DTE Energy is again requesting a $450 million rate increase just four months after being approved for a $368 million rate increase.

“DTE is following their usual playbook, incessant and oppressive rate hike requests not grounded in reality, but rather based on the financial aspirations of their corporate shareholders.” – Dana Nessel, Attorney General

The absurdity of DTE rate increases follows a trend since 2015 of increasing rates by $1.1 billion. Yet, there is an even more absurd action taken by the power-hungry energy monopoly, selling debt. Outlier Media found in 2022 that DTE sold $282 million in debt from almost 300,000 customers for just $4.8 million to Jefferson Capital Systems.

Michigan has some of the most lacks rules around wage garnishment for debt collection so companies like Jefferson Capital bulk submit debt cases to the courts and receive default judgements which automatically starts taking funds from someone’s paycheck. Two out of three Detroiters were found to have some kind of debt in collections in 2016 and UM Poverty Solutions found 56% of Detroiters are financially insecure.

The data on this map was scraped from the 36th District Court listings of debt collection cases.