DTE Energy and battery maker sonnen announced on 29 October 2026 that Michigan's first residential battery virtual power plant (VPP) is starting. The two-year pilot, approved by the Michigan Public Service Commission, will connect nearly 100 homes in Ann Arbor through their sonnen batteries and let the utility coordinate them as one grid resource.
Where it runs
The homes are in Veridian at County Farm, a development by local builder Thrive Collaborative on 14 acres next to County Farm Park. The neighbourhood has 170 mixed-income homes built without fossil fuels. Every home has a sonnen battery system, and the community combines geothermal energy, electric heat pumps, rooftop solar, all-electric appliances and EV-ready charging.
That makes Veridian an unusually clean test bed. The batteries are already installed, and every house has a similar all-electric setup, so the pilot can focus on how the coordination works rather than on selling and installing hardware.
What DTE wants to learn
According to the announcement, DTE will use the pilot to see whether pooled home batteries can help meet growing demand, cover high-demand periods and lower system costs. The utility ties this to recent commission recommendations to make more use of distributed energy resources and existing assets. Blake Richetta, chairman and CEO of sonnen Inc, describes the result as individual batteries turned into "a pooled, grid-interactive resource that responds to grid needs in real time".
DTE serves 2.3 million electricity customers in Southeast Michigan, so a 100-home pilot is small. The press release also leaves out the details homeowners would care about most: whether residents are paid for taking part, how often and how deeply the utility can discharge their batteries, and how much reserve stays in each home for outages.
The wider trend
Utility-run VPPs are becoming a regular part of the home energy market. sonnen already runs one with Rocky Mountain Power, where its Wattsmart Battery Program was named a 2026 POWER Awards finalist, and the Veridian project was nominated for the Project of the Year award at the 14th Michigan Energy Innovators Gala organised by EIBC. For owners of home batteries, the question is less whether such programmes will reach them and more on what terms their battery will be shared with the grid.