5 Michigan environment stories to watch in 2026
By Kelly House, Bridge Michigan
The Great Lakes News Collaborative includes Bridge Michigan; Circle of Blue; Great Lakes Now at Detroit PBS; Michigan Public, Michigan’s NPR News Leader; and The Narwhal who work together to bring audiences news and information about the impact of climate change, pollution, and aging infrastructure on the Great Lakes and drinking water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work HERE.
Changes to Michigan’s energy sector are expected to dominate the headlines in 2026, with big implications for the state’s environment.
From data centers, coal plants and solar arrays to petroleum pipelines and aging dams, energy-related decisions next year that could shape Michigan’s environment for decades to come, affecting everything from which fish can survive in rivers to how quickly the state’s utilities ditch planet-warming fossil fuels.
Here are the topics to watch:
Data centers
Swift and secretive dealmaking involving some of the world’s most powerful corporations.
Vast quantities of money, land and electricity.
Promises of prosperity from a booming industry, coupled with fears that Michiganders could be left holding the bag in a bust.
Given those dynamics, it’s no wonder data centers became one of Michigan’s biggest environmental and political issues in 2025. And the debate shows no signs of letting up in 2026.
“It’s not going away,” said Sarah Mills, a land use planning expert at the University of Michigan who advises local officials as they consider how to respond to the data center boom.
“I’m telling you, like, two weeks ago, the priest talked about it at church.”
Tech giants OpenAI, Oracle and Related Digital expect to break ground soon on Michigan’s first hyperscale data center in Saline Township, a milestone hailed by some as a win for Michigan, and maligned by others as an example of corporations railroading communities.
Developers have approached multiple other communities with data center proposals, prompting pushback from neighbors and fears that rapid expansion of the energy and water-hungry industry could imperil Michigan’s environment and drive up utility rates.
Support and opposition blurs party lines. Data center supporters include President Donald Trump, a Republican, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. Both contend the facilities are important to state and national economic development and national security interests.
Meanwhile, bipartisan criticism has emerged in response to Michigan’s tax breaks for the industry and regulators’ approval of data center deals with limited public scrutiny. They note that the facilities employ few permanent workers and have overtaxed water and energy supplies in some other data center-heavy states.
Michigan’s two largest utilities, Consumers Energy and DTE Energy, both say they’re in late-stage negotiations to bring on several gigawatts’ worth of new data centers in the near future.
“We’re talking about doubling our entire electricity demand,” said Bryan Smigielski, a Michigan organizer with the Sierra Club. “There’s no way to do that in a sustainable manner.”
The next year will be crucial for both sides, as developers continue to pursue deals and local governments decide whether to grant them access to the land they need to operate.
Michigan’s energy transition
More than two years after state lawmakers passed a law requiring utilities to get all of their power from designated “clean” sources by 2040, Michiganders will get their first glimpse next year at how the largest utilities plan to meet that goal.
Both DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, the monopoly utilities that provide electricity to the vast majority of Michigan households, are scheduled to file so-called integrated resources plans next year with the Michigan Public Service Commission.
The long-range planning documents spell out how utilities plan to meet demand over the next 20 years. Because of the new climate law, they also must include details about how they’ll invest in clean energy to get off fossil fuels.
Both utilities contend they’re on track to meet the 2040 deadline, along with an interim deadline to reach 50% renewables by 2030.
But they have a long way to go. Right now, about 12% of Michigan’s in-state electricity generation is from renewable sources.
Concern has emerged recently that growing demand from data centers could make it harder for utilities to make the transition. A single hyperscale facility typically consumes as much power as a large American city.
And at least in the near-term, DTE Energy is planning to power the Saline Township facility largely with fossil fuel energy generated by ramping up production at existing power plants.
“We cannot build renewables fast enough to avoid at least a temporary increase in greenhouse gas emissions” from data centers, said Douglas Jester, managing partner at the energy consulting firm 5 Lakes Energy.
Over the longer term, utilities will need to build even more solar arrays, wind farms or other approved clean energy to meet rising data center demand while still complying with the state’s clean energy law. Adding a single 1 gigawatt data center to the grid would require an extra 10,000 acres of solar arrays if utilities looked to power it exclusively with solar.
That raises big questions about where that energy infrastructure might be built and how utilities will add it to a power grid that’s already facing lengthy interconnection backlogs.
Palisades power plant
Against that backdrop, the Palisades nuclear plant has emerged as a controversial answer to Michigan’s energy supply conundrum.
It seems all but certain that the shuttered facility on Michigan’s southwestern shoreline will reopen in 2026, as the federal and state governments pour money into an effort to boost Michigan’s supply of carbon-free energy during a time of rising demand.
Subsidies for the project now top $3.5 billion.
The federal government has authorized a $1.5 billion loan plus $1.3 billion in grants to help two rural electric cooperatives buy power from the plant and another $400 million to build additional reactors at the site. Michigan taxpayers have chipped in another $300 million.
“I’ll keep working with anyone to grow Michigan’s economy and build a more affordable, clean energy future right here in Michigan,” said Whitmer, a supporter of the restart plan.
Officials with Holtec Energy, the plant’s owner, began refueling the facility in October and say they’re on track to start generating power as soon as year’s end. But as of early December, federal officials were still inspecting the plant and opponents were fighting on multiple fronts to prevent the restart.
Arguing the promise of emissions-free energy is not worth the risk of reopening a 54-year-old plant that has a history of problems, three anti-nuclear groups filed a November lawsuit contending the restart scheme should never have received regulatory approval.
“They’re making a mockery of safety regulations and even laws,” said Kevin Kamps, a Kalamazoo-based radioactive waste specialist with Beyond Nuclear. His group will likely file additional suits if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows the plant to reopen.
And then there’s the issue of what to do with the spent nuclear fuel. The United States still has no permanent storage location for the stuff, so, for now, it’d be held indefinitely in storage casks situated on concrete pads near the Great Lakes shoreline.
Line 5
After years of delays, cost overruns, lawsuits and political controversy, 2026 could be the year Michigan learns for sure whether Enbridge Energy will build the Line 5 tunnel.
Federal regulators say they’ll decide by spring whether to grant key permits for the proposed concrete-lined tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac, where Enbridge has said since 2018 it plans to reroute the petroleum pipeline that currently poses an oil spill risk in the open water of the Straits.
But this fall, they announced they’re also studying a separate option that would involve drilling a narrow borehole hundreds of feet underground and snaking the pipeline through it.
While pipeline fans and foes await decisions on the federal permit and a separate state permit that Enbridge needs to begin tunnel construction, the US Supreme Court is preparing to issue a key ruling pertaining to Attorney General Dana Nessel’s yearslong effort to shut down the pipeline.
The court will decide which court — federal or state — should decide whether the pipeline shuts down.
It may sound insignificant, but onlookers widely agree that a state court is more likely to side with Nessel, while a federal court is more likely to side with Enbridge.
Climate change
So far, Michigan is seeing its most normal winter in years, by historic standards.
Snowpack across much of the state is at or above average, temperatures have been seasonally chilly, and a brave few are already augering fishing holes into the ice as Great Lakes bays freeze over.
But the respite from a string of lackluster winters and smoky, hot summers can’t mask the fact that Earth’s atmosphere is steadily warming, with consequences reverberating into the Great Lakes region’s ecosystem.
Bridge has written extensively about how climate change affects Michigan, from lost winter pastimes to disappearing fish and worsening storm damage. It’s impossible to say what sort of climate disruption is in store for Michigan in 2026, but you can bet on more coverage about how the global changes are hitting home locally.
The post 5 Michigan environment stories to watch in 2026 appeared first on Great Lakes Now.
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https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2025/12/30/5-michigan-environment-stories-to-watch-in-2026/
