Eolian said on July 29, 2026 that construction has started on Flint Grid, a 200-megawatt battery storage plant in Jersey Township, Licking County, Ohio, built to hold 5.3 hours of output, or roughly 1.06 gigawatt-hours of electricity. The site sits inside the New Albany data center and industrial corridor east of Columbus and ties into what the developer calls one of the region’s most critical load-serving substations.
Flint Grid cleared PJM’s capacity auction for the delivery year that starts June 1, 2027, and Eolian expects the battery to be running before then. The company describes it as the first large-scale battery to qualify for the PJM capacity market and the largest to clear the 2027/2028 auction, accounting for more than half of the new battery capacity committed for that year.
That auction is where PJM’s supply arithmetic came apart in public. The grid operator secured 134,479 megawatts of unforced capacity at the federally approved price cap of $333.44 per megawatt-day and still finished 6,623 MW below its own reliability requirement, the first auction in which the entire market fell short. Only 774 MW of the cleared total was new generation or generator upgrades. Forecast peak demand rose about 5,250 MW from the previous auction, and nearly 5,100 MW of that increase came from data centers.
“This auction leaves no doubt that data centers’ demand for electricity continues to far outstrip new supply,” said Stu Bresler, then PJM’s executive vice president for market services and strategy.
Why the location does the work
The facility delivers power into the existing Jug Street 138-kilovolt substation owned by AEP Ohio Transmission Company, from about 15 acres along Jug Street Road. Storage at that kind of delivery point changes what the wires already in the ground can carry. The battery discharges in the hours when the substation and the circuits behind it would otherwise cap how much load can be served, which is the argument Eolian is making in a region where demand is arriving faster than transmission can be built. A 15-acre battery yard energizes years ahead of a line rebuild or a new gas plant working through permitting and construction.
“There’s growing consternation about how the US can rapidly scale infrastructure to support America’s growing electricity demand, but not nearly enough conversation about how to use existing technology to unlock the wasted capacity that already exists on the grid,” Aaron Zubaty, Eolian’s founder and chief executive, said in the announcement. He put the construction cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars and said the company committed that capital years before load forecasts became national news.
The permitting record supports the speed argument. The Ohio Power Siting Board certified Flint Grid in October 2022, the first stand-alone battery project it had approved in the state, in a case opened in 2021. That certificate covered 800 megawatt-hours of discharge capacity; the system now going up holds more than a gigawatt-hour. Duration matters for what a battery is worth in this market, because PJM accredits each resource class by how much of its capacity can be counted on when the system is most at risk.
What Flint Grid arrives into
PJM’s board directed the grid operator on July 27, 2026 to file two proposals with federal regulators. One is a one-time backstop procurement for new supply, running from September 30 to October 21, 2026, with accepted offers capped at $555 per megawatt-day and commitments of up to 15 years. The other is an operational rule under which large new loads that have not brought their own generation by June 1, 2027 can be curtailed during capacity shortages, ahead of the emergency demand-response programs PJM pays to reduce consumption.
That deadline lands on the day Flint Grid’s delivery year begins. The board put growth in new large loads at an estimated 70 gigawatts by 2038, against 15 GW of generating capacity retired since 2022, and defined a large load as at least 50 MW at a single site.
For operators in the New Albany corridor, that sets two terms at once: capacity that reaches the grid before mid-2027 counts toward the shortfall, and load that can neither flex nor supply itself is first in the curtailment queue. It is the same pressure that has pushed developers toward flex-ready campus designs and pushed utilities into arguing that the new load will hold down bills for everyone else on the system.
Eolian, which is owned by its employees and by funds managed by Global Infrastructure Partners, a BlackRock (BLK ) company, calls this Flint Grid’s first phase. It is targeting commercial operation before summer 2027, on a site it began developing in 2018.
