Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has asked state utility regulators to rehear their approval of DTE Energy's special electricity contracts for a Google hyperscale data center in Van Buren Township, arguing the deal could shift costs onto ordinary households and businesses for years.
Source: Michigan Attorney General
The petition for rehearing, filed on October 30 in case U-22058 before the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC), says DTE failed to meet its legal burdens, the commission applied the wrong standards of review, and the approved terms leave weak protections for the utility's existing residential and business customers.
Source: Michigan Attorney General
The contracts at the centre of the fight run for twenty years and are worth billions of dollars. Reporting on the filing puts the planned facility at about 1 gigawatt of load, with DTE committed to building 1,600 megawatts of new renewable capacity and 480 megawatts of battery storage to serve it, and Google required to pay for at least 80 percent of its contracted power.
Source: Ann Arbor Times
Who pays when a giant data center's power costs run higher than projected — the tech company that uses the electricity, or the families and small businesses already on DTE's lines? That is the question the Attorney General wants the commission to answer again, this time year by year.
The 'aggregation' fight at the heart of the case
Nessel's biggest objection is to the commission's decision to adopt DTE's contract-long 'aggregation' approach — judging the costs and benefits of serving Google across the whole 20-year term instead of reconciling them annually. Under that approach, she argues, customers could subsidise the data center for years before anyone can prove it at the end of the contract.
Source: Michigan Attorney General
The Attorney General's office notes that the commission itself concedes other customers will directly subsidise the data center for at least a four-year period, from 2035 to 2038. DTE's own long-term modelling, cited in coverage of the filing, projects about $1.7 billion in system-wide benefits over the term — a projection Nessel says is not guaranteed and may never be realised.
Source: Ann Arbor Times
“The most shocking part of these contracts is that DTE and the MPSC are seemingly signing off on unknown ratepayer costs to support the Google data center, as long as DTE's benefit projections can keep pace for 20 years,” Nessel said, insisting that costs and benefits be “accounted for and reconciled annually.”
Source: Michigan Attorney General
Collateral cap and missing transmission costs
The petition also urges the commission to reject outright a collateral cap that limits the liability of Google and its parent company Alphabet for costs of service. And it says regulators ignored significant transmission costs that the Attorney General identified and DTE refused to account for in its contracts — the same omission she raised when the commission considered DTE contracts for the Oracle and OpenAI data center in Saline.
Source: Michigan Attorney General
“These are massive, twenty-year, billion-dollar contracts between one of the wealthiest businesses on the planet, and one of the most powerful companies in the State,” Nessel said. “The MPSC simply didn't do their job here — failing to protect DTE's existing residential and business customers, and accepting lousy contracts with weak terms.”
Source: Michigan Attorney General
How the project got here
The commission conditionally approved the Google contracts on October 1, 2026, on the basis that no costs would pass to DTE Electric's other customers, and the Van Buren Township Planning Commission approved the site plan on October 14. A separate gas plant of 727 megawatts with carbon capture is planned for completion by 2033 as part of the wider build-out reported around the project.
Source: Ann Arbor Times
Van Buren Township sits in Wayne County, west of Detroit, along the I-275 corridor — a part of southeast Michigan where many Punjabi and other immigrant families run trucking, warehousing and small businesses that are heavy users of electricity and are especially exposed to commercial rate rises.
What happens next
The commission must now decide whether to grant rehearing in U-22058. Nessel's petition asks it to adopt her recommendations — stronger cost recovery from Google, annual tracking and reconciliation, and adequate backstops from Google and DTE — or, failing that, to reject the contracts outright. No rehearing date was announced in the Attorney General's release.
Source: Michigan Attorney General
For Michigan ratepayers, the decision will set a precedent far beyond one township: how the state treats every hyperscale data center that follows will be measured against the standard set in this case.
Source: Ann Arbor Times