It's Tuesday. The fastest way to connect a gigawatt to the grid this year is to not connect at all.
In today's edition:
⚡ Big Story: Energy Vault contracts 1.25 GW of off-grid power for a Texas AI campus
🔌 Quick Hits: a heat pump that runs on milk, India's first cell-to-pack storage
💰 Capital: DOE lends $489M into Puerto Rico batteries
📋 Policy Watch: Virginia bills large loads for their own wires
📊 Chart of the Day: 36 hours of everyday outages
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The Big Story
Energy Vault contracts 1.25 GW of off-grid power for Texas AI campus.
Energy Vault (NYSE: NRGV) said on August 7 it executed an agreement to supply battery storage, grid-forming power conversion systems and AI control software for an initial 1.25 GW of power infrastructure serving hyperscaler AI data centers in Texas. The counterparty is an unnamed national EPC contractor deploying Caterpillar gensets, and the hyperscaler is unnamed too. The company put the revenue impact at roughly $500 million to $600 million across 2H 2026 and 2027, with first deployments in four to twelve months. The agreement is executed and nothing is built yet.
As our largest single contract executed to date, this milestone agreement represents another important step in Energy Vault's strategic evolution from an energy storage technology pioneer into an integrated energy infrastructure provider.
The architecture pairs dispatchable generation with grid-forming inverters and a control layer the company describes as a mission-critical operating system, orchestrating generation, storage and distribution as one plant.
Off-grid is the whole point. Energy Vault says the design brings compute online without depending on interconnection schedules, leaving room to add grid power later.
The batteries are built to support FEOC-compliant deployments, and the company called this its second strategic framework agreement under an AI infrastructure strategy. Management discusses the numbers on its Q2 call today.
Source: Data Center Dynamics · Business Wire
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Four from across the stack, one of them running on milk.
Arkaya Energy built a heat pump that draws heat from fresh milk rather than air, ground or water, and says it halved electricity use at the world's oldest cheddar maker, with payback the startup puts under two years across 27 installs. Canary Media
Ola Electric signed a 20 GWh MoU that would make the EV maker the first cell-to-pack vertically integrated supplier into India's utility-scale storage market, though an MoU is not a binding order. Energy-Storage.news
Hyundai Heavy Industries booked a reported $675.6 million order for 1 GW of reciprocating gas engines for an unnamed US data center developer, a sign engine-based prime power is scaling while turbine slots stay scarce. Data Center Dynamics
Duke Energy customers in North Carolina are buying rooftop solar again, installers reporting record months after a two-thirds drop in Q1, helped by third-party leasing and the utility's battery incentives. Canary Media
The Capital Stack
DOE lends $489 million into Puerto Rico battery storage.
The DOE Loan Programs Office closed a $489.4 million loan to Amanecer Puerto Rico, a Pattern Energy vehicle, supporting 220 MW of batteries at Arecibo and Santa Isabel alongside natural gas, according to Energy-Storage News. Federal balance-sheet lending into storage is notable from an administration that has pulled back from clean energy grants. The loan closed, which is a different milestone from a conditional commitment.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Also in the capital stack:
Switch has confidentially filed for an IPO, according to a report, which would return Rob Roy's data center company to public markets and test public appetite for AI infrastructure risk. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
Virginia's State Corporation Commission directed Dominion Energy to build a tariff assigning high-voltage transmission costs directly to large loads under its GS-5 class, citing the 765 kV Valley Link project as assignable, with the change expected in force in January 2027. Cost allocation stops being a modeling argument and becomes a line item. Data Center Dynamics
Vistra executives said they support Texas's pause and audit of data center interconnection requests, and trimmed the company's ERCOT load-growth forecast to 4% to 6% from 5% to 6%, while saying its 1.2 GW Comanche Peak deal with Amazon is unaffected. When a merchant generator welcomes a queue audit, the speculative share of the pipeline is what is being repriced. Utility Dive
Chart of the Day
Puerto Rico customers lost 36 hours to everyday outages last year.
EIA reports the duration of interruptions not caused by major events rose 19% in Puerto Rico in 2025, to roughly 36 hours per customer, against about two hours on the mainland. The gap sits in the ordinary distribution grid, not the hurricane headlines.
Source: EIA Today in Energy · August 10, 2026
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