It's Monday. The two cheapest elements on the periodic table are getting a serious look now that four hours of lithium has stopped satisfying anyone buying power by the gigawatt.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Noon Energy lines up 1 GW of 100-hour storage for AI
⚡ Quick Hits: Southern's load surge, a network utility's first big battery, sodium-ion's first sale
💰 Capital: power work eats 40% of a global engineering firm
📋 Policy Watch: FERC clears a gas plant for compute
📊 Chart of the Day: home batteries climb after the credit expired
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The Big Story
Noon Energy targets 1 GW of 100-hour storage for AI data centers.
Noon Energy and Sabanci Renewables announced a joint agreement to co-develop ultra-long-duration storage pairing Noon's 100-plus-hour battery with Sabanci's US renewable portfolio, targeting systems of up to 1 GW, or 100 GWh. Noon's cell stores energy in carbon and oxygen instead of lithium, which the company says is what makes multi-day duration affordable. This is a co-development framework rather than a financed project, meant to yield power purchase or capacity offtake agreements later, with deployment possible as early as 2027.
"In this cooperation we will develop the commercial, technical, and operational frameworks to unlock a 100% reliable and renewable grid for cents per kWh using multi-day energy storage."
Sabanci Renewables operates and is building four plants totaling 790 MWdc in ERCOT and says it is targeting 3 GW in the US within five years, so most of the generation these projects would firm does not exist yet.
Noon has raised more than $45 million from At One Ventures, Emerson Collective, Aramco Ventures, Sabanci Climate Ventures, and the California Energy Commission, among others.
Noon announced a similar plan with Meta in April for up to 1 GW of 100-plus-hour storage, making this the second gigawatt-scale arrangement it has disclosed without a financed project attached.
Source: pv magazine USA · GlobeNewswire
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five stories from across the stack, from a utility's load curve to the first sodium-ion cells anyone actually paid for.
Southern Company reported data center power usage up 55% year over year and a contracted large-load pipeline 6 GW higher, among the sharpest load revisions a US utility has disclosed this quarter. Data Center Dynamics
Evergy is leaning on existing coal plants to firm a growing data center pipeline as large-load tariffs win approval, Latitude Media reported, with speed to power and clean power pulling opposite ways. Latitude Media
Ausgrid broke ground on the 200 MW/400 MWh Steel River battery in Newcastle, the first grid-scale storage built by Australia's largest distribution network. RenewEconomy
TerraPower signed agreements with Hyundai Engineering & Construction and SK Innovation to commercialize its Natrium sodium fast reactor in the US, Korea, and selected markets. World Nuclear News
Foton sold a 100 kW/200 kWh sodium-ion commercial battery in Australia using Cospowers cells, which it says is the country's first commercial sale of the chemistry. RenewEconomy
The Capital Stack
Power work now accounts for as much as 40% of WSP's revenue.
Chief executive Alexandre L'Heureux told analysts on the firm's second-quarter call that power now represents up to 40% of WSP's revenue, driven by generation, nuclear, and data center work, Utility Dive reported. Engineering capacity is a quieter constraint on the buildout, and a share that large shows where the hours are going.
Source: Utility Dive
Also in the capital stack:
Naver invested in Panthalassa, a US developer of wave-powered offshore data centers targeting commercialization in 2027, an unusual bet by a Korean internet group on generation it would also consume. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
FERC approved PowerTransitions' purchase of the 1,242 MW Roseton plant in New York, which the buyer plans to run as a data center energy campus, and cleared TransAlta's roughly $1 billion buy of 319 MW in Colorado. Federal sign-off on repurposing gas for colocated compute lowers the bar for the next such deal. Utility Dive
Section 232 minimum import prices on polysilicon and derivatives now force imported cells and modules to match US production costs, according to pv magazine USA, resetting procurement math for developers building around cheap imports. pv magazine USA
Inside Climate News reported that a data center advocacy group is promoting industry benefits without disclosing who funds it, and that the campaign appears to be hardening local opposition rather than easing it, which makes siting consent the binding constraint in a growing list of markets. Inside Climate News
Chart of the Day
Home battery installations grow despite expired tax credits.
US homeowners installed 673 MW of residential battery storage in the first quarter of 2026, the highest quarter on record, after the federal residential storage credit expired at the end of 2025. California has carried roughly three quarters of installations, though Hawaii and other states are widening the base. Q1 2026 data is preliminary.
Source: Canary Media · August 14, 2026 · Chart by Canary Media from BloombergNEF and EIA data
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