Michigan Made Google Guarantee 80 Percent of a Data Center's Power Bill for 20 Years. The Utility Granting That Contract Still Wants to Build Two New Gas Plants to Serve It.

On October 1st, the Michigan Public Service Commission voted unanimously to approve DTE Electric's special contracts with Google for a 1-gigawatt data center in Van Buren Township — and, in doing so, signed off on some of the sharpest ratepayer-protection terms attached to any large-load power contract in the country. Google has to pay for 80 percent of its contracted capacity whether it uses the power or not, for twenty years, and if it walks away early it keeps paying minimum charges for years after it's gone. Three weeks before that order, DTE had filed its own 20-year resource plan with the same commission, proposing two new natural gas plants sized almost exactly to the load this contract and one signed last December add to its system. The tariff is the clean story. The resource plan is the one that isn't finished yet.

What "protected" actually means in the contract

DTE's standard large-load tariff, Rate D11, already has large-customer minimum-bill terms built in — if you're a factory that rarely shows up in headlines, D11 service typically runs five-year contracts with a minimum monthly billing demand of 50 to 60 percent of whatever capacity you've contracted. Case No. U-22058, the docket covering Google's Van Buren Township project, modifies almost every one of those numbers upward. The primary supply agreement runs twenty years instead of five. The minimum billing demand is 80 percent of contract capacity instead of 50 to 60, meaning Google pays for most of the power it reserved even in a year its servers run under capacity. And a termination payment — reporting on the order puts the figure at somewhere between ten and fifteen years' worth of minimum charges, depending on the account, which tells you the commission's order and the press summaries of it aren't using identical language for the same formula — keeps Google paying if it leaves the deal early. None of that is boilerplate. It's a regulator writing, into a single contract, almost everything last month's failed federal Ratepayer Protection Act tried and failed to mandate by statute: large loads should pay the full cost of what they ask a grid to build for them, with real security behind the number.

The question commissioners actually asked

MPSC Chair Dan Scripps framed the approval around exactly that tradeoff: "The protections the MPSC enacted today in approving these contracts will ensure that other customers aren't subsidizing this large addition to the state's energy grid." Commissioner Katherine Peretick's question before the vote was blunter — "How do we make sure that existing customers are protected?" — and it's the right question to ask in public, on the record, before a vote, rather than assume the answer afterward. DTE's own math says the contract nets other customers a $1.7 billion benefit over its 20-year life. That's the utility's number, not an independent audit's, and it's worth exactly as much as any other unverified claim at the bottom of our evidence ladder until a rate case tests it. What's harder to dispute is the structure underneath it: a 20-year commitment, an 80 percent minimum bill, and a termination payment are specific, enforceable contract terms, not a voluntary pledge a utility can point to and then not demonstrate, the way Duke Energy's Ratepayer Protection Pledge compliance just got tested, and failed, in a live North Carolina rate case over a turbine request the utility couldn't tie to a specific cost allocation. Michigan's order is what it looks like when a commission makes a utility show that work before approval instead of after denial.

This isn't Michigan's first one, either

Google's deal isn't an isolated approval. In December 2025, the same three-member commission voted unanimously to conditionally approve DTE's contracts for a separate 1.4-gigawatt data center in Saline Township, Washtenaw County, anchored by Oracle and developer Related Digital. Add the two together and Michigan has now approved 2.4 gigawatts of contracted hyperscale demand in under a year, on a grid that didn't carry a single hyperscale data center contract before. That pace is the real story underneath the ratepayer-protection framing: Michigan isn't writing one careful contract. It's building a template it expects to reuse, fast, because more requests are already in the pipeline behind these two.

The gas plants sized to match

Here's where the clean story gets complicated. DTE filed its latest integrated resource plan — the 20-year generation roadmap state law requires utilities to submit — in the weeks before the Google order, and it proposes two new natural gas plants, reported at roughly 1.4 gigawatts and 700 megawatts, a combined 2.1 gigawatts. Environmental groups tracking the filing, Earthjustice among them, point out that 2.1 gigawatts of new gas lines up almost exactly with the 2.4 gigawatts of data center demand DTE has now contracted for with Oracle and Google combined. The Clean Capacity Accelerator Agreement attached to the Google contract commits the company to fund up to 1.6 gigawatts of new renewables and 480 megawatts of battery storage, built and owned by DTE — a real, contractually binding number, not a press-release aspiration. What nobody outside DTE can verify yet is whether that renewable build actually lands on schedule, or whether the gas plants end up carrying more of this load than the clean-capacity agreement implies. The Environmental Law and Policy Center's staff attorney put the gap directly: the commission "failed to encourage large, financially capable customers such as Google to develop and fund innovative, distributed solutions that can support grid reliability," and the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council's president called it a missed chance to guarantee the data center runs on the clean power it's paying for rather than whatever the system happens to be burning when it comes online.

What's actually happening on the 282 acres

The contract terms aren't the only thing this project has to clear. Project Cannoli — Google's code name before it confirmed itself as the customer in March — sits on 282 acres at Haggerty Road and I-94, developed by Panattoni Development Co. after the firm screened seven brownfield alternatives, including the former Ford Wixom plant and Detroit's old Packard site, and picked greenfield land instead. State permitting records show the site plan would permanently fill 13.55 acres of wetlands and part of a stream, offset through wetland mitigation bank credits in the Huron River watershed and 1,174 feet of new stream channel built on the property. Water use is projected at 2 million to 3.6 million gallons a day. Demonstrators showed up at DTE's own headquarters in December 2025, before either contract was finalized, objecting to the scale of the combined buildout rather than either project individually. None of that is a reason the MPSC's tariff work doesn't matter — it's a reminder that a well-structured power contract answers the cost-allocation question and leaves the water, wetlands, and land-use questions for entirely different agencies to sort out on their own timeline.

The diligence angle

A fact-checking project tracking large-load contracts nationally flagged something worth sitting with: as filed, the 1,000-megawatt figure in this case was DTE's own prefiled testimony — not a measured load, not a confirmed critical-IT capacity, not yet an MPSC order. That's precisely the distinction our evidence ladder exists to enforce. A utility's claimed number in its own filing sits several rungs below a signed, commission-approved contract, which itself sits below an actual measured load once the facility is running. The October 1st order moves this specific project up that ladder in a real way — 1,000 megawatts is now a contractually committed capacity figure, with security behind it, not just a developer's or utility's assertion. It does not, by itself, confirm that DTE's renewable buildout arrives on schedule, that the gas plants in the IRP get built at the scale proposed, or that Google's servers ever actually draw the full gigawatt the contract contemplates. Those are each separate claims, on separate rungs, verified on separate timelines — exactly the kind of claim-by-claim grading a Kill Test is built to do rather than accept a single headline number as proof of the whole picture.

GridPermit works Colorado, not Michigan, and nothing in Xcel Energy's territory has produced a large-load tariff with Rate D11's specific combination of 80 percent minimum billing and a multi-year termination payment. But the pattern traveling out of Lansing is one every state regulator watching this space is studying right now: when a commission makes a hyperscaler document its financial commitment in the contract itself — real security, real duration, real termination cost — the cost-allocation fight that's sunk gas-plant applications elsewhere this year doesn't have to happen after the fact. It gets settled before the ink dries. What Michigan's order doesn't settle, and what nobody can settle from a tariff filing alone, is whether the generation mix actually serving that 80-percent-guaranteed load twenty years from now looks anything like the renewables DTE promised this month, or more like the gas plants sitting in the same filing cabinet.