It’s Monday. Nearly five years is the average wait in a US interconnection queue. It is also about enough time to build your own power plant, hire somebody to run it, and stop waiting.
In today’s edition:
🔌 Big Story: Veolia signs on to run a 350MW microgrid for an Ohio AI campus
⚡ Quick Hits: Exelon’s phantom gigawatts, Memphis turbines come out, Poland’s capacity-market battery
💰 Capital: Ontario writes a 20-year storage contract
📋 Policy Watch: Virginia’s grid utilization law, New York’s balcony solar bill
📊 Chart of the Day: California runs mostly on solar for a full month
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The Big Story
Veolia signs on to run a 350MW AI campus microgrid in Ohio
Environmental services group Veolia has been selected to operate and maintain a 350MW microgrid powering an AI data center campus in New Albany, Ohio, Energy-Storage News reported. The system pairs gas engines and linear generators with a 430MWh battery, and Veolia will run it around the clock under a performance-based contract. It was brought in before commercial operations to coordinate contractors and equipment makers on a compressed construction schedule. The campus developer was not disclosed.
The big banks—the top four or five in the country—may still prefer to do utility-scale projects because they can get more scale with fewer projects. But for groups like Foss that are syndicators able to navigate the complexities of these distributed generation (DG) projects more efficiently, there is growing interest in microgrids.
Published specifications put generation at 350MW, storage at 430MWh, availability at 99.9%, and on-site staffing at 35 to 40 full-time personnel working 24/7.
Veolia cited Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in putting the average US interconnection wait at nearly five years, the arithmetic behind building generation on site rather than queueing for it.
The award, announced July 30, shifts operational complexity from a utility to a private operator, and it buys the campus a permanent industrial workforce rather than a substation.
It landed a day after Eolian began construction next door on Flint Grid, a 200MW/1.06GWh battery that ESN reports is the first large-scale BESS to qualify for the PJM capacity market.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Four stories from across the stack, starting with the gigawatts that were never really there.
Exelon said its high-probability data center load fell from 18 GW to roughly 11 GW in the second quarter, and its interconnection pipeline from about 43 GW to 25 GW, as transmission service agreements backed by posted collateral filtered out speculative projects. Utility Dive
xAI started removing gas turbines that had been operating at its Memphis site without the permits regulators say were required, as Elon Musk confirmed a fourth data center in the city. Data Center Dynamics
Greenvolt energized a 200MW/800MWh battery at Turośń Kościelna in Poland under a capacity market contract, with trader Entrix handling dispatch optimization. Energy-Storage.news
A retired Texas lignite mine is being redeveloped into a 1.2 GW solar project that reuses the site’s already-disturbed land and existing grid connection, Canary Media reported. Canary Media
The Capital Stack
Ontario signs a 20-year capacity contract for 1.2 GWh of storage
Aecon executed an energy storage agreement with Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator for the 150MW/1,200MWh Simcoe project in Norfolk County on a 20-year capacity contract, pv magazine reported. The tenor is the story for anyone financing storage: a two-decade contracted revenue line is a different asset class from a battery clearing a one-year PJM capacity auction.
Source: pv magazine USA
Also in the capital stack:
Eliyan raised a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation for chiplet interconnect, technology that governs the energy cost of moving data between dies, one input into the rack power densities utilities are now planning around. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
Virginia is rolling out the first state grid utilization law in the country, and analysts remain split on whether measuring spare headroom on existing lines lowers rates or simply adds a metric, a question that decides whether grid-enhancing technologies get a regulatory hook. Latitude Media
New York advocates rallied behind the SUNny Act, which would legalize plug-in balcony solar with export limits and wattage tiers still unsettled, opening the first mass-market DER category that needs no installer and no interconnection study. pv magazine USA
Chart of the Day
Solar supplied 51% of California’s electricity in May
Solar produced 51% of California’s power in May, the first time a major grid has run mostly on solar across a full month, according to Canary Media. The record and the state’s midday curtailment problem are the same surplus viewed from opposite ends.
Source: Canary Media · July 31, 2026
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