WattWatch/Data center tracker

Metrobloks Southfield

Approved

Southfield, Oakland County

The municipality has granted the approval sought. Construction may still wait on permits, a power agreement, or both.

The project

Electrical demand
100 MWreported estimate

Estimate reported by a third party, not confirmed by the developer

Developer
Metrobloks LLC
Serving utility
DTE Electric
Building area
109,000 sq ft
Expected online
2027

Last checked August 21, 2026. Every field above has been confirmed against the sources listed.

What has happened

Every entry carries the source it came from. Where the record gives no date, the entry says so rather than being placed by guesswork.

On the record, but undated

No source consulted gives a date for these, so they are not placed in the sequence above.

  1. Date not on the recordApproved by Southfield City Council. EDRA of Michigan

Where the sources disagree

Cleanview lists 100 MW; EDRA of Michigan lists roughly 30 MW for the same building. The gap is large enough that neither figure should be treated as settled.

Published rather than resolved. Picking a favourite number and printing it alone is how a tracker becomes an opinion.

How this compares to the load DTE Electric already serves

Running at 100 MW for a year at 85% capacity factor works out to roughly 745 GWh a year. Every household DTE Electric serves used 15,132 GWh between them in 2024. This one site is therefore about 5% of what every home in the territory uses.

Computed, not quoted. No filing states this figure. The denominator is residential sales only — DTE Electric’s total system load, including commercial and industrial customers, is considerably larger, so this is not a share of the whole grid. The capacity factor is an assumption. The arithmetic is 100 MW × 8,760 hours × 0.85, against 2024 EIA-861 residential sales.

What DTE Electric customers pay, before and now

Residential rate, 2019

16.11¢

Residential rate, 2024

20.13¢

Change over that period

+25%

Those figures are DTE Electric’s own EIA-861 filings and they cover the whole territory. This page does not attribute any part of that change to Metrobloks Southfield. It could not honestly: the change spans years in which this project did not exist, rates move for generation costs, storm recovery, tree trimming and approved return on equity all at once, and the large-load terms the Commission has approved are written specifically to keep these costs off other customers’ bills. Whether they succeed is an open question in front of the Commission, not a settled fact this site can assert.

What actually did change DTE Electric rates, case by case →

The terms a large load takes service under here

DTE Electric operates under U-21990, approved December 18, 2025. Approved special contracts for electric service to the Saline Township data center, with conditions — a contract-by-contract approval rather than a general tariff.

Contracted demand
Roughly 1,383 MW.
Contract length
A power supply agreement of roughly 19 years, extendable by the customer for a further 20, plus a separate 15-year energy storage agreement.
Conditions imposed
Cost allocation and rate design proposals ensuring future large-load interconnection customers pay their own interconnection costs, plus an administrative fee for further large loads.

The Attorney General's motion to reopen and her separate petition for rehearing were both denied on 27 March 2026. On 17 April 2026 she filed a claim of appeal in the Michigan Court of Appeals, seeking to invalidate the approval as an unlawful ex parte order and to remand the matter for a contested case hearing. The proceeding is not closed.

Sources

Everything above traces to one of these. Local agendas and FAQ pages get replaced in place rather than archived, so each carries the date it was read.

  1. [1] Michigan data center tracker Cleanview, read August 21, 2026
  2. [2] Map of AI data centers in Michigan EDRA of Michigan, read August 21, 2026

Watch the docket this project runs through

Large-load contracts, tariff changes and the cases contesting them all arrive as DTE Electric filings. Alerts go out when one is filed and when a comment deadline is set — which is the only window in which a comment counts for anything.

New filings and comment deadlines for DTE Electric. No newsletter, no sharing your address. Unsubscribe in one click — what we store.