Land off South Lima Center Road in Washtenaw County's Lima Township where a 1.4 GW data center had been proposed. | Photo provided by Ken Klovski
Residents of Lima Township and surrounding areas who opposed a proposed Consumers Energy power plant celebrated a victory last week when the utility announced it had withdrawn plans for a 1.4-gigawatt power plant on a 120-acre parcel of farmland off South Lima Center Road.
The July 1 decision came after weeks of protest from residents and lawmakers concerned about the potential health hazards of a massive power plant on land zoned for agriculture.
“It was such an awesome team effort, how everybody came together,” Lima Township Supervisor Bill VanRiper told Michigan Advance. “There’s no right or left, we’re all fighting for the same thing.”
The project was first discovered by Ken Klovski, a former DTE executive, who noticed deep borehole drilling activity on the property across the road from his home. Klovski consulted county records and found the farm had a three-year option agreement with Consumers Energy.
The agreement didn’t provide project details, but his neighbors told him it was for a small electrical substation. Klovski wasn’t convinced, and found a February 28 filing on an active project map from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which oversees a major portion of the North American electric grid. The map showed a 1.4-gigawatt power plant near the Majestic-Milan 345-kV line in the vicinity of the farm across the road.
If constructed, it would be one of Consumers Energy’s largest power plants. He informed VanRiper, who attempted to reach Consumers Energy for information. His calls were not returned.
The planned power plant is strikingly similar in scale to a 1.4-gigawatt data center in Saline Township owned by Oracle and OpenAI that recently broke ground in nearby Saline Township.
Klovski reached out to MLive, which broke the story on May 18. At VanRiper’s invitation, Consumers Energy sent two representatives to a public meeting in Lima Township on June 1 to answer questions about the proposed power plant. According to VanRiper and others present at the meeting, the representatives stated that Consumers Energy had not optioned the land specifically for a power plant and denied any connection to the Saline data center.
Klovski stood up in the meeting and accused the representatives of lying. “This isn’t coincidental,” Klovski recounted during a phone interview with the Advance. “1.414 GW is about a quarter of Consumer Energy’s daily load. You’re obviously anticipating more load. You’re not going to get an influx of 25% more population in the state in the next couple of years.”
Klovski explained that while power plants participating in MISO sell their electricity into a regional wholesale market rather than directly to a single end user, the location of power generating facilities is heavily influenced by access to high-voltage transmission infrastructure and the distance to major customers. The closer the power source is to the end user, the lower the cost of transmission.
The property across the road from Klovski has the added advantage of being at the intersection of two natural gas lines and a MISO transmission line. Klovski said that from a convenience standpoint, wherever a natural gas pipeline and a transmission line intersect is a good spot for a natural gas power plant.
“It makes economic sense but that means that you don’t care what the people think. And guess what? People are your customers,” Klovski said. “Data centers and power plants don’t need to be going onto virgin farmland.”
The meeting prompted VanRiper to spend numerous nights looking over Lima Township zoning ordinances to learn what rights Lima had to deny the project. He decided that more time was needed to determine a legal course of action. On June 12, the Lima Township Board of Trustees passed a 12-month moratorium on new power-generating facilities.
Scio Township resident Jeff Parness learned of the proposed power plant and the potential health impacts to his community and was determined to stop the project. “The facts speak for themselves about nitrous oxide, sulfur oxide, the particulate matter, the carcinogens,” he said.
On June 6, he formed the community-based organization Neighbors United Against Noxious Consumers Energy, or NUANCE. On the group’s Facebook page, Parness began a daily podcast “Dear Garrick,” expressing the concerns of the group’s 1,400 members directly to Consumers Energy CEO Garrick Rochow.
Parness is a native New Yorker who graduated from U-M in 1987 and has extensive political and corporate experience. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he founded New York Says Thank You, an organization that has sent 700,000 volunteers to disaster-stricken communities in all 50 states to help them rebuild.
Parness was able to leverage his legal and political contacts, corporate knowledge, and experience with community organizing to demonstrate to Consumers Energy that opposition to the plant would have a negative impact on stock values.
On June 14, Rochow accepted Parness’s invitation to meet at his home to discuss the proposed power plant in Lima Township.
In the meeting, Parness expressed the community’s health concerns and pressed Rochow to locate any new power plants on brownfields or sites where existing power plants have been decommissioned. “He looks at me, and he says, ‘I am here to assure you that we want the same outcome that you want,’ and then he says that we do have alternatives and we’ve been looking at them very closely,” recounts Parness.
On July 1, Rochow made good on his promise as the utility confirmed it would not move forward with the proposed plant in Lima Township.
When asked to comment on the decision, Consumers Energy Director of Media Relations Katie Carey instead sent the Advance a copy of their general public statement.
“We will release the option on the land back to the property owner and withdraw our application to study the costs of interconnecting this project to the electric grid with our grid operator,” the statement said. “We recognize that our communication fell short to the Lima Township community to address their concerns about the project and apologize for that.”
The statement denied that the data center in Saline Township is connected to the proposed natural gas plant in Lima Township, affirming that “Consumers Energy builds and operates electric generation plants to serve our customers, not DTE’s.” Consumers did not state in the media release what the use for the proposed power-plant would have been.
Parness characterizes Rochow as one of the most courageous CEOs he has ever met. “It doesn’t do anybody any good if you’re yelling at each other from your own corners, you have to find ways to come to the table and talk about complicated things out of respect and out of hope,” says Parness. “Because at the end of the day, we’re all neighbors in this.”
Leading up to the decision to withdraw, Parness has heard from numerous residents fearful of the ramifications of a possible power plant on their lives. “People who have been there for seven generations,” he says, who have told him “we don’t know if we can keep our family’s legacy here if this happens. We’d have to sell our houses and move away.”
The threat of unwanted large-scale industrial development remains visceral for rural communities that lack the resources to fight back.
VanRiper has joined a group led by Chelsea Mayor Kate Henson that includes environmental attorneys and more than a dozen officials from the local to the state level, to develop a regulatory framework for controlling new large-scale industrial developments. “Because even though we beat them this time, we’re going to keep this group going and strengthen it for the next time,” he says.
This story was originally produced by Michigan Advance, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Alabama Reflector, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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Author: Trilby MacDonald