Public sentiment on data center development continues to sour.
On May 7, a few hundred vocal locals packed the Hillside Barn in Andover, New Jersey, to share their concerns over the potential construction of a high-performance computing project in their community. Last December, a foreign limited liability company registered to build one for a yet-to-be-named client (there are only so many possibilities) on mostly undeveloped land that was once the Newton Airport, after the township passed a pair of ordinances that paved the way. A fair number of the roughly 6,000 people who call the rural Sussex County town home are quite displeased at the notion.
“This is working-class Jersey at its core,” one resident told the Andover Township Committee. “And not only are you inviting Big Tech into our backyard, but you’re handing out tax breaks to them as if there’s not work to be done here: potholes to be filled, roads to be fixed, schools to be funded.”
His comments garnered applause from many in the room, but not everyone was feeling quite so warm and fuzzy. The meeting was punctuated by an attendee getting tackled and cuffed by police, to the chagrin of onlookers shouting “shame!” and “free speech!” while insisting the man did nothing wrong.
Over the weekend, Mayor Tom Walsh Jr. confirmed the town will repeal the ordinances and vote on an outright ban on data centers this week.
The Andover controversy is one of many similar situations unfolding in small towns coast-to-coast; a snow globe in a Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland of percolating resistance to Big Tech and whatever they plan to do with all that compute. A recent survey found nearly half (47%) of U.S. residents oppose the construction of an artificial intelligence (AI) data center in their neighborhood, more than any other type of building the pollsters asked about.
More and more Americans distrust data centers and don’t want them around, regardless of whatever incentives developers dangle. They’re noisy, they strain resources, and they’re being blamed for rising electricity bills. Your position on the validity of those common concerns is irrelevant; the resistance is working. According to exclusive Heatmap data, at least 20 proposed data center projects were canceled after local pushback during the first three months of this year, redlining more than $41.7 billion in investment and nixing at least 3.5 gigawatts of electricity demand.
Meanwhile, online rhetoric on the topic is growing increasingly violent. Deteriorating sentiment towards AI has been accompanied by a rise in direct threats against individuals perceived as driving the technology forward, warns one nonprofit intelligence firm, as well as threats against policymakers and corporations involved in developing new data centers. Physical security, it turns out, might be just as important to computing projects as cybersecurity.
So how does this all shake out? Your guess is as good as mine, but one thing is for sure: the temperature is rising, and, as we all know, cooling things down can get very expensive for data centers.
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Bringing Batteries Back from the Dead
Second-life battery maker Moment Energy is celebrating an oversubscribed $40 million Series B funding round that will accelerate the expansion of its North American manufacturing footprint and fuel the scaled deployment of its state-of-the-art commercial battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Moment Energy has raised more than $100 million to support its repurposed electric vehicle (EV) battery technology. The Series B round was led by Evok Innovations, with participation from Liberty Mutual Investments, W23 Global Fund, and Acario (the corporate venture capital arm of Tokyo Gas), joining the company’s major investors, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Voyager Ventures, and In-Q-Tel.
Moment Energy believes it is poised to address both rising electricity demand and bottlenecked foreign battery supply chains with its solution, which unlocks what the company calls the “largest untapped domestic resource”: EV batteries already on North American roads.
“As energy demand continues to increase, Moment Energy is focused on one mission: improving grid resilience and reducing energy costs,” shared Edward Chiang, co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy. “We are building a new generation of energy infrastructure that can be deployed rapidly, manufactured domestically, and powered by existing battery resources.”
Rising to the Moment?
Moment Energy is advancing battery repurposing from experimental use cases to commercial deployment. The company has uniquely achieved critical safety milestones, including UL 1974 and UL 9540A certifications, making it the only provider able to deploy second-life BESS in the built environment without special dispensations. Moment says it offers the world’s most energy-dense second-life battery systems that are FEOC compliant, insurable, and scalable, touting a compact footprint that enables up to 164 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage per acre, a solid return on investment per square foot in high-value, space-restricted environments.
The company attests its proprietary pack-swapping architecture extends system lifespan to 30 years, compared to the typical 15-year lifecycle of conventional BESS. Combined with domestic tax incentives, this enables net costs up to three times lower, reducing cycling costs to as low as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for industrial users.
CEC Orders One Large Soda
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has approved the nearly $700 million Soda Mountain Solar Project, a combined 300-megawatt (MW) utility-scale solar and 300-MW/1,200-megawatt-hour (MWh) BESS. Soda Mountain Solar, LLC, a subsidiary of VC Renewables, will construct and operate the facility, situated on about 2,670 acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) California Desert District in San Bernardino County, contingent on BLM approval.
The hybrid project was the second to be approved through California’s new Opt-In Certification program, created to help speed up clean energy permitting and deployment across the state. Authorized under Assembly Bill 205, the program provides a consolidated state permitting option for eligible clean energy projects, supporting California’s transition to 100% zero-carbon retail electric sales by 2045.
“[This] approval shows we can move projects forward with urgency and efficiency while preserving the values that matter most to Californians,” noted CEC Chair David Hochschild.
The project will create around 200 jobs and includes a community benefits agreement that commits the developer to pay $50,000 to Friends of El Mirage, a local nonprofit that supports outdoor recreation and public land stewardship in San Bernardino County. The funding will pay for improvements to amenities at a nearby recreation area.
“This project doesn’t solely deliver clean, reliable energy — it brings jobs and meaningful economic investment to the region,” added CEC Commissioner Noemi Gallardo. “We are committed to seeing that the benefits of California’s energy transition are felt locally, in the communities where these projects are built.”
New Peaker Plant Coming Soon
Multistate utility Xcel Energy has received approval from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to begin construction of a new natural gas peaking plant in southwest Minnesota this summer to support grid reliability.
Xcel Energy says the 420 MW Lyon County Generating Station, to be located near Garvin in Lyon County, will play a critical role in supplying reliable power to the grid during periods when wind and solar energy are not available and when the hottest and coldest temperatures of the year drive energy use up. Xcel Energy plans to retire its remaining coal plants by the end of 2030, and new gas peakers like this one will play a pivotal role in making that happen.
“As we end our use of coal, we’re bringing gigawatts of new renewables online in southwest Minnesota to serve our customers with clean, cost-effective energy,” said Bria Shea, president of Xcel Energy–Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. “The Lyon County Generating Station will complement this new wind and solar with always-available energy to meet the needs of our customers when demand is highest.”
The Lyon County Generating Station will also provide grid stability for the upcoming Minnesota Energy Connection transmission line, which will connect up to 4,000 MW of new wind and solar in southwest Minnesota to the existing electric grid at the Sherco Energy Hub in Becker, MN. The transmission line will deliver enough energy to power more than 1 million homes in the region and across the Upper Midwest. The Lyon County plant will be located next to the Garvin Substation, which will serve as the southern endpoint of the transmission line.
Construction on the Lyon County Generating Station will begin late this summer, and the facility will start operating in late 2028.
A Unicorn Appears
Long-duration energy storage (LDES) pioneer CMBlu Energy has achieved unicorn status, eclipsing the €1 billion valuation ($1.178B) threshold following a €50 million ($58.9M) initial close of its Series C financing with participation from Samsung Ventures. All of the company’s existing investors also joined in the round, which will support manufacturing scale-up and accelerate early commercial deployments in Europe and the United States.
CMBlu’s SolidFlow technology is a new class of non-lithium LDES engineered for high-energy, multi-hour applications. Designed to deliver ten hours or more of dispatchable energy, the system combines non-flammable, water-based electrolytes with proprietary, recyclable solid energy storage materials. CMBlu says SolidFlow addresses one of the most urgent structural constraints limiting hyperscale growth: securing dependable, multi-hour capacity.
“Our SolidFlow technology is redefining energy storage by combining inherent safety with a streamlined permitting pathway – enabling faster, more predictable deployment at scale,” ventured Constantin Eis, CEO of CMBlu. “That speed to power, paired with resilient, localized supply chains, is critical as data centers and industrial customers advance their business needs and race to meet surging demand.”
CMBlu’s unicorn status comes on the heels of its 5 GWh framework agreement with Uniper, one of Europe’s leading utilities. The company also has existing deals with Mercedes-Benz and pilot projects with several utilities in both the EU and the U.S.
Iron and Water
ESS Tech has announced the commissioning of two of its iron flow battery systems at Turlock Irrigation District (TID) in California’s Central Valley.
The project pairs ESS’s iron-flow BESS with solar panels installed above active irrigation canals, an innovative configuration designed to generate renewable electricity while helping to reduce water evaporation. ESS believes the project demonstrates the ability of long-duration iron flow battery technology to support critical infrastructure applications where reliability, safety, and flexible energy dispatch are important.
“The successful commissioning of this project is an important milestone for ESS and a strong demonstration of our iron flow battery technology in a real-world infrastructure application,” observed Drew Buckley, CEO of ESS Tech.
The solar-over-canal configuration is drawing growing interest as water agencies and utilities look for ways to address both energy and water challenges. By combining renewable generation with long-duration storage, the TID project is designed to enhance the use of on-site solar power while also supporting water conservation objectives. Learn more about the project here.
ESS’s Energy Base is a flexible platform consisting of iron, salt, and water, engineered for the 8- to 24-hour long-duration segment. Its capability for deep daily cycling, 25-year asset life, and zero capacity degradation delivers what the company calculates to be the lowest available levelized cost of storage. The company recently signed a letter of intent to form a strategic partnership with sodium-ion battery pioneer Alsym Energy, which would add 8.5 GWh of cells and modules to ESS Tech’s portfolio and mark its entry into the short‑ and medium‑duration battery energy storage system (BESS) market, an arena historically dominated by lithium-ion (Li-ion) technology.
