Powering the People: DTE Energy

More than a dozen thought leaders and decision makers took the stage at the Edison Foundation's Institute for Electric Innovation's 13th annual Powering the People event in Washington D.C. Enjoy these excerpts.
 

Jonathan Hirte: We are an electric provider in southeast Michigan that includes metro Detroit. We also do gas delivery throughout the state, including some rural counties in northern Michigan.

When you look at our customer base, about thirty percent of our customers are at two hundred percent of FPL or below. So, we have a large universe of customers that at some point may need energy assistance to help them meet that energy burden and maintain bill affordability.

Digging into sort of the deeper findings. I know some of these were mentioned both by Matt and by Ted. Our kind of cohort, we were one that had five cohorts instead of three. But that middle cohort, one pattern that really emerged was the extent to which consumption of energy was a key driver of arrearages.

That may seem sort of intuitive, but for these folks, they historically were in the oldest homes in our service territory. They often had severe issues with the building envelope, whether that was broken windows, or a hole in the roof.