The Metro: After a week of outages, a bigger question about Michigan’s grid

If you live in metro Detroit, the last week probably tested your patience — and maybe your fridge.

First, the heat. As temperatures rose past 100, the grid strained, and a substation in Warren failed. Thousands lost power, some for many hours.

Then, just as that passed, the storms came. Friday night, winds tore through the region and dropped 80-foot trees onto power lines — and at the peak, hundreds of thousands of homes went dark. Some homes stayed dark for days.

And here’s the thing: that’s the grid we already have, straining under an ordinary Michigan summer.

Now Michigan is preparing to add something extraordinary — data centers built to power artificial intelligence, each one hungry for as much electricity as a small city. And the decisions about who pays for that, and how, are being made right now, mostly out of public view.

Nicholas Schroeck, dean of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, thinks a lot about who answers to the public when big energy decisions get made. He joined Robyn Vincent to talk about what the data center boom means for Michigan’s grid, your electric bill, and whether the public has any real say.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

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