Consumers Energy has asked state regulators to approve a new $436 million rate hike. That would raise household electricity bill prices by about 13%.
"Fundamentally, what we're talking about is making investments and upgrades to deliver better electric service," said spokesperson Brian Wheeler. "We know particularly with the storms that we've seen here in Michigan, especially lately, that there's a premium on being more reliable and having fewer and shorter outages."
Wheeler said Consumers Energy is devoting more resources to an accelerated schedule of tree trimming, since trees falling on electric wires are the single biggest cause of outages.
The company is also planning to bury about 50 miles of electric lines in areas where outages are especially frequent, and invest in technologies that can quickly identify the location of a broken line, so workers can more rapidly restore service to larger regions after storms.
Reliability concerns
Ultimately, the Michigan Public Service Commission will decide whether Consumers Energy gets the full amount, or less. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said it should be much less.
"They always say the increases are for improving reliability," Nessel told Michigan Public. "They increased corporate profits, they increased shareholder dividends, and they increased their executive salaries and bonuses. But in terms of improving service and reliability — we've not seen that occur."
Overall, Michigan has among the very lowest metrics for reliability in the nation. The 2024 Citizens Utility Board of Michigan report (using 2022 data) said Michigan was 49th in the nation for the average time to restore power following an outage, and 43rd for the duration of outages per customer.
Affordability worries
Nessel said the rate increases on their own are deeply worrisome.
"What Consumers is doing is pricing their own customers out of the market," Nessel said. "People are not going to be able to afford to pay their electric bill anymore. This is not some discretionary household item, right? It's not like a streaming service. This is your electricity. People literally will die if they don't have electricity in their homes. We get letters, emails, from people pleading, 'I can't afford to pay my electricity bill as is. I certainly can't afford to pay another 13%.'"
Wheeler said the company works to connect customers who are having trouble paying their bills with state and federal assistance programs. The utility also has its own programs.
"Ultimately what affects your bill is not just the rate but how much you use," said Wheeler. "We're doing a lot with home energy analysis, so you can see ways you can reduce your energy usage. We provided earlier this year $5 million to assist people after a particularly cold stretch that we saw here in Michigan. We understand that some people can struggle with their bills. We really want to work with people to afford to pay their bills."
Who decides the rate?
Over the next 10 months, the Michigan Public Service Commission will conduct a public process for determining the ultimate rate increase. The agency will analyze the company's rate filing, as well as briefs contesting the request filed by intervenors such as consumer and environmental groups and the state Attorney General's office.
In recent history, the MPSC has typically reduced utility rate requests by at least a third — sometimes cutting them nearly in half. Regulated utilities are generally allowed to include a return on equity (essentially, the rate of shareholder profit they are allowed to charge customers) of between 9 and 10% of the total increase in rates.
Consumers Energy is one of Michigan Public's corporate sponsors.
This story was edited on 6/5/2025 to change the numeral 15 to 50 in the fourth paragraph.
