Michigan Approved a 1-Gigawatt Data Center Deal Tied to 2,080 New Megawatts

The Michigan Public Service Commission conditionally approved two special electric contracts between DTE Electric and Google on October 1, clearing the utility path for a 1-gigawatt data center in Van Buren Township, in Wayne County. The vote was unanimous. The order in Case No. U-22058 reaches only the rates, terms and conditions of the electric service. Whether the campus gets built is a local land-use question the Commission does not decide.

The primary supply agreement runs 20 years, against the five-year term large-load customers on DTE's system normally sign, and sets a minimum monthly billing demand at 80 percent of contracted capacity. If Google walks away early, it owes at least 15 years of those minimum monthly charges, backed by credit and collateral requirements. Attorney General Dana Nessel had argued for a 90 percent floor and termination payments pegged to 100 percent of the months remaining on the contract. The Commission kept 80 percent, held that other customers will not cover the cost of serving Google, and reserved the right to reopen the case if the promised affordability benefits do not materialize or erode over time.

The second contract, a Clean Capacity Accelerator Agreement, is where the electrical scope sits. Google pays for DTE Electric to develop up to 1,600 megawatts of renewable generation and 480 megawatts of battery energy storage, and receives 300 megawatts of capacity credits at no cost in return. DTE puts the benefit to its other customers at $1.7 billion across the 20-year term. The site runs 282 acres north of I-94 between Haggerty Road and I-275. Service begins in December 2027, with maximum load reached by December 2028.

That is 2,080 megawatts of new generation and storage tied to a single load, and nearly all of it is commercial and industrial electrical work. Utility-scale collector systems, inverter pads, battery enclosures and their DC collection, medium-voltage cable, grounding grids, substation terminations and SCADA tie-ins are separate scopes from the data halls themselves, which carry their own switchgear, busway, uninterruptible power supplies and generator paralleling equipment. A December 2027 in-service date means permitting, long-lead transformer and switchgear orders, and crew commitments are being made now, not next year.

Michigan licenses electricians at the state level through the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, which issues journeyman and master electrician licenses and enforces the state electrical code. For contractors reading the order, the 80 percent billing floor and the 15-year termination exposure are the provisions worth a second pass. They are the Commission's method for making a 20-year load commitment expensive to abandon, and that is what separates an announced data center from a staffed backlog. The generation and storage build also draws on a different skill set than white-space fit-out, so one project is hiring against two distinct profiles on overlapping schedules.

Michigan still has no statewide siting rulebook for data centers. What it has now is a priced, conditioned, 20-year contract that regulators in other states will read closely.