One developer watched Amazon start buying land near Columbus a decade ago, and now he’s building the East’s biggest battery in the middle of America’s AI power crisis
Image generated with artificial intelligenceJust northeast of Columbus, Ohio, the quiet Midwestern countryside doesn’t stay quiet for long. Lush fields and agrarian ponds give way to mile after mile of enormous white warehouses emitting a low, steady hum — one of the densest clusters of AI computing in the nation.
All that computing demands enormous, reliable power. But the regional grid has struggled to keep pace, pushing electricity prices up and drawing frustration from governors, regulators, and the White House alike.
Tucked inside that data center corridor sits an unlikely piece of land: a small parcel with an old house and a pond, left behind when tech giants snapped up everything around it. That overlooked plot is now a construction site — and what’s being built there may offer a rare answer to the East’s growing power problem.
The Flint Grid project, now under construction, will deliver 200 megawatts of output for up to five continuous hours — totaling 1 gigawatt-hour of storage capacity.
A patch of farmland in the middle of an AI gold rush
The transformation of New Albany’s outskirts is hard to overstate. What were once open Ohio fields now host one of the densest concentrations of AI computing infrastructure in the country. Intel is constructing a $28 billion chip factory at the northern edge of the complex, and data center warehouses stretch in every direction, each drawing enormous amounts of electricity around the clock.
That demand has collided hard with the limits of the regional grid. PJM Interconnection manages power across 13 states — from Illinois to New Jersey — and has consistently struggled to bring new generation online fast enough to meet surging load. The resulting price spikes have angered governors on both sides of the aisle.
The frustration has reached the highest levels of government. The White House has pushed AI companies to “build, bring, or buy new power supply.” New York has frozen data center construction entirely. Ordinary ratepayers, caught between tech giants and an overtaxed grid, are watching their electricity bills climb and demanding answers.
How Eolian ended up with the perfect piece of land
Eolian CEO Aaron Zubaty didn’t start out thinking about Ohio. In the early 2010s, he wanted to develop solar farms near northern Virginia, which then led the nation in data center density. The idea made sense on paper — put clean energy close to the biggest consumers. But the land simply wasn’t there. Horse farms, subdivisions, and the Appalachian Mountains blocked every viable path westward from Dulles Airport.
“Where do the mountains end? A little bit east of Columbus,” Zubaty said.
Central Ohio had a lot going for it: population growth, a skilled workforce anchored by Ohio State University, and plenty of open land. Zubaty started researching parcels near Columbus where solar might work. That’s when something unexpected surfaced.
While scanning land records, his team noticed a pattern — obscurely named LLCs quietly buying up properties near electrical substations. It turned out to be Amazon. AWS opened its first New Albany data center in 2016, and a land rush followed as other tech companies moved in on the larger surrounding parcels.
One small tract got left behind. It had an old house, some trees, and a pond — nothing flashy. But it sat surrounded on all sides by what would become data center warehouses, and it abutted a critical AEP substation tied directly into the region’s high-voltage transmission backbone. Eolian bought it. The house is gone now, replaced by construction equipment.
Building before the market was ready
Securing the land was only the beginning. For years, PJM’s power prices stayed low, offering little financial incentive to build. Eolian watched massive data center development unfold around its parcel while the economics of new power generation remained unfavorable.
The company pushed forward anyway. By 2025, Eolian was ordering transformers and other long-lead equipment — before it had signed a single power purchase agreement. A calculated bet: if demand kept growing, the market would eventually have to respond.
In December 2024, that bet was validated. PJM’s capacity auction hit its maximum possible price, a clear signal that demand had definitively outstripped supply. Eolian bid the project into that auction and won contracts for capacity to be delivered starting June 1, 2027.
Winning came with consequences. “There’s a massive financial penalty to bidding and then not showing up,” Zubaty said. The clock started ticking immediately. Eolian moved forward without the multi-decade revenue commitments that power plant financiers typically require — accepting a single year of contracted certainty and betting that more deals would follow.
What 1 gigawatt-hour of storage actually means for the grid
The Flint Grid project, now under construction, will deliver 200 megawatts of output for up to five continuous hours — totaling 1 gigawatt-hour of storage capacity. That makes it the largest battery storage project east of the Mississippi River, and the largest on PJM’s entire 13-state network.
The mechanics are straightforward. The battery charges when electricity is cheap and abundant, then dispatches stored power during peak demand, flattening price spikes and stabilizing the grid. It’s the same role large batteries have played for years in California and Texas. That’s precisely the problem — battery deployment has clustered heavily in the West, while the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard have lagged badly even as AI-driven demand in those regions has surged.
The Flint Grid project is a rare exception, one made possible only because Eolian started positioning itself a decade ago. A second phase of equal size is also planned, targeting completion by 2029.
Can one battery open the floodgates in PJM territory?
Political pressure on tech companies is intensifying. The White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge has pushed leading AI firms to commit to covering their own energy costs rather than passing them onto the broader grid. New York’s year-long data center construction freeze signals that other states may follow. Hyperscalers operating in PJM territory increasingly need a credible answer to where their power comes from.
A deal with Eolian could offer exactly that. A hyperscaler contracting with the Flint Grid project could take credit for the battery’s capacity contribution to PJM, reducing its exposure to the market’s sky-high rates — and demonstrating to regulators that it’s not simply offloading its energy burden onto ordinary customers.
The limits here are real. PJM can’t retroactively produce more developers who secured well-placed land near future AI hubs years ago, and unlike Texas, PJM’s market rules still don’t strongly incentivize battery storage. The structural gaps won’t close overnight.
But what Eolian is building points toward something worth watching. If the Flint Grid project proves that large-scale batteries can be financed, built, and profitably operated in PJM territory, competitive pressure from the AI buildout may push more projects through the same difficult path. The question isn’t whether the East needs more storage — it’s whether one successful bet can show others the way.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
