It's Thursday. The steam turbine has run the world's power plants for a century and a quarter. A national lab just agreed to help swap the steam for something that is both liquid and gas.
In today's edition:
☕ Event: our virtual coffee meetup
🔬 Big Story: Sandia signs on to test Elemental Nuclear's CO2 generators
⚡ Quick Hits: a make-or-break geothermal circulation test, Europe's largest battery, SpaceX skipping the grid
💰 Capital Stack: 5C's $500M raise and a seed round for smarter water heaters
📋 Policy Watch: a large-load market playbook and Michigan's data center backlash
But first…
☕ Event Announcement: Grid Innovation Virtual Coffee Chat
Presented by Grid Innovation Hub
Thursday, August 13 · Virtual · Hosted by Adam Shaw - 10 AM PST
Join fellow grid professionals for a virtual coffee chat on advanced technology strategies and implementations on the power grid. The conversation spans generation, transmission and distribution, grid modernization, project development, operations and compliance, and venture capital, and it runs on crowd-sourced problems rather than slides. No presentations. No sales.
Grid Innovation Hub subscribers are encouraged to register for the next session.
The Big Story
Sandia backs Elemental Nuclear's supercritical CO2 generators for data centers
Elemental Nuclear Energy said the Department of Energy, through Sandia National Laboratories, has approved a Strategic Partnership Project to design, build, and demonstrate the company's supercritical CO2 Brayton Cycle Generator at two scales. The first unit is a 1 MWe natural-gas-and-waste-heat-fired power and cooling system aimed at small modular data centers and remote military installations, with a 10 MWe follow-on engineered for behind-the-meter data center, microgrid, and industrial load. The agreement is an approved research partnership rather than a funded order, and the company targets first operation in 2027 with commercial deliveries beginning in 2028.
Approval of this Strategic Partnership Project is a major validation of Elemental's vision and an important milestone for our company.
Sandia operates one of the world's foremost sCO2 test facilities and is described in the announcement as a leader in recompression Brayton cycle systems.
The 10 MWe unit is engineered to run on a range of heat sources, including Elemental's ISTR nuclear reactor, which remains in development.
Elemental said it expects to become the first company in the world to demonstrate long-term viability of sCO2 Brayton cycle generation at this scale, a claim no independent party has yet tested.
Source: Business Wire and Power Engineering
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Six technology stories from across the stack, from a geothermal endurance run to a chip fab that plans to skip interconnection entirely.
Utah FORGE started a 90 to 120 day closed-loop circulation test ramping from 5 to 10 barrels per minute, built to quantify thermal breakthrough and water loss, the two variables that decide whether enhanced geothermal is commercial. ThinkGeoEnergy
S&C Electric broadened its collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory to accelerate grid hardware and controls aimed at large-load customers and AI data centers. T&D World
SpaceX said its $16.8 billion TeraFab chip plant in Texas will run on on-site generation plus battery storage and is not expected to draw grid energy, a gigawatt-class industrial load opting out of the queue. Data Center Dynamics
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners brought Coalburn 1 into commercial operation in Scotland, now Europe's largest battery and the first of three transmission-connected UK projects in its pipeline. pv magazine
Tomago Aluminium won a A$2.5 billion government package that lets Australia's biggest smelter flex its load like a battery, unlocking wind and solar contracting that had stalled. RenewEconomy
Uptime Institute research finds power now causes 56% of impactful data center outages, while Synergy and JLL count 66 GW under construction across North America at roughly 1% vacancy. Data Center Frontier
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To talk placements, dates, and pricing, contact Lucas Cheney at [email protected].
The Capital Stack
5C raises $500 million to fund its AI data center pipeline
5C secured $500 million in new financing to build out its development pipeline, including new capacity in Columbus, Ohio, according to Data Center Dynamics. The round is a balance-sheet raise for a developer whose binding constraint is power rather than tenant demand.
Source: Data Center Dynamics
Also in the capital stack:
Reservoir raised an $8 million seed led by Asymmetric Capital Partners to commercialize connected heat pump water heaters as a grid-flexibility asset. Heatmap News
Tesla filed plans for a $10.1 billion solar cell manufacturing complex in Texas codenamed Project Crystal Sun. Electrek
Aurora Energy Research projects that standalone batteries commissioning in Greece in 2027 could reach 12% returns, with wholesale power averaging about EUR 100/MWh through 2029. ESS News
Policy Watch
ESIG's Large Loads Task Force published 20 recommendations for RTOs, regulators, and utilities covering scheduling, balancing, and large-load flexibility obligations, the closest thing yet to a shared market-design playbook for data centers. ESIG
Michigan voters rejected data center rezoning in Saline and Augusta Township and unseated a lawmaker who backed 2024 data center tax breaks, a sign that siting risk is now electoral as well as regulatory. Inside Climate News
A California appeals court questioned the adequacy of environmental review for a Salton Sea geothermal-lithium project, adding permitting risk to the domestic lithium-from-brine buildout. ThinkGeoEnergy
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