Ann Arbor launches pilot municipal energy utility, installs solar and batteries on about 100 homes

Ann Arbor’s new Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) began installing rooftop solar panels and whole‑home batteries in the Bryant neighborhood in May, launching a pilot that city officials say will put renewable systems on about 100 homes and aggregate them into a virtual power plant.

The pilot follows voter approval of the SEU in November 2024 and the Ann Arbor City Council’s creation of the unit as a city department in April 2025. SEU officials said the utility is built to be 100% renewable and optional: residents and in‑city businesses choose whether to participate, and the city will own, install and operate the equipment.

“The energy will be things like solar power and batteries, geothermal energy,” said the SEU executive director, describing the assets the city will install and maintain. City ownership, the director said, removes upfront capital costs for participants: the systems are owned by the SEU while customers pay a monthly SEU bill for the portion of their energy served by SEU assets and remain connected to the traditional grid.

The SEU executive director said the city is designing rates so that the sum of a customer’s traditional utility bill plus the SEU bill should be equal to or less than what the customer paid before, and that the pilot is intended to lower energy burdens for households that spend a high share of income on utility bills. Formal rates have not yet been published; the city plans to release rate details later this fall.

The Bryant pilot grew from a long partnership between the city, the Community Action Network and neighborhood residents. SEU staff said Bryant comprises a little more than 260 households and that two grants—one from the Michigan Public Service Commission and another from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity—provide funding to install solar and batteries on roughly 100 homes, covering more than a third of the neighborhood in the pilot phase.

Each pilot deployment combines about 10 rooftop panels (roughly a 4.5 kW system) with a whole‑home battery, the executive director said. When aggregated and coordinated, those systems form a virtual power plant (VPP): distributed resources that can be controlled together and dispatched to supply energy when the grid needs it.

“By having all these batteries here in the Bryant neighborhood—about 100 of them—we can turn those on when the grid needs that power or when those homes need that power,” the SEU executive director said, describing how batteries make the aggregated resource dispatchable.

City officials described practical benefits: faster deployment than building a large centralized power plant, local resilience (batteries can supply backup power during outages), lower transmission needs, and reduced pollution in communities that historically host large fossil‑fuel plants.

Officials said there were no VPPs operating in Michigan at the time of the interview and that Ann Arbor aims to be among the first local tests of the model in the state. The SEU executive director said the pilot kicked off with a community meeting in March and that installations began in May.

Looking ahead, the city plans to begin offering SEU services more broadly in 2027. SEU staff said they hope to serve hundreds or up to about 1,000 participants and asked interested residents to submit an expression‑of‑interest on the SEU website (the episode references the site a2su.com).