This Michigan Coal Plant is Being Turned Into a Giant Battery

This Michigan Coal Plant is Being Turned Into a Giant Battery

Trenton Channel Power Plant, a coal plant that operated for nearly 100 years, closed in 2022. Now the site is turning into a battery storage center.

For nearly 100 years, the Trenton Channel Power Plant sat along the banks of the Detroit River, about 22 miles south of downtown Detroit, burning coal. The plant began operating in 1924, and was the largest project the local electricity company (now called DTE Energy) had undertaken.

Now that power plant is retired—but its location is getting a second life. A new battery storage system, called the Trenton Channel Energy Center, will soon be built on the site of the demolished coal plant. It will capture energy from the grid when demand is low, storing it for use when demand is high. It’s set to become the largest stand-alone energy storage site in the Great Lakes region.

DTE chose Powin Energy, an Oregon-based energy storage company, to supply that center. Powin was responsible for powering the 2024 Super Bowl with renewable energy, thanks to its battery storage project alongside a solar farm in Moapa, Nevada. It’s also currently building a storage site on a soon-to-close coal plant in Sydney that it says will be one of the largest battery systems in the world.

In Michigan, the project on the site of the Trenton Channel Power Plant will store 220 megawatts, or 880 megawatt hours. (The original coal plant generated about 535 megawatts). That’s enough to power about 40,000 homes for a day—or up to 150,0000 homes for four hours, “which really will cover your peak electricity demand in the evenings,” says Powin CEO Jeff Waters.

THE NEED FOR BATTERY STORAGE In order to meet our global climate goals, the International Energy Agency has said we need a “rapid expansion” of batteries. Storage systems are crucial to the clean energy transition because they store excess electricity generated by solar or wind at peak times that would otherwise be lost, and generally make that power more reliable and available. Battery storage systems can also help states get off of fossil fuels like coal by addressing grid issues. In many cases, decommissioning or scaling back a coal plant can create electricity reliability issues. If there aren’t enough other power sources, like wind and solar, to meet peak energy demands, the region relies on fossil fuels to fill those gaps. But batteries can store electricity when

demand is low, and deploy it when demand is high, making the grid more reliable without the need for fossil fuels, and reducing the chance of brownouts or blackouts. In the case of the Brandon Shores coal plant in Maryland, for example, the local electricity transmission company says it needs to keep burning coal until grid upgrades are completed—or customers could experience blackouts and other reliability issues. But the Sierra Club says adding battery storage to the plant would solve that problem, without the need to keep burning coal. Battery storage is expected to soar in the coming years. In 2024 alone, U.S. storage capacity could double compared to 2023, reaching 30 gigawatts if all the planned projects come online. By 2030, global energy storage capacity needs to increase sixfold in order to get the world on track for its climate goals, according to the IEA.

Powin has started to see some of this demand firsthand. The energy storage company was founded in 2010 but didn’t begin deploying projects at scale until around 2018. By 2023, it deployed 8 gigawatt hours of storage. But within 2024 alone, it’ll do another 8 gigawatt hours, “so we’ll do as much this year as we’ve done in the history of the company,” Waters says.

TURNING A COAL PLANT INTO STORAGE

The Trenton Channel Power Plant in Michigan was decommissioned in 2022, alongside another plant called St. Clair. (DTE Energy said it was retiring the plants as part of its carbon-free goal. The Sierra Club and Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against DTE over alleged Clean Air Act violations, the settlement for which required the utility to close three plants: Trenton Channel, St. Clair, and another called River Rouge.) At the end of June, the Trenton Channel Power Plant boiler building was demolished, its nine stories collapsing in less than a minute. It was the second phase of the plant’s demolition; its coal stacks were imploded in March. DTE Energy broke ground on the battery storage facility in June. Construction will continue through 2025, and the Trenton Channel Energy Center is expected to begin operating in mid-2026. Old coal power plants make good sites for battery storage not just because of the story it tells about a new, clean energy solution replacing an old, polluting one, but also because of the logistics of the facilities. Coal plants already have a connection to the energy grid “in a very useful place,” Waters says. Setting up that grid connection can often be a challenge, he adds—new connections require complicated approval processes that can delay clean energy projects—but by using an old coal plant, those rights are built in.

Because battery storage systems take up less space, they’re somewhat easy to add, Waters says. The entire Trenton Channel power station covered more than 450 acres; Powin’s battery storage system will be nearly 20 acres. Because of the size of the Trenton Channel site, DTE has said it could add even more battery capacity in the future. “There may be future phases,” DTE Chairman and CEO Jerry Norcia previously told The Detroit News. “It’s not unreasonable to think that over time we could more than double the capacity here or put other generating resources back at this location.” The storage project will cost up to $460 million; some $140 million of that will be offset by tax incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Waters recognizes that the demolition of these coal plants, which long provided jobs and economic stability, can be difficult for some communities. At the groundbreaking ceremony for the battery system, he heard stories “from way back in the day that that coal plant was really a source of pride for the community, because it was creating the industrial revolution within the state of Michigan,” he says. “And so it was kind of with heavy hearts that they were seeing that coal plant come down. But [there’s also] this great optimism around storage coming in and effectively being able to replace that coal plant, but do so in a clean way that isn’t bringing with it all the baggage that comes with coal.”