(WWJ) Crews from DTE and Consumers Energy are working to restore power to more than 80,000 Michiganders following Wednesday's treacherous ice storm as state officials call for hearings to hold the utility companies accountable for the long delays.
According to DTE, service has been restored to 95 percent of the customers who lost power due to weather damage last week. By the energy company's count, that is approximately 600,000 of 630,000 affected clients.
The DTE outage map, however, reported almost 63,000 outages across the metro area. A representative for DTE told WWJ that the map counts all outages, not just those caused by the ice storm, and says it would not be unusual to see around 4,000 outages on the map at any given time.
This still does not adequately explain the discrepancy between the map and DTE's latest post-storm update.
At this time, DTE believes it will have electricity restored to all customers by the end of Tuesday -- almost an entire week after the lights went out.
Consumers Energy also has crews in the field today, working to get power back to 28,000 customers across the state. So far, they have restored service to more than 250,000 homes and businesses.
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For Consumers customers, power should be restored by Monday night.
While many residents are grateful to have lights and heat again, the long outages across cold winter days and nights also raised concerns.
Several state officials have called for hearings for DTE and Consumers Energy to determine why restoration took so long and why so many customers lost power in the first place.
One such legislator is Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who said in a Tweet that the length of the outages in freezing temperatures is completely unacceptable.
"Right now Michigan is competitive with rates when it comes to corporate rates... But we have some of the highest residential rates in the entire country," McMorrow said, speaking to WWJ's Charlie Langton.
The senator also stated that DTE made record profits and that the company needs to build in a regulatory mechanism so that customers are automatically credited if they lose power for long periods of time.
DTE's "Damages and Reliability Credits" policy allows for a $25 credit if power goes out for more than 16 hours in non-catastrophic conditions, more than 120 hours in catastrophic conditions or eight times in a 12-month period. This policy does not automatically apply to customer accounts. Customers must apply for the credit and may be denied. ((UPDATE: DTE says customers without power for 4 or more days will get an automatic $35 credit)).
Sen. McMorrow said that the current priority is getting power restored -- but to expect hearings sooner rather than later.
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