The Michigan Public Service Commission has approved a DTE Energy pilot project involving a net-zero housing community in Ann Arbor called Veridian at County Farm.
The development is designed to produce at least as much energy, through renewable sources, as its residents consume.
All of the homes in the development are heated and cooled primarily with electricity from solar panels, with help from a geothermal system, which uses the ground's year-round stable temperature to help heat or cool a building as needed. The excess electricity that homeowners produce is stored in home batteries for later use when the sun is not producing enough for the home's needs.
In fact, the community could very well produce quite a bit more than its own needs. That's why it is a perfect match for DTE Energy's first Virtual Power Plant pilot project, according to Veridian founder Matt Grocoff.
Virtual power plants are systems that tap into and aggregate many small sources of locally produced electricity, like what's produced by residential solar panels, and stored in homeowners' home batteries or electric vehicle batteries. The electricity can service local needs, as well as be dispatched to serve the greater electric grid.
Large virtual power plants have the capability of replacing actual power plants like coal- or gas-burning facilities. Virtual power plants can also include off-site control of smart thermostats, so the utility can turn down participating homeowners' air conditioning a degree or two during times of peak demand.
Grocoff said homeowners at Veridian at County Farm are currently producing nearly all their electricity needs with their solar panels.
One homeowner (the one with two, rather than one, electric vehicles to charge) did have to pay DTE Energy about $2.37 recently for a month's worth of utility-produced electricity, he said. But most homeowners are taking tiny sips of DTE-produced electricity, and their bills are often just a few cents. Nearly all the homeowners also have large credits on their DTE bills for producing more electricity than they use.
"And because they can't use all of the power while the sun is shining, they store a good percentage of that power inside their batteries," Grocoff said.
It's that stored battery power that will be the focus of DTE's virtual power plant. The utility will study how homeowners store and use it, and DTE will dispatch some of the excess electricity at regular intervals.
In a statement, the company said it will "learn how assets like the batteries owned by pilot participants perform under real-world conditions."
"Pilots like this one give us the opportunity to learn how customers respond and engage with the program and gain insight into how to scale potential future residential battery offerings across our service territory," the company said.
Grocoff hopes the project will be a proof point for developers and city planning officials in Michigan and around the country that net zero housing developments, combined with virtual power plants, can reduce reliance on monopoly utilities and the fossil fuel power plants they operate. It's a more democratic, bottom-up approach, he said, that allows communities to create carbon-free electricity from the sun that strikes their own roofs, and from the ground under their own houses.
"We need to have an example of how to decarbonize the grid and make it affordable and reliable, which currently it is not — and it's going to get worse with time if we don't address this now," Grocoff said.
