A Minnesota Judge Halted Google's Data Center in May. The State's Attorney General Says the Real Cost Is Still Redacted.

On May 22nd, a Goodhue County, Minnesota judge told Ryan Companies to put down its tools. Project Skyway, the 780-megawatt Google data center under construction on roughly 482 acres outside Pine Island, was six weeks from breaking ground when District Judge Patrick M. Biren issued a temporary restraining order, freezing the site over a lawsuit arguing that local regulators had never actually studied what building it would do to the area's water, air, and land. Four months later, the fight most likely to decide what this data center actually costs hasn't gone anywhere near a courtroom. It's sitting in a filing cabinet at the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, where the state's own attorney general says Xcel Energy has blacked out the dollar figures that would tell anyone whether Google's power deal saves its neighbors money or costs them close to a billion dollars.

Google was revealed as the tenant behind Project Skyway on February 24th, after months of Pine Island residents guessing at who wanted the land. The reaction split fast. "My biggest concern is the water," resident Lee Ondler said. "They won't tell you how they're going to dispose of it." Calob Darci's objection ran to the land itself: "What makes me worry about the idea is it's taking up farmland." Not everyone in town sees it that way. "It's going to bring investments into our community, and there hasn't been [investment] for a very long time," said Heather Gunderson, 38. A group called Stop the Pine Island Data Center organized against the project for months, arguing the city hadn't been straight with residents about its plans, while Google ran what local reporters described as a charm offensive through the summer, trying to answer questions in two Minnesota towns at once as the opposition kept growing.

A construction site under an injunction

The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy sued developer Ryan Cos. and the City of Pine Island in the spring, arguing the environmental review behind Project Skyway, an Alternative Urban Areawide Review the city used to clear the site, never actually grappled with a data center of this size. Judge Biren didn't just grant the restraining order. He also denied a motion from Ryan Cos. and the city to end the case without a trial, which means the underlying lawsuit is still alive, not a formality on its way to being waved through. The order required MCEA to post a $2,000 bond, a small number next to what it's holding up: Ryan Cos. told the court delays on the project could cost the firm $5 million or more. "We are currently reviewing the judge's order in detail to determine our next steps," the company said at the time. Pine Island's city administrator, Elizabeth Howard, said the city was doing the same with its own legal counsel. Rev. David Derksen, one of the project's more vocal opponents, framed the stakes plainly: "Until they engage in a proper environmental review with mitigation strategies with those harms, we will not be protected." As of the most recent public reporting, no trial date has been set, and the restraining order has not been lifted.

That fight is a real one, and it's exactly the kind of local land-use dispute this blog tracks constantly: a city approved a project through a review process, a nonprofit and a judge said the process didn't match the project's actual size, and construction stopped while a court sorts out which one of those is true. But it's also the smaller of the two fights hanging over Pine Island right now, measured in dollars. The bigger one doesn't involve a bulldozer at all.

The real fight is over a number nobody can check

In April, Xcel Energy filed a proposed 15-year electric service agreement with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to power Google's data center, paired with 1,900 megawatts of new generation the utility says it will build specifically to serve the load: 1,400 megawatts of wind, 200 megawatts of solar, and 300 megawatts of long-duration battery storage from Form Energy. Xcel and Google's pitch to regulators is that this is a model deal, with the hyperscaler effectively footing the bill for clean generation the rest of the grid gets to share. The companies say the arrangement nets other Xcel customers more than $1.1 billion in savings over the contract's 15 years.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office looked at the same filing and reached close to the opposite conclusion. In comments filed with the commission on September 28th, Ellison's office argued Xcel hasn't shown the agreement is reasonable, consistent with the public interest, or built to meet the state's own legal standard for serving a very large customer. Its own analysis puts the deal closer to a billion dollars in net cost to other ratepayers, not a $1.1 billion savings, with the gap growing worse in a scenario where Google ends up using less power than contracted or terminates the agreement before the term runs out. Minnesota law requires that costs tied to a utility's largest customers get assigned to those customers, not spread across everyone else's bill, and Ellison's office argues the filing as written doesn't prove that's what actually happens here.

Here's the part that should bother anyone trying to referee that disagreement: almost none of the dollar figures behind either number are public. Xcel redacted nearly all of them as trade secrets, and Ellison's office says the company hasn't explained most of those redactions in any way that lets an outside party judge whether they're warranted. Two sides are arguing about whether a contract helps or hurts a few hundred thousand households, and the inputs to that argument are visible to exactly two companies and a handful of regulators under protective order. The commission is scheduled to take up a motion on October 22nd on whether the case gets contested-case treatment, the kind of adversarial, trial-like review with cross-examination and a formal evidentiary record that could force more of those numbers into daylight. That's a procedural step, not the commission ruling on the deal itself, and nobody has set a date yet for when the actual electric service agreement gets decided.

This is close to the cleanest version of a gap we write about constantly in Colorado's own large-load tariff filings: a minimum-bill structure is supposed to answer exactly the question Ellison is asking here, who pays if the customer's demand comes in lower than promised, and the honest answer depends entirely on numbers that are either filed and public or filed and sealed. NiSource made a similar ratepayer-protection claim for its own Microsoft data center deal in Indiana this month, and that claim was at least checkable against a public rate filing. Xcel's isn't, not yet. In a Kill Test, a company's own savings estimate is a claim sitting on the bottom rung of the evidence ladder regardless of how large the company is or how specific the number sounds, and a redacted filing is a claim that can't even be tested against the document that's supposed to prove it.

I think the useful fact to take from Pine Island isn't which side's number is closer to correct. It's that nobody outside Xcel and Google can check either one yet, and a regulatory process that lets a utility black out the only figures that would settle a billion-dollar disagreement is a process a company can win by outlasting its critics, not by being right. Pine Island's residents are likely to find out whether the bulldozers come back before they find out whether their own electric bills move because of a data center down the road. The order those two answers arrive in says a good deal about which fight the people building this deal were actually worried about losing.