Dozens of residents gathered in downtown Saline Monday to protest a planned data center. They chanted “No secret deals” while holding posters that read slogans like “Protect Pure MI.”
The company Related Digital is developing the 1.4-gigawatt data center for big tech corporations OpenAI and Oracle. DTE is set to power the planned site, which will span 250 acres of what's now farmland in Saline Township, a rural community home to under 3,000 people in Washtenaw County.
Tammie Bruneau lives in Saline Township with her husband. She was one of the demonstrators on Monday and said she and her husband have been fighting the data center since the beginning. “I'm going to be honest and say I never did want it here,” Bruneau said. “If it magically went away, I would be very happy because I could go back to my quiet life, and I don't have to stand out here in the corner and yell that I don't want it here.”
Bruneau said she hopes the protest will bring visibility to the issue. “We need every person in Michigan to understand that there’s a data center coming to their back door.” The Saline Township project is among a wave of forthcoming data centers, including two proposals in Ypsilanti and Augusta townships.
DTE said it expects the Saline Township data center will not raise electricity rates for consumers, although it's been criticized for pushing for a state approval process that would bypass public hearings on its plans. Protesters said they're concerned that the data center's electricity draw will impact the energy grid. Saline resident Erin Ploe said her power goes out around 10 to 15 times a year. “So DTE clearly does not have enough electricity to power the data center,” she said.
Ploe said the group is protesting what she called DTE’s lack of transparency to its consumers. “There’s been no input,” she said. “This was kind of a middle-of-the night drive-by agreement.”
“We're out here trying to just gain some traction nationally, because this is going to affect everyone in Michigan,” she said.
In a statement announcing the project, Governor Gretchen Whitmer called the plan “the largest economic project in Michigan history.” She said the data center will create more than 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 jobs on site and 1,500 more across the wider community.
“For a governor who's been so committed to climate and green energy and things to be sort of rolling out the red carpet for a company that is almost certainly going to pollute and destroy our community – it's just baffling to me,” protest organizer Jordan Rice said.
Rice said they're received calls from protesters against data centers across the country, from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania. “It’s the most rapid political mobilization that I've seen against any initiative or project in this state in my lifetime, and someone else has said — and I agree with this — that it's the most unifying political issue that a lot of us have ever seen,” Rice said.
In early September, the Saline Township board voted 4-1 to deny rezoning about 575 acres of agricultural land. Related Digital sued the township last month. In a settlement decision, data center construction will continue while agreeing not to expand the data center and to have a noise limit.
The Michigan Public Service Commission, the state's utility regulator, scheduled an online public hearing for December 3 to hear comments on the expedited data center approval. The commission said it expects this will add transparency to the process.
