Just northeast of Columbus, Ohio, the leafy Main Street of New Albany gives way to lush green fields and agrarian ponds — but soon the countryside transitions into mile after mile of enormous white boxes that emit a low hum. This patch of former farmland has become one of the densest clusters of AI computing in the nation, recently joined by Intel, which is constructing a $28 billion computer-chip factory at the northern end of the industrial bloc.
All of this requires a tremendous amount of electricity, but the area falls within the multistate market managed by PJM Interconnection, which has consistently struggled to bring new power plants online even as demand booms. The resulting power price spike has drawn the ire of both Republican and Democratic governors, who are demanding that PJM and tech giants figure out how to stop data centers from driving up costs for everybody around them. No less than the White House is pushing AI companies to “build, bring, or buy new power supply.”
A huge battery that just began construction in the heart of the New Albany computing cluster could model a way to accomplish that task.
Developer Eolian announced on Wednesday that it’s broken ground on its Flint Grid battery project. The first phase is due online by June of 2027, and will be able to inject 200 megawatts for up to five hours straight into an electrical substation that serves the computing hub. With 1 gigawatt-hour of storage capacity, this battery won’t just be the biggest on the 13-state PJM market; it’ll be the biggest battery east of the Mississippi.
The system will help lower electricity prices by charging up when energy is cheap and abundant and dispatching that stored power onto the grid at times of peak demand — exactly what big batteries have been doing for years in places like California and Texas.
“There are things that have been in progress for a long time, designed to solve these very problems,” said Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty, in response to the “snowballing narrative” that the grid can’t keep up with demand.
Batteries have set new installation records in the U.S. year after year, swiftly becoming the nation’s top pick for on-demand capacity and beating out new gas plant construction. But construction has clustered in the West, and developers have struggled to make inroads in the Midwest or the densely populated Eastern Seaboard. However, now that those areas face tremendous AI data center growth, they could use the instantaneous power that massive batteries provide.
Eolian can deliver that in New Albany because the firm got started a decade ago, taking calculated risks that seem to have paid off.
“This isn’t just some random 200 megawatts,” Zubaty said. “This is 200 megawatts at the epicenter of one of the largest industrial buildouts ever seen in our country, and by putting it at this spot, it will actually allow more stuff to get built.”
From farmland to data center hub
Zubaty didn’t originally have Ohio top of mind for his clean energy ambitions. By the early 2010s, northern Virginia led the nation in data center density, and Zubaty wanted to develop solar farms near those major energy consumers. But he ran into obstacles finding enough land. Solar development had to contend with northern Virginia’s horse farms and suburban subdivisions, and further west from Dulles airport, you hit the Appalachian Mountains.
“Where do the mountains end? A little bit east of Columbus,” Zubaty said.
Central Ohio was already growing in population and economic vitality, Zubaty noted, anchored by a skilled workforce and The Ohio State University. And it had a lot of open space that could accommodate new growth if the titans of the internet wanted to branch out from northern Virginia.
“We started doing land research, looking at where we could build solar in proximity to the Columbus metro area,” Zubaty recalled. “Lo and behold, we stumbled upon a couple obscurely named LLCs that were buying up a bunch of land at substations, and it was Amazon.”
