$19.8 million

Power plants get hot. Very hot, in fact. Most of them sit next to a body of water so that they can use that water to cool the machinery used to make power. Whether the plant burns coal or gas or splits uranium, water will be evaporated by producing electricity, and every megawatt-hour on the grid carries an embedded water cost along with it.

In the hour beginning 11:00 PM on Sept. 30, 2026, the grid that serves Detroit consumed 283 gallons of water for every megawatt-hour it delivered. Of that water, 64.7 percent left the Mississippi group, 30.3 percent left the Great Lakes group, and another 5.0 percent from groundwater and municipal supplies.

This water consumed to generate power — gridwater — does not currently have a home, a place where it is tracked, measured, and recorded. We currently track electricity’s output, carbon, with a robust accounting and tax credit system that settles every hour. We do not currently track electricity’s input, water, in the same fashion.

Aquadrio keeps a record of every hour of electricity, with each record containing data on its energy mixture, gallons consumed to produce it, and the price of its gridwater.

Ford Field doesn’t publish its electricity usage, so we model from its floor area: about 3.1 megawatt-hours every hour around the clock. The stadium’s gridwater is priced at whatever Detroit’s water rate was at the time.

Over the last 8,760 hours up to Sept. 30, 2026, Ford Field's gridwater came to 7,582,593 gallons, valued at $50,626.05. Each of those hours has its own sealed record.

The Barn is a 1,383-megawatt load under contracts the Michigan Public Service Commission approved in December 2025. Running flat out through the year containing 8,760 hours, we get 12,115,080 megawatt-hours, or roughly 445 times what Ford Field draws.

At full load, The Barn’s gridwater over those same hours would be 3.38 billion gallons. Priced at the City of Saline’s published rate, this 3.38 billion gallons would be valued at $19,778,586.37. The contracts between DTE and Green Chile Ventures, an Oracle subsidiary, guarantee that Green Chile will be billed for at least 80 percent of its contracted demand regardless of usage. At that floor, the figures come to 2.70 billion gallons, valued at $15,822,868.40.

Every number on this page comes out of a sealed record or a filed figure. A record carries its own inputs and a seal computed over all of them, so anyone can check our math. You can do so right here, in fact.

Simply pick an hour and press “Recompute”. Your browser rebuilds the seal and reruns the arithmetic, one line at a time.