We Want Green Too Featured in Planet Detroit Voices: Detroit’s DTE shutoff crisis has a face, and it looks like mine

We Want Green Too's Energy Justice Strategist, Amani Sawari, is featured as a contributor in Planet Detroit's Voices Column.

Her powerfully written article looks at the impacts of energy poverty from her personal experience through the lens of her professional expertise supported by data from DTE's Gas rate case, exposing the impact of shutoffs for Detroiters.

The scale of the crisis

The article closes the gap between the shutoff numbers and real life expereince. In 2025, DTE conducted 48,000 shutoffs across the city of Detroit's gas service customers. The city accounts for less than 17% of DTE's gas customers but absorbs 62% of all shutoffs across the utility's entire service territory. The next-highest city, Ypsilanti, recorded an astounding 17 times fewer shutoffs.

Detroit shutoffs lasted an average of 38 days. In River Rouge, they stretched to 53. Added together, Detroiters lived through more than 1.8 million days without gas service in a single year — roughly a full week of service lost for every DTE customer in the city.

A racial pattern hiding in plain sight

The piece outlines a city-by-city breakdown that makes the pattern unmistakable. Detroit is nearly 89% Black and brown and tops the list by an order of shutoff magnitude. Ann Arbor with a larger share of DTE's gas customers than most cities ranked above it, still it lands at the very bottom for shutoffs.

The shame that keeps it hidden

As a central part of this article Sawari shares her direct experience from the day her own power was shut off. As unfortunately common that shutoffs are across Detroit, each person tends to feel alone in the moment the gas goes cold, making the issue so hard to organize around. Aman combats this through her vulnrable contribution to this column.

A national crisis hiding inside a state story

The piece zooms out to show this is not only a Detroit problem. By one federal count, Michigan ranked 11th in the nation for gas shutoffs in 2024. Nationwide, the share of families living with some form of energy insecurity has climbed from about 27% in 2020 to nearly 33% in 2024.

What "reliable" actually means

Sawari closes with a challenge that cuts through the rate-case jargon: utilities tell us rate increases buy reliability, but there is nothing reliable about a system that causes tens of thousands of shutoffs a year in a single city. The piece ends on a question we carry in our own work: what number finally moves someone?

It is also a reminder of why this work exists. We Want Green Too is proud to see Amani's voice in Planet Detroit.

Read Amani's full article here: https://planetdetroit.org/2026/06/detroit-dte-shutoff-crisis-has-a-face/