Michigan lawmakers grill utility companies over power outages.

Representatives from DTE Energy and Consumers Energy apologized for the power outages caused by two back-to-back severe winter storms that knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents and businesses. The Michigan Public Service Commission said climate change, poor tree maintenance, and a deteriorating infrastructure are the leading contributors to severe weather causing outages. Utility representatives pledged to work faster on improving reliability in the future, but they admitted it could still take upwards of a decade to fix Michigan’s vast electric network. The public service commission is looking at further addressing reliability issues by requiring performance and safety reports from utility companies and initiating a third-party, independent audit of the operations of the Consumers and DTE distribution systems.