On September 30, a patch of Michigan farmland started doing something new: powering the grid. DTE Energy’s 100-megawatt Cold Creek Solar Park began generating electricity, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 1 attended by DTE’s Ryan Thomas and Ford’s Amir Mirshahi. It’s the first project to go live under Ford and DTE’s agreement to add up to 650 megawatts of new solar capacity in Michigan — and it’s only the beginning.
One hundred megawatts is real power. Enough for tens of thousands of homes. And this is project one of many.
How it got built
Ground broke in April 2025, and the build was a genuine community effort: three townships coordinated the project across leased farmland — 50 megawatts on 347.6 acres in Quincy Township, 43 megawatts on 252.6 acres in Coldwater Township. That’s the unglamorous reality of the energy transition: it happens one township meeting, one land lease, one interconnection agreement at a time. Cold Creek is proof the process works.
A 75-megawatt battery storage system at the site comes online next year, which will let the park store midday sunshine for the evening peak — the moment solar earns its keep. Generation plus storage, on the same site, is the template utilities are converging on everywhere.
Ford’s end of the bargain
For Ford, this is about the factory as much as the grid. The automaker aims to assemble every Michigan-made vehicle with 100% carbon-free electricity by the end of 2027, on the way to carbon neutrality across vehicles, operations, and supply chain by 2050. When your product is increasingly electric, the carbon math of how you build it matters as much as how it drives. A Michigan-built EV charged on Michigan solar is the whole thesis in one sentence.
The project runs through DTE’s MIGreenPower program, one of the largest voluntary renewable energy programs in the country — and the pitch to participants goes beyond electrons. Clean energy, local tax revenue, construction and operations jobs: the ribbon-cutting talking points, but also the actual economics of rural solar.
The 650-megawatt horizon
Cold Creek is the first of up to 650 megawatts under the Ford-DTE agreement. That’s more than six Cold Creeks still to come. From Utah’s geothermal breakthrough this week to Michigan’s solar fields, the clean-energy buildout keeps hitting milestones that would have sounded optimistic five years ago. The panels are up, the meter is spinning, and the next 550 megawatts are already on the drawing board.
