It's Thursday. The hottest new idea for powering AI isn't a reactor or a gas turbine. It's a box of sand baked to 1,000 degrees and left sitting in the desert.
In today's edition:
🔆 Exowatt's plan to power desert data centers with stored solar heat
⚡ Quick Hits: California's battery-performance gap, Duke exits offshore wind, and a Northeast solar-storage build
💰 Capital: National Grid's $1.75B US AI-power bet and the fight over a $67B utility merger
📋 Policy Watch: Oracle sues Wisconsin, and US emissions climb
📊 Chart: data centers become a first-order driver of North American power
The Big Story
Exowatt bets stored solar heat can power off-grid AI.
Sam Altman-backed startup Exowatt launched ExoRise, a program pairing land acquisition with its modular solar-thermal platform to build islanded, off-grid power for AI data centers across West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Each factory-built, 40-foot P3 module uses Fresnel lenses to heat a bed of domestically sourced sand, dirt, and slag to 1,000°C, banking the energy as heat and converting it back to electricity on demand with a heat engine and linear generator. The pitch is a way for compute clusters to bring their own firm supply and skip multi-year interconnection queues. Exowatt says it already holds a 90 GWh project backlog and is chasing a levelized cost of 1 cent per kWh.
"The bottleneck in AI infrastructure has shifted. For most of the last decade, the constraints were compute and network connectivity. Today the binding constraint is power. Specifically, the multi-year queues to interconnect new load to a strained grid in established hubs."
Each module stores 150 kWh as heat and can deliver up to 24 hours of dispatchable output, targeting a 50% to 70% capacity factor depending on the site's solar profile.
The closed loop runs behind the meter under IEEE 1547 and UL1741 interconnection standards and uses almost no water because it skips a steam cycle, limiting consumption to occasional lens cleaning.
The system needs roughly one acre per megawatt-hour of dispatchable capacity and is built from domestic steel and supply chains, avoiding lithium, cobalt, and rare earths.
Exowatt reports its 90 GWh backlog spans binding and early-stage agreements with US data-center operators and utility-scale developers, and it manufactures from a base in Austin, Texas.
Source: pv magazine USA
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five US milestones from a busy 48 hours, from a hard look at how California's batteries actually perform to Duke walking away from offshore wind.
Gridmatic published a study finding a wide performance gap across California's grid-scale batteries, with static bidding strategies leaving significant revenue on the table versus optimized dispatch. pv magazine USA
Kearsarge Energy started commercial operations on 88 MW of distributed solar and storage across the US Northeast, with plans to bring more than 160 MW of additional capacity online by the end of 2026. PR Newswire
Duke Energy agreed to surrender its undeveloped Carolina Long Bay offshore wind lease under an Interior Department deal, redirecting nearly $129 million toward new nuclear, gas, and grid upgrades. Heatmap
Form Energy detailed a manufacturing milestone at its Weirton, West Virginia iron-air battery plant, a step toward cheap multi-day storage. Latitude Media
Avangrid began building a 41 MW/82 MWh battery in Gilliam County, Oregon, the Iberdrola subsidiary's first utility-scale storage project in the US. Energy-Storage News
The Capital Stack
National Grid bets $1.75 billion on powering US AI
National Grid Ventures agreed to invest $1.75 billion for a 35% stake in Joulent, a newly launched US platform building dedicated power and electrical infrastructure for large loads, in a deal valuing Joulent at $5 billion. It plants a major foreign transmission utility squarely in the US data-center power business. Joulent's first project is a 2.67 GW gas-fired facility in West Texas, developed 50/50 with Chevron, that will supply a Microsoft data-center campus under a 20-year power purchase agreement starting in 2028.
Source: PR Newswire
Also in the capital stack:
Sen. Angus King urged FERC to reject the proposed $67 billion NextEra-Dominion merger, warning that combining roughly 110 GW of generation with major transmission assets in one company would let it suppress competing resources. Utility Dive
Policy Watch
Oracle sued Wisconsin's Public Service Commission over new financial requirements for data centers, a case that could set the template for how states make hyperscalers pay for the grid capacity they demand. Latitude Media
US utilities drove a 2025 rise in global CO2 emissions by leaning back on coal to meet surging demand, a reversal that sharpens the case for firm clean capacity, flexible load, and storage. Reuters
Chart of the Day
Data centers become a first-order driver of North American power.
North America's data centers drew nearly 320 TWh of electricity in 2025, up from about 185 TWh in 2020 and adding more than 60 TWh in the past year alone, the fastest growth of any region. Asia is climbing close behind toward 270 TWh, while Europe trails near 145 TWh.
Source: Reuters, data via the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2026 · July 2, 2026
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