Detroit City Council voted unanimously in September to study whether the city should break away from DTE Energy and build its own public power utility, after storms left more than 450,000 people without electricity. The idea isn't entirely new for Detroit, which ran its own public electric utility until financial troubles tied to the city's 2013 bankruptcy forced it to shut down. Now, with outages fresh on residents' minds, the question is back on the table.
The council's vote directs the city's legislative policy division to examine how other Michigan municipalities source their power and report on whether a similar model could work in Detroit, according to ClickOnDetroit. Council President Pro Tem Gabrielle Santiago-Romero pushed for the probe, arguing that the city's legislative policy division should look closely at how other cities use public power, per reporting from Spartan Newsroom. Santiago-Romero has also said she believes Detroit residents pay a lot for electricity but get little in return, telling the outlet she feels they're being robbed.
DTE, for its part, has pointed to its own numbers in response to the scrutiny. The company told ClickOnDetroit it has invested more than $1 billion in Detroit's electric grid over the past five years and restored power to more than 90% of Detroit customers within 48 hours of the storm that triggered the council's vote. DTE also said the length of Detroit power outages improved by 91% between 2023 and 2025, according to the same report.
A Tornado Adds Urgency to the Push
The storm that knocked out power to nearly half a million people wasn't an isolated incident driving the conversation. Detroit residents also lost power after a tornado left thousands without electricity, per Spartan Newsroom's reporting, adding to frustration with the investor-owned utility's reliability during severe weather.
Galen Hardy, Michigan Environmental Council's program director in Detroit, has been vocal about wanting the city to move faster. Hardy said he wants Detroit to act on bringing back an independent utility, framing the current council study as a step that should lead somewhere concrete, Spartan Newsroom reports.
What Public Power Looks Like Elsewhere in Michigan
Public power utilities are community-owned, not-for-profit operations run as a division of local government, according to the Michigan Municipal Electric Association. The group's membership includes utilities in Traverse City, Marquette, Zeeland, Harbor Springs, Lansing, Newberry, L'Anse, Baraga and Escanaba, per Spartan Newsroom. Sources differ on exactly how many municipally owned electric utilities operate statewide — Spartan Newsroom's reporting cites 41, while Michigan Advance has reported the association represents all 40 of the state's municipally owned electric utilities — so that figure should be treated as unsettled.
Katie Abraham, executive director of the association, has made the case that affordability is a major draw for cities weighing municipalization, and that smaller service territories let public utilities respond more quickly when the lights go out, Spartan Newsroom reports. Abraham has also said public utility workers live in the communities they serve and are ready to respond when outages hit. Per the association, Michigan's public electric utilities saved residents and businesses more than $400 million in rates and reliability in 2023, a figure Abraham cited to the outlet.
That reliability edge shows up in the association's own outage data: in 2023, public-power customers experienced 1.5 fewer hours without power outside of major events and more than 4.5 fewer hours during major events compared with customers of other utilities, according to the group. Separately, Michigan residential public-power customers paid 17% less per kilowatt-hour in 2024 than customers of investor-owned utilities, according to a 2026 American Public Power Association report cited by Planet Detroit. Public power currently covers about 10% of Michigan's electric load, per Michigan Advance, and Michigan's last traditional municipal utility to form dates back to 1935, according to the City of Ann Arbor's municipalization FAQ.
Detroit Is Watching Ann Arbor Closely
Abraham told Spartan Newsroom she had not heard from Detroit's city government about pursuing municipalization directly, but she expects Detroit officials are waiting to see how Ann Arbor's own municipal utility proposal plays out before moving further. Ann Arbor voters have a proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot — Proposal E — that would create a nine-member municipal electric utility board to operate a publicly owned power grid and set rates, according to CBS News Detroit. If it passes, voters would elect five of the nine board members in 2028, with the city council appointing the remaining four, per the same report.
Importantly, Proposal E would not itself authorize the city to purchase DTE's assets — that step would have to happen later, CBS News Detroit reports. Estimates of what that acquisition could eventually cost vary widely depending on the source. Conan Smith has estimated the price tag for DTE's infrastructure in Ann Arbor could range from $180 million on the conservative end up to $1 billion, according to CBS News Detroit. A separate 2023 city study, cited by the City of Ann Arbor, estimated acquiring DTE's distribution assets and business in the city, excluding substations, could plausibly cost between $281 million and $1.15 billion, with another roughly $114 million needed for substations and transmission lines. Ann Arbor voters previously approved a related but distinct Sustainable Energy Utility proposal in November 2024, which the city's FAQ describes as a supplemental program rather than a traditional utility meant to serve all of a community's electricity needs.
What Michigan Law Requires — and What Other Cities Learned
Any path toward municipal ownership would face a high legal bar. A Michigan constitutional provision requires that a proposition to acquire a public utility first be approved by three-fifths of the electors voting on it, according to the Michigan Legislature. The City of Ann Arbor's own municipalization FAQ describes the same threshold, stating that state law requires approval from at least three-fifths of a city's voters before it can acquire a utility.
Other cities' experiences offer a mixed cautionary tale. Residents of Winter Park, Florida, voted to buy the city's electric assets from Progress Energy in 2003 and successfully left the investor-owned utility's grid by 2005, according to The Detroit News. Boulder, Colorado, took a different path, abandoning its effort to form a city-run power company in 2020 after spending roughly $29 million, the same report notes.
For now, Detroit's own effort remains at the fact-finding stage. The city is considering whether a municipal electric utility makes sense, but no decision has been made, and the legislative policy division's feasibility report has not yet been released.
