It's Wednesday. Swapping a gas turbine's fuel usually takes a long retrofit conversation. In Greenville, South Carolina, one model just passed its exam with no natural gas at all.
In today's edition:
📅 Webinar: Structuring Gigawatts with Hans Royal and Christian Okoye, Nov. 19
⚡ Big Story: GE Vernova validates 100% hydrogen on an aeroderivative turbine
🔋 Quick Hits: a Chinese flywheel record, NERC's cold check, SpaceX's $24B power plant, the data center clean-power gap, stalled offshore wind factories
💰 Capital Stack: $145M for a zero-capex hyperscaler battery, Mavria's reported $130M
📋 Policy Watch: Duke's 50 MW line, a Louisiana lawsuit, a Dutch storage target
But first…
📅 Event Announcement: Structuring Gigawatts (Virtual Event)
Presented by Grid Innovation Hub
Thursday, November 19 · 11 AM to 12 PM ET · Online · Hosted by Adam Shaw, Hans Royal, and Christian Okoye
Structuring Gigawatts is a one-hour online session where Hans Royal of RP Energy and Christian Okoye of Occam Edge walk through their joint research on what speed-to-power is worth to AI data centers, and how flexibility arrangements can work for data centers, utilities and investors.
Built for utility and RTO teams working on large-load interconnection, transmission planning and rate design, data center and hyperscaler power and procurement leads, developers and IPPs, infrastructure investors and lenders, and flexibility tech companies.
Hans Royal, Co-Founder & President, RP Energy
Christian Okoye, Co-Founder & CEO, Occam Edge
Adam Shaw, Founder, Grid Innovation Hub, and CMO, Integ (host)
The Big Story
GE Vernova validates 100% hydrogen on an aeroderivative gas turbine
GE Vernova said it has completed testing that validates its LM6000VELOX aeroderivative gas turbine, fitted with a single annular combustor, to run on 100% hydrogen, and that it officially validated its LM2500XPRESS for blends of up to 50% hydrogen with its Dry Low Emission combustor. The tests ran at a new hydrogen testing facility at the company's Global Technology Center in Greenville, South Carolina, and were unveiled at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye.
Cecilia Giovannelli, CEO of GE Vernova's aeroderivative gas turbine business, called the milestones a crucial step in the company's push to accelerate the energy transition, backed by testing under real-world conditions.
The LM2500XPRESS keeps its ability to reach full power in five minutes or less on the hydrogen blend, the company said.
GE Vernova says its fleet has logged more than 11 million operating hours on hydrogen and hydrogen blends across more than 120 gas turbines.
The LM6000 base is nearly 1,350 units in about 60 countries.
These are validation tests. GE Vernova named no customer, order or commercial availability date for either hydrogen package.
Source: GE Vernova
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
A flywheel record, a cold-weather check, gas for compute and two clean-power gaps.
Huaneng connected a 5.5 MW/1.375 MWh dual-flywheel frequency regulation system at its Lanzhou combined heat and power plant on Nov. 6 and says its 5 MW main unit, spinning at 3,200 rpm on magnetic levitation, is China's largest single flywheel. ESS News
NERC found 99% of 1,154,231 MW of net winter capacity can run at calculated extreme-cold temperatures, though 633 units totaling 85,691 MW declared cold-weather constraints, 71% of them wind. Utility Dive
SpaceX plans a $24 billion gas-fired power plant and supercompute facility on 444 acres near the Port of Brownsville, with a tax-break hearing set for December and no plant size disclosed. Texas Tribune
Latitude Intelligence found utility plans cover only about 30% of contracted data center load with carbon-free power, leaving roughly 120 TWh a year of signed load with no planned clean supply. Latitude Media
US offshore wind manufacturing has stalled, with about $23 billion in expected supply-chain investment frozen and manufacturers pivoting to other markets, Canary Media reported. Canary Media
The Capital Stack
Calibrant closes $145M to put a battery behind a hyperscaler's meter
Calibrant Energy secured a $145 million project debt facility led by Investec, with Citi, Liberty Bank and Siemens Financial Services participating, the company said. The financing covers solar and storage, including a 120 MWh behind-the-meter battery for an unnamed hyperscale data center customer in PJM, delivered turnkey with no upfront capital from the customer. Calibrant says it now has 5.9 GWh of storage operating, under construction or in exclusive development.
Source: POWER
Also in the capital stack:
Mavria, a modular data center startup from former Energy Department official Seth Cohen, launched with a reported $130 million Series A at a valuation near $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, per Heatmap. Heatmap
Policy Watch
Duke Energy reached a settlement with Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, the Department of Defense and the Public Staff that would lower North Carolina's large-load threshold from 100 MW to 50 MW for customers with at least an 80% load factor signing after June 1, 2026. If the NCUC approves it, expected by mid-November, smaller data centers fall under the same cost protections. T&D World
Louisiana landowners sued the Public Service Commission over its "Lightning Directive," which Entergy plans to use on Dec. 10 for seven gas plants and a roughly 80-mile transmission line serving Meta's $50 billion Hyperion data center. The case tests how far fast-track approvals for data center power can stretch. WWNO
The Netherlands set its first national storage target, 110 GWh by 2040, more than 50 times the capacity installed at the end of 2025, in a policy agenda with 25 actions aimed at grid congestion. That makes batteries central to the Dutch congestion plan. ESS News
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