30 GW hours. That is the number on the table
today. We're looking at AA300 MW
battery system going up in Minnesota.
But the power output isn't even the headline here, it's the
duration. This system provides 100 hours
of storage. Which is.
Just total capacity, 30 GW hours.
That makes it the largest battery project by energy
capacity ever announced in the world.
It is really hard to overstate the sheer scale of 30 GW hours.
I mean, usually when we talk about grid batteries, we're
talking about, you know, a lithium ion container sitting at
a substation somewhere, and that's just designed to handle a
quick spike in air conditioning use between maybe 5:00 and 9:00
PM. This is an entirely different
animal. And it's not for general grid
storage either. No, exactly.
This massive battery is specifically being built to
power a new Google data center. They're partnering with Xcel
Energy to handle the massive, just continuous electrical load
coming from artificial intelligence.
It really feels like a shift from simply, you know,
supporting the public grid to building an entirely new kind of
infrastructure for just one specific customer.
It is. This represents a very physical
answer to that AI energy crunch we keep hearing about.
But what makes this specific case study so compelling is that
it touches on three really distinct layers.
First, you have the chemistry, which is radically different
from what is sitting in your phone right now.
Then you have the financial structure which involves Google
paying for essentially everything.
And then finally you have the local reality on the ground in
Pine Island, MN where this the sci-fi technology literally
meets small town zoning politics.
So the question hanging over all of this for you listening is
pretty straightforward. If we can actually build
batteries that last for days instead of hours, and using
materials as cheap as iron and air, does that finally solve the
reliability problem for renewables?
Or does it just create a grid where only the wealthiest
companies in the world can afford for the lights to stay
on? And to answer that, you really
have to look at the pressure driving the deal in the 1st
place. It isn't just that Google wants
to be green for PR reasons. Right.
It's operational. Highly operational data centers,
especially the ones running large language models.
Your Geminis, your TAT GPTS, they have a totally flat
relentless demand profile. They run 24/7.
And wind and solar obviously do not, right?
The sunsets, the wind dies down. That mismatch is the fundamental
problem of the whole energy transition, and until now the
primary tool to fix it has just been lithium ion batteries.
Which are literally everywhere. I mean they run our phones or
EVs a huge chunk of our short term grid storage.
And lithium ion is an incredible technology.
It is highly power dense and it reacts instantly.
If a cloud passes over a solar farm, a lithium battery creates
a bridge in milliseconds to keep the grid frequency stable.
Yeah, but financially and chemically, lithium ion just
hits a hard wall right around 4 hours of duration.
Which four hours gets you through the evening peak?
Yeah, but it doesn't help you if a storm system just parks itself
over the Midwest for three days. Exactly.
And in the energy industry, there is a very specific German
word for that exact scenario, dunkle float.
Dunkle Float. Yeah, dunkle float.
It translates roughly to dark doldrums.
Dark doldrums. Right.
These are periods where there is absolutely no sun and no wind
for days at a time. So if you are a data center
manager and your mandate is to run on 100% carbon free
electricity. Which, by the way, is
Minnesota's official state goal by 2040.
So dunkle flout is the thing that keeps you up at night.
Because if your battery dies after four hours and the
forecast says there's no wind for another 40 hours, you have
to fire up a natural gas plant. And that totally destroys your
carbon free goal. So that is why the 100 hour
duration is the specific answer to the dunkle flout problem.
It's a bridge. Right.
This battery system isn't designed for speed, it's
designed for endurance. It bridges those multi day gaps
without burning fossil fuels. OK, so let's actually look at
the machine itself. The company making these is Form
Energy. Yeah.
And I was looking at their spec sheet and under chemistry it
literally just lists iron air. It sounds almost too simple,
because the fundamental principle is something we
usually spend a lot of time and money trying to prevent.
It relies on rusting. Hold on, we are trusting the
reliability of the grid to Rust. In a highly controlled way, yes.
The process is officially called reversible rusting.
The battery uses iron, water and air.
That's it. OK.
When the battery is discharging, meaning it's sending power out
to the data center, it takes in oxygen from the outside air and
exposes the iron inside the cell to it.
The iron turns into iron oxide. Rust and that releases energy.
Exactly. That chemical reaction releases
electrons. So the active rusting creates
the electricity wait back up. How do you recharge a box of
Rust? You reverse the current.
When the wind is blowing hard and you have excess electricity
on the grid, you push that power back into the battery.
That incoming energy forces the oxygen to detach from the rust,
turning it back into metallic iron, and then it just expels
the oxygen back out into the air.
It's essentially breathing. That is actually the best way to
visualize it. It breathes in oxygen to
discharge and it breathes out oxygen to recharge.
I'm trying to picture the physical unit here.
Is this just a giant tank of metal?
It's modular. Each individual module is about
the size of a side by side washer and dryer set OK, and
inside that box you have stacks of about 50 cells, each 1A meter
tall. They contain the iron anode, the
air electrode and a water based electrolyte.
That water based part seems really significant for safety
because we constantly hear about lithium batteries Catching Fire
or going at the thermal runaway. It is a major differentiator
because the electrolyte is water based.
It is completely non flammable. There is 0 risk of thermal
runaway. Wow.
You could technically shoot a hole in the side of this thing
and it wouldn't explode. I mean it might leak water, but
it will not burn. That has to make the permitting
process so much easier compared to putting in a massive lithium
installation 0. Absolutely.
But if it's safer and it holds power longer, why isn't this
exact chemistry in our electric cars right now?
Wait, iron is incredibly heavy. You do not want an iron air
battery in your car. It would weigh as much as the
vehicle itself, right? But for a stationary grid
battery just sitting in a field in Minnesota, weight is totally
irrelevant. Cost is what matters.
And Form Energy claims they can store energy at less than 110th
the cost of lithium ion. 110th That is the economic trigger
here. Lithium ion packs cost somewhere
around 130 to $150.00 per kWh. OK, Form is targeting closer to
$20. That is a massive.
Gap. It entirely comes down to the
materials. Iron is the most abundant metal
on earth. We know exactly how to work with
it and it's extremely cheap. We aren't mining cobalt in
unstable regions. Yeah, the entire supply chain is
domestic. In fact, these specific
batteries are being manufactured right now in Weirton, WV.
That's form factory 1. Right, right.
And the location really tells the story.
Weirton used to be a massive steel town.
Form Energy actually built their factory right on the side of a
defunct steel mill, so they're using the legacy workforce and
the existing infrastructure of the old steel industry to build
the storage medium for the renewable age.
That is a fascinating transition.
So we have a battery that is cheap, safe, and last for 100
hours, but 30 GW hours of storage is still a massive
infrastructure project. Usually when a utility builds
something this big, the cost just gets passed right on to the
ratepayers. And this is where the so-called
Minnesota model comes into play. The regulatory framework here is
honestly just as innovative as the chemistry.
It's being called the Clean Energy Accelerator Charge, or
CEAC. Clean energy accelerator charge.
How does that actually differ from a normal utility rate hike?
Well, in a traditional utility model, if Xcel Energy builds a
new power plant, they take that cost, they add a Guaranteed Rate
of return, and they just spread it out across everyone's
electric bill. You, me, the local bakery, we
all pay a slice. Which is standard since we all
ostensibly use the grid, but this project is explicitly for
Google. Exactly, and that is why the
Cesc is so different. Google is paying all the costs
for this service. All of them.
They're paying for the wind
farms, the solar panels, the form energy batteries, and this
is critical, the grid infrastructure upgrades required
to actually hook it all up. So Excel Energy is claiming that
residential bills will not go up 1 cent to support this growth.
That is the promise. Excel has been very clear that
the residential customer pays nothing extra for this specific
project, and this connects directly to the broader
ratepayer protection debate we are seeing nationally right now.
Yeah, we heard about this recently in the State of the
Union. President Trump announced A
ratepayer protection pledge, basically demanding that data
centers pay their own way so they don't drive up prices for
regular families. Right.
And it is a very politically popular stance.
You have these trillion dollar tech companies coming into town
and demanding literal gigawatts of power.
It is completely natural to worry that regular people are
going to foot the bill. But there is some disagreement
on whether a Plex like that is even necessary.
Yes, Brian Janis, who used to lead energy at Microsoft, argued
recently that the pledge is, quote, meaningless.
Meaningless because the data centers are already paying.
His argument is that industrial customers have always had
entirely different rate structures than residential
ones. Data centers have generally
always paid for their own load. Janus is basically saying we
were already going to pay for this anyway.
So Google might look at the pledge and say it's completely
redundant. Right.
But the Minnesota deal formalizes it in a new way.
It creates a highly specific tariff that totally isolates the
cost. So just to reset here, Google
gets the clean power and the reliability they need for AI,
Excel gets a massive upgrade to their grid paid for by a
corporate client, and the residential customer
theoretically sees no change in their monthly bill.
That's the deal on paper. I want to look at the sheer
scope of what Google is actually buying here.
We talked about the battery, but what is charging it?
The agreement involves 1.9 gigawatts of new clean energy
total. So you have the 300 megawatts of
storage we discussed, but that is paired with 1400 megawatts of
wind and 200 megawatts of solar. 1400 That is a lot of wind.
Minnesota is a very wind rich state, but there is another
detail in the deal that is really worth highlighting.
It's a $50 million investment in something Excel calls Capacity
Connect. Capacity Connect.
What does that money actually go toward?
It's a distributed energy program.
Instead of putting all the batteries in one giant field
strictly for Google, this money goes toward putting utility
owned batteries at local businesses and industrial sites
throughout the grid. So local factory just gets a
battery on site. Yes, the idea is to help grid
reliability at the edges, not just at the central data center.
It's essentially A sweetener for the broader grid.
Let's zoom in on where this giant battery and data center
are actually going. Pine Island, MN.
Yeah, a small city population is less than 4000.
It's roughly an hour South of the Twin Cities.
And before this, their biggest claim to fame was holding a
world record for a 6000 LB block of cheese on a railroad flat
car. Which is a very, very different
kind of heavy industry than artificial intelligence.
Just a little bit. But clearly, not everyone in
Pine Island is happy about this transition.
No, they aren't. There is a Facebook group called
Stop the Pine Island Data Center that currently has over 600
members and in a town of 4000 that is a significant percentage
of the local population. What are their specific
concerns? It's the usual friction you see
with data centers, mostly water usage and noise.
Data centers need massive amounts of water for cooling.
Even with closed loop systems, the overall consumption is high.
Locals are worried about drawing down the local aquifer.
And then there is the noise from the cooling fans.
Yeah, we've seen reports from Ohio, where residents living
near data centers complain about just a constant, inescapable
hum. Right.
And while this specific project avoids the air pollution
concerns you normally get with diesel backup generators, since
they are using the iron air batteries instead, the physical
industrial footprint is still massive.
You are turning quiet farmland into a high tech industrial
park. It's that classic tension
between wanting all these digital services to work
instantly but not wanting the physical infrastructure next
door. Exactly.
However, from a political standpoint, this project is
being held up nationally as the model.
Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm specifically praised
this exact deal. Really.
Yeah. She called it the prime example
for how sighting should be done. Just because of the Google
funding structure. That and the legislative
groundwork that made it possible.
Minnesota passed laws in 2025 that set very strict
environmental guardrails for these types of projects.
Granholm's point is that you can't just let a massive build
out like this happen in a vacuum.
You need state legislation that protects the environment 1st,
and then you need a utility willing to actually create a
contract structure like the CEAC to protect the race.
So let's pull back and look at what all of this means for the
energy transition as a whole. We have the world's largest
battery by energy capacity, made of iron and air, funded entirely
by Google to basically bypass the limitations of the public
grid and weather intermittency. It essentially proves that you
can get firm 24/7 carbon free power if you are willing to move
beyond lithium ion. That is the key take away here.
It feels like the Minnesota model shows that Big Tech can
actually act as a catalyst. They aren't just buying paper
credits to offset their carbon footprint anymore.
They're funding the hard physical hardware that makes the
grid reliable. That is the major shift.
For years, companies would just buy renewable energy
certificates. They'd pay for a wind farm in
Texas to technically offset set the emissions of a data center
in Virginia. It was purely accounting.
Yeah, spreadsheet exercise. Exactly.
But this deal is about physics. It's about Google saying I need
actual power here in this spot right now, regardless of the
weather, and I will pay for the infrastructure to make that
happen. But if this technology works at
this scale, if these iron air batteries do exactly what they
say they can do, does that finally kill the argument that
renewables are too unreliable? It weakens it significantly.
The main argument against a purely renewable glid is always
intermittency. But if you can cost effectively
store 100 hours of energy, you simply don't need a gas peaker
plant. You just have four days of
backup sitting in a box. Right.
The catch, of course, is the price tag.
Google can afford to be the first mover and pay the premium
to build this out. Can a municipal utility in a
small town afford to do the same thing?
That is the risk. Does this technology get cheap
enough for everyone or do we create a 2 tiered grid, 1 tier
for the googles of the world with these private bulletproof
green energy islands, and another tier for the rest of us
relying on an aging grid that flickers every time the wind
dies down? That is the real test of the
Minnesota model. We'll be watching to see if the
technology actually trickles down or just stays at the top.
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