DTE and sonnen launch a home battery VPP pilot at Ann Arbor's Veridian

DTE Energy and sonnen launched a two-year pilot on October 29, 2026 that ties the home batteries of nearly 100 houses at Veridian at County Farm, an all-electric development in Ann Arbor, into a virtual power plant. The companies call it Michigan's first residential battery VPP pilot; Veridian's developer, Thrive Collaborative, calls it DTE's first. (Ann Arbor's city utility runs its own solar-and-battery pilot in the Bryant neighborhood.)

The Michigan Public Service Commission approved the pilot on September 10, 2026, the first application under its expedited pilot review process. Per DTE's application as the order summarizes it, the pilot will cost an estimated $500,000, and each home comes standard with one sonnen battery rated at 4.8 kW and 20 kWh (kW vs kWh). Participants earn $105 per kW-year for letting DTE schedule their batteries for daily dispatch, at most $504 a year per battery, based on the share of scheduled dispatches they allow. DTE puts the pilot's levelized cost of capacity at scale at $136.02 per kW-year, under MISO's 2026/2027 cost of new entry of $138 by less than two dollars.

What the commission wants next is batteries that send power to the grid. It required no changes, calling the pilot "only an initial start to the company's potential to scale future VPPs across its territory," but encouraged DTE to remove the barriers to valuing and dispatching battery exports during the first year and "to be ready to export during the second year of operation," and to look for ways to expand beyond Veridian in year two. The Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association argued that a pilot putting 80% of its budget into evaluation, measurement and verification is not cost-effective, per the order's account of its comments.

The sonnen name is in trouble in Germany. sonnen GmbH, which Shell sold to Tiven in August, has filed for insolvency, according to an October 22 Handelsblatt report relayed by Energy-Storage.News. In an October 27 update, a sonnen USA spokesperson told the outlet that "sonnen USA will operate as sonnen Inc. USA – as they always have." The joint release does not mention the German filing.