1501 Conns Creek Rd. — Approximate Battery Facility Project Site
Georgia’s largest battery energy storage facility is now up and running in northeast Cherokee County, a 530-megawatt operation built to store power and release it the instant the grid needs it. The McGrau Ford Battery Facility sits on 40 acres at 1501 Conns Creek Road near Ball Ground, where it holds 1,100 self-contained Tesla battery units arranged in individual locker-style enclosures designed to run around the clock.
Cherokee County and state officials joined Georgia Power representatives Friday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening, according to tribuneledgernews.com. As CBS News Atlanta reports, the batteries themselves don’t generate any electricity — they simply charge from the grid and store it for release when demand spikes, functioning as backup muscle rather than a new power source.
Why Georgia Power Picked Ball Ground
Georgia Power’s senior vice president and senior production officer, Rick Anderson, said Ball Ground offered a strong spot to tie into the company’s grid, with the site selection built around available land and existing access to the transmission system, per CBS News Atlanta. Anderson told WSB-TV that speed is the whole point of the technology: “these batteries will step up, they’re really fast,” he said, describing how they can respond to reliability problems or outages far quicker than traditional power sources…