By Attorney General Dana Nessel
LANSING – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has filed testimony before the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) in the case concerning DTE Energy and Google’s 20-year special contracts to service a 1-gigawatt data center in Van Buren Township. Attorney General Nessel’s testimony argues that the contract terms are inadequate to protect Michigan ratepayers and that the MPSC must take additional steps to prevent costs from being shifted onto residential customers. The Attorney General appeared last night on Fox 2’s ‘The Pulse’ to discuss the proposed contracts.
“Michiganders are already facing an energy affordability crisis and should not have to pay a single penny to service a data center,” said Attorney General Nessel. “Many of these contract terms are meant to be financial safeguards against stranded assets, bad bets, and failed investments to protect both DTE and their customers over twenty years, and they need to be carefully considered. The MPSC must ensure that ratepayers are protected and that any purported benefits from this project go toward lowering bills for families, not padding utility profits.”
In the filed testimony, the Department of Attorney General recommends raising minimum monthly charges required from Google from 80% to no lower than 90% of their full anticipated demand and raising the proposed exit fees. Both, argues the Attorney General, are currently set at rates too low to sufficiently protect against potentially enormous stranded costs.
The Attorney General is also calling on the MPSC to implement additional cost tracking mechanisms to ensure that transmission and other costs needed to supply power to the data center are not subsidized by ratepayers. Attorney General Nessel asserts that a tracking mechanism is necessary to ensure that any realized financial benefits actually go toward lowering residential rates, rather than being kept by DTE to bolster its own profits or shareholder value.
The newly filed contracts between Google and DTE are subject to review under a ‘contested case’, where intervening parties can conduct discovery, file testimony, cross-examine witnesses, and file briefs, unlike the previous proposed contracts between DTE and Green Chile Ventures LLC to service an anticipated AI data center in Saline Township. Those contracts were approved by the MPSC late last year through a secret review process without a contested hearing. Attorney General Nessel recently filed an appeal of the MPSC’s ex parte approval of the DTE data center contracts concerning the site in Saline.
“This is the first time our office is getting a look at data center contracts with real numbers and structures to examine,” said Attorney General Nessel. “If what DTE is willing to show us has this many issues, what are they hiding in their secret agreements? We need transparency, and the MPSC must use this opportunity to stop rubber-stamping backroom deals and reevaluate previous agreements before Michigan ratepayers get burned by contracts none of us are even allowed to read.”
The two contracts proposed by DTE to service the 1-gigawatt Google AI data center, a primary supply agreement (PDF) and clean capacity accelerator agreement (PDF), are subject to the Michigan Public Service Commission’s Case U-22058 and both are accessible to the public in redacted form for limited review.