Eolian has broken ground on Flint Grid, a battery plant in Licking County, Ohio, sized at roughly one gigawatt-hour and able to discharge 200 megawatts for about five hours into the substation serving the New Albany data center corridor northeast of Columbus. The first phase is due online by June 2027, with a second phase of the same size planned for 2029, Canary Media reports.
The siting carries most of the meaning. The same corridor has drawn Amazon Web Services, which opened its first data center there in 2016, and Intel, whose 28 billion dollar chip factory is under construction nearby, according to Canary Media. Flint Grid abuts an American Electric Power substation that takes transmission-level power and feeds the lower-voltage loop running through the data center region.
What the battery adds is flexibility rather than generation. Eric Stoutenburg, Eolian's chief development officer, describes the mechanism plainly: "When you have too much water you spilled on your floor, you could pick it up with a sponge, and when need that water back out, you just give it a squeeze." In practice that means charging when regional prices are low and discharging into the corridor's evening and heat-wave peaks, five hours at a stretch.
On the market side, the project cleared PJM's December 2025 capacity auction, with delivery obligations beginning June 1, 2027, per Canary Media. WOSU reports it is the first project of its kind approved by both PJM and the Ohio Power Siting Board, and Canary Media calls it the biggest battery east of the Mississippi. PJM's footprint covers thirteen states and some 65 million people, so a capacity commitment of this size lands in a market short of firm supply.
More storage is likely behind it. "We're not alone in terms of developing these projects. We happen to be first and happen to be sited at a great location, but I think you will see a rapid expansion of energy storage across PJM and certainly in Ohio," Stoutenburg says. The operational detail behind the optimism is the 2029 second phase, which would double the site's stored energy if it proceeds.
The trade-off for operators is the usual one with storage. A battery firms the hours a constrained substation can deliver, but it moves energy in time rather than adding new supply, so generation and interconnection queues still set the corridor's ceiling.
For buyers weighing New Albany capacity, five hours of 200-megawatt discharge at the local substation is peak-hour headroom that arrives years before any new plant could. June 2027 and 2029 are the dates worth writing into capacity conversations with utilities and colocation providers in the corridor.
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