Michigan regulators just approved a 1.4-gigawatt data center in Saline Township. That’s enough electricity to power over a million homes. And it’s just the beginning.
DTE and Consumers Energy have a combined 16 gigawatts of data centers in the pipeline. If all of that comes online, it would nearly double Michigan’s total electricity demand. Double.
Where’s that power supposed to come from?
Michigan has a 2040 clean-energy mandate, signed into law back in 2023. We’ll see how long that lasts. But in the meantime, that means renewables. And renewables here mean solar.
I don’t really have a problem with solar power as it stands. But I do have a problem with the math.
Solar farms need vast amounts of land. Industry estimates put utility-scale solar at 5 to 7 acres per megawatt. Run that against 16 gigawatts of new demand, and you’re looking at well over 100,000 acres of solar panels. That’s over 150 square miles. Roughly three or four state forests, covered in glass and aluminum. What a win for “green energy.”
Michigan’s residential electricity rates have more than doubled in the last 20 years, from $60-70 a month per home to $120-130 today. DTE has filed four rate hike requests in five years, and that’s before data centers come online demanding power that doesn’t exist yet.
When demand outpaces supply and utilities scramble to build new generation under a clean energy mandate, that cost lands on every ratepayer in the state.
Without more baseload power like nuclear, projections have rates climbing past 25 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2030, pushing the average household bill above $155 a month. What’s more likely: That we cover 150 square miles of Michigan land in solar panels or that your electricity bill keeps climbing?
Meanwhile, 5 miles south of South Haven, on the shore of Lake Michigan, sits Palisades Nuclear Generating Station. It produces 800 megawatts of electricity on 432 acres. To get that same 800 megawatts from solar, you’d need 5,600 to 8,000 acres. Palisades does it on less than 500. That’s 13 to 18 times more land efficient. Same power, fraction of the footprint. And that footprint hasn’t changed since 1971.
After Entergy shut down Palisades in 2022, Holtec bought it with plans to decommission. Then the feds threw $1.5 billion at a restart, Michigan added $150 million, and the plant is coming back online in early 2026.
The timing isn’t an accident. Data centers are hungry, and nuclear is one of the few power sources that can feed them.
Solar farms, as they exist right now, aren’t nearly effective enough for our growing demand for power. And every panel covers ground that used to grow something. Every access road cuts through a woodlot. The “clean energy transition” has a very real land cost, and I haven’t seen anyone in Lansing put that on the brochure.
Nuclear power doesn’t have that problem. One facility sits in the same spot for decades, with an output that would take thousands of acres of panels to match. We need at least a handful of new nuclear facilities to create the power these data centers demand.
That’s not to say nuclear doesn’t have its own, obvious concerns. Palisades stores its spent nuclear fuel on concrete pads near the Lake Michigan shore. There’s no permanent repository for it. That waste will sit there, essentially forever, until someone figures out what to do with it. The plant is 54 years old. The NRC has flagged issues over the years. These aren’t made-up concerns.
But what’s the alternative? Even when Michigan backs off its Green Mandate, gas and coal won’t be able to keep up with our growing power demands. I’d rather have one well-run and highly monitored nuclear plant than see 100,000 acres of Michigan land and forest disappear under panels.
If you care about open land, if you hike, hunt, fish, or just don’t want every other field in your state turned into an industrial installation, the nuclear question matters.
Not because it’s perfect. Because the alternative is much worse.
Tom Zandstra is a passionate outdoorsman and CEO of The Fair Chase. Follow him on X @TheFairChase1.
