Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel this week filed a Petition for Rehearing with the Michigan Public Service Commission over DTE's two special contracts approved to service a 1.4 gigawatt hyperscale AI data center in Washtenaw County.

According to the AG's office, the Commission conditionally approved those contracts on December 18th while granting DTE a timeline of 30 days to convey their acceptance of those conditions and denying the Attorney General’s request to hold a formal contested case.

Within her petition the Attorney General challenges the statutory authority of the Commission to approve these special contracts without a contested case hearing and requests a rehearing in this matter.

The Attorney General additionally seeks clarification regarding the extent of the conditions ordered by the Commission and their enforceability, as many of the conditions purportedly put in place by the Commission appear to require only repeated assurances from DTE with no further evidentiary support or commitment, rather than enforceable conditions imposing meaningful requirements on the utility or its customer.

Attorney General Nessel also expresses concerns regarding DTE’s ability to serve as the financial ‘backstop’ in lieu of sufficient collateral requirements, as dictated by the Commission, according to her office.

The Attorney General continues to seek a contested case hearing in order to review the heavily redacted special contracts, verify DTE’s claims of affordability benefits to its ratepayers and that servicing this customer will cause no increase in electric rates for their existing customers, as well as verify adequate ratepayer protections such as collateral and exit fees in place to protect DTE and its customers if the data center fails to purchase the full projected amount of electricity, leaves the State before the full length of the contracts run, or goes bankrupt.

“I remain extremely disappointed with the Commission’s decision to fast-track DTE’s secret data center contracts without holding a contested case hearing,” said Nessel.

“This was an irresponsible approach that cut corners and shut out the public and their advocates. Granting approval of these contracts ex parte serves only the interests of DTE and the billion-dollar businesses involved, like Oracle, OpenAI, and Related Companies, not the Michigan public the Commission is meant to protect.

“The Commission imposed some conditions on DTE to supposedly hold ratepayers harmless, but these conditions and how they’ll be enforced remain unclear,” Nessel continued. “As Michigan’s chief consumer advocate, it is my responsibility to ensure utility customers in this state are adequately protected, especially on a project so massive, so expensive, and so unprecedented. As my office continues to review all potential options to defend energy customers in our state, we must demand further clarity on what protections the Commission has put in place and continue to demand a full contested case concerning these still-secret contracts.”

The Commission ordered DTE to formally accept its conditions within 30 days of its December 18th order.

This timeline, her office said, creates a difficulty for the Attorney General or any other party deciding whether further challenge is necessary to protect DTE’s more than two million electric customers and Michigan energy customers broadly within the applicable timeframe in which parties may seek relief through further challenges to the Commission’s order.

Accordingly, the Attorney General files her Petition for Rehearing in-part to preserve her arguments concerning the issues surrounding the Commission's unclear conditions and legal justification for granting review and approval of these special contracts on an ex parte basis.