The AI economy runs on electricity. And this week, the energy industry took a historic step toward meeting that demand.
On February 24, Xcel Energy announced it will supply power for a new Google data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. At the center of that agreement is a battery system unlike anything the world has seen. Form Energy’s iron-air technology will provide 300 MW / 30 gigawatt-hours of long-duration storage: the largest battery project by energy capacity ever announced globally.
To put that in perspective, this single installation stores enough energy to dispatch electricity continuously for 100 hours — more than four days. That’s a remarkable engineering achievement, and a sign of just how fast the storage industry is innovating.
The battery energy storage industry has matured rapidly, and today it encompasses a growing toolkit of technologies each purpose-built for different grid needs. Lithium-ion systems have transformed how we manage short-duration flexibility, frequency response, and peak shaving, and they remain the backbone of the storage buildout happening across the country right now.
Iron-air batteries like Form Energy’s technology add a new capability to that toolkit: extended multi-day discharge for the hardest reliability challenges — seasonal mismatches, prolonged weather events, and the around-the-clock baseload needs of major load centers like data centers. This is Form Energy’s first deployment specifically for a data center customer, and it demonstrates that the market for storage is expanding, not shifting — creating new opportunities alongside the ones already being developed.
The batteries for this project will be manufactured at Form Factory 1 in Weirton, West Virginia, already in commercial production and on track to reach 500 MW of annual capacity by 2028. This is domestic clean energy manufacturing at scale, creating real jobs in communities that need them.
The Google-Xcel agreement is structured through a Clean Energy Accelerator Charge (CEAC) — a framework designed so that new large loads fund new generation rather than shifting costs to existing ratepayers. The full package includes 1,400 MW of wind, 200 MW of solar, the Form Energy long-duration storage system, and a $50 million contribution to Xcel’s distributed grid resilience program — which itself is designed around a network of smaller batteries deployed across the system.
This is exactly the kind of project that shows what a mature, diversified clean energy industry looks like: multiple technologies working together, each contributing what it does best, with customers paying their own way and the grid getting stronger in the process.
For those of us who believe America’s energy future is built on deploying every available resource, this announcement is a milestone worth celebrating. The storage industry is growing in every direction — and that’s good news for the grid, for customers, and for the members building it.