MANY MINDEDEolian breaks ground on a 200 MW, five-hour store in Licking County
Construction has begun on Eolian's Flint Grid battery in Jersey Township, Licking County, outside Columbus. The system is rated at 200 megawatts sustained for more than five hours — over a gigawatt-hour of storage — on about 15 acres along Jug Street Road. Eolian says it will be the largest battery project in Ohio and across PJM, the grid operator serving 13 states and Washington, DC, and that it is the first grid-scale storage project permitted by the Ohio Power Siting Board.
Location is the substance. The site sits beside New Albany's data center and industrial corridor, where Amazon Web Services already operates and Google and Meta are building. Flint Grid is the first large-scale battery to qualify for PJM's capacity market, and it was the largest battery to clear the 2027-28 capacity auction, accounting for more than half of the new battery capacity selected for that delivery year.
Storage placed at the load is the cheapest way to add usable capacity to a grid that cannot build transmission fast enough. A battery beside the demand charges when power is plentiful and discharges when supply is tight, letting existing lines carry more real energy without new steel, and blunting the scarcity pricing that data center growth is currently pushing onto everyone else on the system.
It is under construction, not operating; commercial operation is expected before PJM's 2027-28 capacity year. Eolian put the cost at hundreds of millions of dollars without a precise figure, and did not name the battery supplier or the cell chemistry.
Source: Electrek