Owosso Township battery storage draft: M-2 only, 300-foot setback

If a company wanted to build a grid-scale battery farm in Owosso Charter Township, the rules the planning commission takes public comment on Wednesday would keep it out of every part of the township except General Manufacturing land, hold it 300 feet back from the nearest house on a neighbor's property, cap it at 20 feet tall, and require the owner to post a bond worth 125% of the cost of tearing it out again.

That is the substance of Draft #3 of the township's Battery Energy Storage Systems text amendment, which Owosso Charter Township has now posted inside its Oct. 28 meeting packet. The Current reported on Oct. 22 that the agenda announced a hearing but that the ordinance text itself was not posted and the meeting location was not listed. Both of those gaps are now closed: the hearing is at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Township Hall, 410 South Delaney Road.

Here is what the draft actually does. It defines a "small off-site" system as one under 50 megawatts and a "large off-site" system as 50 megawatts or more, and allows both only as a conditional use in the M-2, General Manufacturing district. Setbacks are measured from the nearest facility structure: 100 feet from a non-participating commercial or industrial property line, 300 feet from a non-participating residential property line, 100 feet from a road right-of-way, and 50 feet from the property lines of a participating landowner — the owner being paid to host it. Stacking battery components is prohibited. Sound may not exceed 50 average hourly decibels at an adjacent non-participating property line. Access drives must be gravel. Wiring must be buried, with narrow engineering exceptions.

A six-foot privacy fence, wall or berm must ring the site, with a greenbelt planted on the outside of it and the batteries on the inside. Lighting must be fully shielded, motion-activated and held to half a foot-candle at the property line.

The fire provisions are the longest part of the draft, and they run toward our volunteer and small-town departments. Every site must supply its own water for fire suppression, with access located outside the perimeter fence so the fire department can reach it. Applicants must file a fire response plan and a separate emergency response plan, each showing evidence they consulted local fire officials and county emergency managers, each identifying equipment or training gaps in local response capacity, and each updated at least every three years. Containment must be designed to keep burned battery electrolyte and firefighting runoff out of stormwater and groundwater, and every system needs an emergency shut-off.

On the back end, a system that sits inoperable for six continuous months is deemed abandoned. The owner then gets a hearing before the planning commission, and within 90 days of a finding of abandonment must pull a demolition permit and remove everything above and below ground. If they don't, the township can do the removal at the owner's expense and draw on the surety bond, which the draft sets at 125% of a professional engineer's estimated removal and restoration cost, reviewed annually and updated every five years.

Two things the packet still does not say. It does not say whether any battery project has actually been proposed in Owosso Township — an open question this desk raised last week and which the hearing may answer. And the draft is unfinished in places: two cross-references are still written as "section XX," a point Chair Dianna Wilson raised at the Sept. 23 meeting, and the hearing notice cites Section 14.31 while the draft text is headed Section 14.30. Copies are available from Zoning Administrator Brandon Jonas at ROWE Professional Services Company, (810) 341-7500, and written comments can be mailed to the commission at the Delaney Road address.

The chickens come back too. The Sept. 23 minutes, included in the packet, record Don Shanahan of 1978 Bock Street telling the commission he has kept chickens for 15 years and now has to remove them after an anonymous complaint. Attorney Lynn Bowne told the room that residential zoning does not allow farm animals and that once a complaint is filed the ordinance has to be enforced — and that from this point, keeping the chickens is at the property owner's own risk. The commissioners then asked planner Brandon Jonas to add conditional use permit language for raising chickens, covering numbers, lot size, neighbor permission and renewal, with Commissioner Jonathan Archer suggesting the draft's poultry figure change from 12 to 30 and the large-animal threshold drop from 2 acres to 1 acre. Sample ordinances are the first item of old business Wednesday.

What happens next: a master plan open house runs 5 to 6 p.m. Wednesday with maps, survey results and goals, immediately before the 6 p.m. meeting. The battery hearing opens at 6; the commission also reviews sample data center ordinances that night. Whatever the commission recommends goes to the Owosso Township Board, which makes the final decision. The next planning commission meeting after Wednesday is Dec. 9.