the Detroit nonprofit We Want Green Too, which is an intervener in DTE Gas Co.’s rate case.
The day my power was shut off, I wanted to scream, and I wanted to hide.
That tension is the part of this crisis that people rarely describe out loud. A shutoff creates shame, and the shame is what keeps it hidden.
It’s the hardest piece of the work I do now in energy justice. People would rather carry the experience quietly than raise a hand and say it happened to them.
Although shutoffs are common across this city, each person tends to feel alone in that moment when the gas goes cold. It makes it challenging to organize people around an issue no one wants to talk about.
But the data makes it impossible to ignore.
In 2025, DTE executed close to 48,000 shutoffs among its Detroit gas customers — including both electric and gas service shutoffs — according to data we requested as part of DTE’s last gas rate case.
The figure far exceeds previously reported Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) data showing DTE disconnected 28,935 gas or gas and electric combination customers in 2025 across its service territory.
These 48,000 shutoffs in Detroit account for about 62% of the total shutoffs executed on gas customers across the utility’s entire service territory, in a city that accounts for under 17% of its gas customers.
Shutoffs here lasted an average of 38 days. In River Rouge, they stretched to 53. Counted together, Detroiters lived through more than 1.8 million days without gas, which amounts to roughly a full week of service loss for every DTE Energy customer in the city.
The distance between Detroit and everywhere else is striking. Ypsilanti, the city with the next-highest total, recorded about 17 times fewer shutoffs. The pattern comes into focus when the cities sit side by side.
Top 10 cities by DTE service shutoffs, 2025. Source: MPSC docket U-21973 (filing U-21973-0309, FLO-203), Workpaper 1, Statistical Analysis of Shutoffs and HPP Programs.
Look at the last two columns. Detroit is nearly 89% Black and brown and ranks at the top of this list by an order of magnitude. Ann Arbor makes up a larger share of DTE’s gas customers than most cities ranked above it, yet it lands at the very bottom for shutoffs.
A Black resident who falls behind on a bill in Detroit is far likelier to lose service than the same person would be almost anywhere else in Michigan.
Some of that gap comes down to who shows up. Ann Arbor regularly takes part in MPSC rate cases to defend its residents.
Oakland County announced this year it is taking steps to intervene in DTE’s $474-million rate hike request case for the first time.
Detroit has not formally intervened in more than 15 years. The city’s only full intervention in a DTE rate case was in 2009, and the last time Detroit Public Schools intervened, representing the interests of its youth, was 2017.
The MPSC says its purpose is to ensure energy that is safe, reliable, accessible, and reasonably priced. Yet when its chair was asked about affordability, he reached for favorable comparisons, noting that Michigan has lower energy rates than the national average.
That may be strictly true, but it does not explain how a city with 17% of DTE’s customers absorbs 62% of its shutoffs. By one federal count, Michigan ranked 11th in the nation for gas shutoffs in 2024.
Nationwide, the share of families living with some form of energy insecurity has climbed from about 27% in 2020 to nearly 33% in 2024.
Utilities tell us these rate increases buy reliability, but there is nothing reliable about a system that causes tens of thousands of shutoffs a year in a single city.
Losing power in a society built to run on it is its own form of exile, leaving people carrying a sense of worthlessness they did nothing to deserve.
This is what energy poverty looks like in a wealthy country. The pipes and the wires are all in place. What has changed is who absorbs the risk with a loss of power each time a profitable utility wins another rate increase.
I keep waiting for the number that finally moves someone. Forty-eight thousand in one city, in one year. If that is not damning enough, I would like to know what is.
Tyler LaBerge and Justin Schott of the Energy Equity Project contributed to this piece.
This article first appeared on Planet Detroit and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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