A massive battery storage facility is now under construction on Jug Street Road in Jersey Township, Licking County, positioned to stabilize the electric grid that serves New Albany's booming cluster of data centers.

California-based Eolian broke ground on Flint Grid on July 29. The 200-megawatt system will store more than 1 gigawatt-hour of electricity and discharge it for over five hours when demand spikes, according to the company's press release. That makes it the largest battery energy storage system in Ohio and across the entire 13-state PJM Interconnection grid, which manages electricity for about 65 million people.

The project sits on roughly 15 acres surrounded by data center warehouses operated by Amazon Web Services, Google and Meta. It connects to AEP Ohio Transmission Company's Jug Street 138-kilovolt substation, the same infrastructure feeding the computing hub.

No existing battery plant in Ohio exceeds 20 megawatts, and none operate in central Ohio, according to WOSU, which reported on the project Aug. 3.

The timing matters. PJM's most recent capacity auction for the 2027-28 delivery year fell 6,623 megawatts short of its own reliability target. Nearly 5,100 megawatts of that demand increase came from data centers, according to Unite AI. Ohio electricity rates rose by up to 20% in the summer of 2025, reflecting expected data center demand growth, according to ABC 6.

Eolian Chief Development Officer Eric Stoutenburg told WOSU the technology can help prevent brownouts and blackouts as data centers strain the grid.

"We're not alone in terms of developing these projects. We happen to be first and happen to be sited at a great location, but I think you will see a rapid expansion of energy storage across PJM and certainly in Ohio," Stoutenburg said.

Flint Grid is the first grid-scale battery project permitted by the Ohio Power Siting Board, which certified it in October 2022. It is also the first large-scale battery to qualify for PJM's capacity market, clearing more than 50% of all new battery storage capacity in the 2027-28 auction.

Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty said in the company's press release that the firm committed capital years before surging demand forecasts became national news. The project costs hundreds of millions of dollars; Eolian did not disclose a precise figure, battery supplier or chemistry.

Eolian is employee-owned and backed by funds managed by Global Infrastructure Partners, a BlackRock company. The firm began developing the Flint Grid site in 2018.

The first phase is expected to enter commercial operation by June 2027, ahead of the PJM capacity year. Eolian plans a second phase of the same size, targeting 2029, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.