Portage Adds Battery Storage to Its Data Center Ban. The Zoning Gap Is Real.

Portage, Michigan, has not received a single data center proposal. No developer has submitted plans. No site has been identified. On February 24, the city council will vote on a one-year moratorium on data centers and battery energy storage systems anyway.

Portage is one of at least 19 Michigan municipalities that have passed or proposed data center moratoriums since late 2025, from Saginaw to Sterling Heights, from Howell Township to Pontiac. The wave is spreading fast enough that State Representative Jennifer Wortz is drafting a statewide moratorium bill. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has promised a veto, calling any legislation that prevents economic growth “an automatic non-starter.” But the Portage ordinance stands apart because it explicitly lumps BESS facilities in with data centers as a single category of restricted infrastructure.

Michigan moratoriums. The state is the epicenter, though not the only jurisdiction acting. New York State Senator Liz Krueger introduced S.9144 on February 6, proposing a three-year moratorium. Prince George’s County, Maryland, implemented a six-month freeze in September 2025. Virginia has more than 60 data center bills circulating in its legislature. Washington State is advancing legislation that would require data centers to bring their own clean energy rather than draw from the public grid. At the federal level, Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal introduced the GRID Act on February 14, the first bipartisan bill in this Congress to mandate that data centers consuming more than 20 megawatts secure dedicated, off-grid power generation.

Goldman Sachs analysts Manuel Abecasis and Hongcen Wei forecast consumer electricity prices will jump 6% through 2027, with data centers accounting for a disproportionate share of demand growth. Goldman projects a 0.2% drag on consumer spending and a 0.1% hit to GDP as higher power costs reduce household budgets. Lower-income households absorb the worst of it because electricity represents a larger share of their spending.

Local officials read those numbers and see a political problem with no upside. Springfield Township Supervisor Ric Davis, explaining his community’s 180-day moratorium, put it plainly: “This moratorium ensures we are planning from a position of strength, not reacting under pressure.”

Battery storage in the crossfire. Battery storage is not a data center. A 500-kilowatt commercial battery system behind a grocery store does not consume 50 megawatts, does not require millions of gallons of cooling water, and does not generate the land use, noise, and traffic concerns that drive data center opposition. But zoning boards do not always make that distinction. When Portage drafted its moratorium language, it combined data centers and BESS facilities into a single prohibition. Representative Wortz explicitly connected the two in her rationale, arguing that data centers drive demand for “battery storage facilities to store that energy, and so it just continues to be an erosion of land use.”

A proposed battery facility on Rocky Lane in Greene County, Missouri, drew opposition this week over fire risk, noise, and light pollution. The complaints echo those lodged against data centers 800 miles away in Michigan, even though the two technologies serve different functions and operate at different scales. Communities that feel the pressure of large-scale energy infrastructure tend to resist multiple categories of development at once.

Federal signals. The federal response to data center power demand is moving in two directions simultaneously. On one track, FERC is actively enabling co-location. PJM must file compliance tariff revisions by February 16 creating three new transmission service categories for co-located generation and large loads. The filing establishes a formal pathway for behind-the-meter generation, including battery storage, to serve data center loads while remaining grid-interconnected. On the other track, Congress and state legislatures are restricting data center grid access. The GRID Act would force facilities over 20 MW off the public grid entirely, with a 10-year transition for existing operations.

Both tracks increase demand for battery storage. Data centers forced to self-generate need storage for reliability. Data centers allowed to co-locate with on-site generation need storage for load balancing. Whether local zoning keeps pace with federal and regional market design, or whether municipal moratoriums create a patchwork of jurisdictions where needed storage cannot be built, remains an open question.

Duration risk. Michigan’s moratoriums range from 90 days to one year. Sterling Heights approved a one-year moratorium on February 3. These are meant to be temporary, buying time for communities to study impacts and write zoning rules. But moratoriums carry political inertia: once a community has organized against a category of development, lifting restrictions requires officials to spend political capital that extending them does not.

For battery storage specifically, the risk is that moratorium language written to address 100-megawatt data center campuses ends up applying to 250-kilowatt commercial systems installed inside existing buildings. A wall-mounted commercial battery system occupies existing floor space, produces no noise audible outside the building, requires no cooling water, and reduces rather than increases grid load during peak hours. It is, in most operational respects, the opposite of a data center.

The zoning gap. The sources reviewed for this article did not identify any state that has written zoning language cleanly separating commercial behind-the-meter storage from utility-scale BESS or data center infrastructure. The International Building Code and NFPA 855 provide safety frameworks, but local planning boards rarely reference them when drafting moratoriums. That gap means technology designed to reduce grid strain can be regulated as if it causes grid strain.

Wood Mackenzie projects an 11% contraction in U.S. utility-scale storage deployments in 2026, driven by supply chain adjustments under FEOC compliance rules. If municipal zoning friction adds permitting delays to the commercial segment, the contraction could spread. The five-year forecast calls for 93 gigawatts of storage deployment, revised 15% upward after the OBBBA. Delivering on that forecast requires building storage in communities that currently lack the regulatory vocabulary to distinguish a wall-mounted battery from a hyperscale data center.

Nineteen Michigan towns have decided to figure it out later. The question is how long “later” takes.

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