Nessel and Earthjustice File Appeal Briefs Against MPSC Approval of DTE's Stargate Data Center Contracts

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and four environmental groups filed opening briefs in the Michigan Court of Appeals between August 7 and August 10, 2026, challenging the Michigan Public Service Commission’s expedited approval of the DTE Energy contracts that will supply power to the 1.4-gigawatt Oracle/OpenAI Stargate data center in Saline Township, Washtenaw County. The core objection is procedural rather than substantive: Earthjustice argued the MPSC’s expedited process “exposed customers to nearly half a billion dollars in up-front costs without transparent public review,” meaning the commission approved the contracts without the contested-case proceeding that would have let ratepayer advocates test DTE’s cost assumptions on the record. Running alongside the appeal is a separate DTE rate case seeking $474 million — roughly a 10 percent increase — that the utility has explicitly tied to data-center infrastructure buildout.

That pairing is what makes the filing structurally significant. The Saline Township fight has until now been litigated at the land-use layer: the township board voted 4-1 to deny the rezoning, was sued, and settled (2025-09-01–saline-township-denies-then-sued-into-settlement-datacenter-rezoning); it then capped and reversed the property-tax abatement under a “shall approve” legal threat (2026-07-15–saline-township-oracle-openai-caps-then-reverses-tax-abatement); and a resident-led procedural challenge to the Industrial Development District is now pending before the Michigan State Tax Commission (2026-08-13–washtenaw-mi-oracle-saline-datacenter-idd-procedural-challenge). The appeal moves the fight to the electricity layer, where the money is larger and the decision-maker is a state commission rather than a township board of five. Nessel had already characterized DTE’s conditional rate-hike pause offer as a “ransom note” in April (2026-04-24–nessel-calls-dte-rate-hike-pause-offer-ransom-note) — an offer whose conditions included the Saline campus coming online on schedule.

The Stargate project the contracts serve is the buildout announced from the White House in January 2025 (2025-01-21–stargate-llc-white-house-announcement), and the cost-shift question the appeal raises is the same one Oracle litigated from the opposite side in Wisconsin, suing the PSC there to overturn a credit-rating rule designed to keep data-center risk off ratepayers (2026-06-19–oracle-sues-wisconsin-psc-data-center-ratepayer-cost-shift). What distinguishes Michigan is who is bringing the case: a sitting state attorney general appealing her own state’s utility regulator, which turns an intra-government disagreement about process into a published appellate record of how a commission handled a hyperscaler’s power request.

Update, from the brief itself (2026-08-06–nessel-appeal-brief-mpsc-dte-saline-cost-allocation-mechanism): the AG’s actual 145,000-character appeal brief contains zero references to “$474 million” — that figure belongs only to the separate rate case referenced above, and the “nearly half a billion” up-front-cost figure is an Earthjustice statement to press, not a number argued in a brief located during follow-up research. The Court of Appeals has assigned three consolidated docket numbers to the AG’s appeal (Nos. 380362, 380364, 380878 — one per appealable MPSC order) plus separate numbers for the Michigan Environmental Council/NRDC/Sierra Club appeal (No. 380334) and Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association’s appeal (No. 380462). The brief’s core argument is narrower than “cost exposure”: DTE’s own filings admit a projected cost increase for Retail Open Access customers specifically, which the AG argues disqualifies the deal from the ex parte review standard under MCL 460.6a(3) regardless of any other issue. The data center’s contracting counterparty is named throughout the record — Green Chile Ventures LLC, an Oracle subsidiary — a contrast with Louisiana’s Entergy/Hyperion structure, where the financing SPV, borrower, and tenant are separate entities Meta’s own SEC filings do not name (2026-08-12–louisiana-psc-meta-hyperion-hides-electricity-demand-data).