Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has filed a petition for rehearing challenging state regulators' conditional approval of DTE's power contracts for Google's planned 1-gigawatt data center in Van Buren Township. She wants the Michigan Public Service Commission to either toughen customer protections in the 20-year deal or scrap it altogether.
Nessel's office confirmed the filing Friday, saying the petition challenges the commission's sign-off and asks it to add stronger safeguards for DTE's existing customers, according to WLNS 6 News. The case, filed with the commission as U-22058, centers on whether everyday ratepayers could end up subsidizing the massive new electrical load that Google's project will bring to suburban southeast Michigan, per the Michigan Attorney General's office.
What Nessel Wants Changed
At the heart of the dispute is how much Google has to pay even if it ends up using less power than it has contracted for. The commission's approved deal requires Google to pay for at least 80% of its contracted power regardless of actual usage, but Nessel had pushed for a 90% minimum billing demand, arguing the lower threshold leaves too much risk on the table, according to the same WLNS report. Planet Detroit reported that she also sought an early-termination payment based on a 100% minimum billing demand for the contract's remaining months, rather than the weaker terms regulators ultimately approved.
Nessel's petition additionally asks DTE to factor transmission costs into its financial analysis, something the WLNS report says she contends DTE and commission staff left out entirely. She has also requested removal of a cap on the collateral Google must post if it exits the deal early, and she wants ongoing tracking of both the benefits and the costs the arrangement is supposed to generate.
Dueling Numbers On Who Benefits
DTE has argued that the costs of building new generation capacity for the project would be more than offset by $1.7 billion in benefits flowing to its other customers over the contract's 20-year term, per WLNS. The commission, for its part, has said the deal's total impact across that full 20-year span — rather than any single year's benefit — is the key consideration in evaluating whether the contracts are fair.
Nessel has pushed back hard on that framing. She has called the commission's approach a form of customer cost-shifting, arguing that projected benefits may never materialize and could end up masking the deal's real costs. She has also said Michigan law places the burden on DTE, not consumers, to prove its contracts are reasonable, and that the current 20-year aggregation standard creates an opening for data-center costs to land on ordinary electric bills.
A Familiar Fight, Bigger Stakes
This is not Nessel's first run at a DTE data-center contract. The commission approved DTE's contracts for a separate Saline Township data center tied to Oracle and OpenAI back in December 2025 without a contested hearing, and later denied Nessel's rehearing request in that case — a decision she is now challenging in the Michigan Court of Appeals, per WLNS. The size of that Saline Township project has itself been reported inconsistently: WKAR Public Media described it as a 1.4-gigawatt facility, while a Michigan Public Service Commission filing put the figure at 1.383 gigawatts.
The Google case is different in one key respect — it is the first Michigan hyperscale data-center contract to go through a full contested case rather than being waved through, giving Nessel more formal standing to press her objections. DTE expects the Van Buren Township facility to begin taking power in December 2027 and reach full load by December 2028, with the township's planning commission having already approved the project's site plan two weeks ago.
What's Already Locked In
Under the approved contracts, Google will pay for DTE to build 1,600 megawatts of renewable energy and 480 megawatts of battery storage for the site, and DTE has modeled a new 727-megawatt natural gas plant with carbon capture to serve the data center by 2033. Google must also make an early-exit payment covering at least 15 years of minimum charges if it walks away from the deal, backed by collateral described as an Alphabet guarantee that converts to a letter of credit if Alphabet's credit rating drops. The commission has ruled that DTE, not customers, must cover any unpaid costs if that collateral falls short.
Commission chair Dan Scripps said when the deal was approved that the protections would ensure other customers do not end up subsidizing the addition to the state's energy grid. The commission has also said it may reopen the case at any time if the promised customer benefits fail to materialize or if serving costs end up falling on existing DTE customers — though it separately found that Nessel had not shown an 80% minimum payment was insufficient protection. A DTE spokesperson said the agreement keeps bills low and puts customers' interests first, adding that Google will cover the full cost of powering its data center so customers are not left with the bill. A commission spokesperson declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond to WLNS's request for comment.
The Bigger Picture Across Michigan
Nessel's fight comes as DTE pursues a much larger buildout tied to data-center demand. The utility has pitched two new gas plants totaling 2.1 gigawatts at an estimated cost of $6.4 billion, and its Saline Township and Van Buren Township projects together are expected to demand 2.4 gigawatts of power, according to MLive. The Guardian has reported that roughly 2.3 million electric customers in southeast Michigan could feel the effects of DTE's broader plan, even as Erik Nordman, director of the Michigan State University Institute of Public Utilities, has noted that the state's overall electricity demand had stayed relatively flat for the previous two decades.
Michigan is far from alone in wrestling with how to protect ratepayers from the costs of hosting data centers. In North Carolina, Gov. Josh Stein has recommended large-load tariffs for data-center operators while a proposed agreement with Duke Energy — which would require a public contract template, minimum purchase requirements, and grid-strain power reductions in a project's early years — awaits final approval from the state's utilities commission, per WRAL. In Missouri, Ameren's large-load tariff already requires data-center customers to sign contracts of at least 12 years, pay grid hookup costs upfront, and post collateral equal to two years of minimum monthly bills, according to ABC17 News.
For now, Nessel has made clear where she stands. She has said data-center sweetheart deals and unaccountable utilities are not responsible government or good business for the state, and has argued the commission should reject the Google contracts outright if it declines to adopt her recommended protections.
