While Eolian makes important upgrades to a 100-megawatt battery, the company will lend that grid connection to help CyrusOne’s data center get up and running.
A leading data center developer and a pioneering Texas battery owner have formed a mutually beneficial partnership that models a new way for energy storage to accelerate the AI infrastructure build-out.
Storage firm Eolian completed the Chisholm Grid battery in 2021, placing 100 megawatts/125 megawatt-hours of capacity next to a substation 7 miles northwest of downtown Fort Worth. The site was able to discharge its full capacity for just over an hour — a design that worked well for the first wave of big Texas grid battery projects, which could make good money by providing rapid-response ancillary services.
Another 15 gigawatts of storage have piled into Texas since then, and revenues from those once-lucrative ancillary services have plummeted given the glut of batteries. Meanwhile, the market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is changing in other ways that reward longer-duration batteries…