New data centers can lead to higher electric bills and lock in aging, outdated coal plants. But a Google project in Minnesota takes a different approach: The tech giant is paying to build enough clean power that existing customers won’t foot the bill, and the grid will get innovative new tech—a massive battery that will be the largest by capacity in the world.
This week, major tech companies are expected to visit the White House and pledge to shoulder more of their own energy demand. The Minnesota project offers a concrete example of how that can go a step further and use clean power.
“Google has long been committed to scaling our infrastructure responsibility, which includes paying for the electricity and associated costs of our growth,” said Lucia Tian, Google’s head of advanced energy technologies. “Investing in the systems that make our communities more resilient is table stakes for us.”
To support the data center, which will be built in the small town of Pine Island, Google inked an agreement with the local utility Xcel Energy to fund 1,900 megawatts of new clean energy. It’s similar to an approach that Google took in Nevada to pay for a geothermal power plant from Fervo, a company with next-generation technology that otherwise would have been too expensive to add to the grid. In the Minnesota project, Google is paying for 1,400 megawatts of new wind power and 200 megawatts of solar power while helping pioneer another new technology—a battery that can store energy over days instead of hours.
A unique battery for a more reliable grid
The battery, from a startup called Form Energy, uses iron-air technology to help store renewable energy longer. The company describes it as reversibly rusting iron: The iron reacts with oxygen to store and release energy, with storage lasting 100 hours. The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
“The unique thing about Form is it’s one of the only options out there on the market for that 100-plus-hour storage,” Tian said. That’s useful to cover any gaps in renewable electricity.
“A long-duration battery can help us maximize how we use renewable energy when we encounter extended periods of lower solar and wind generation, such as during the middle of winter when we can see several days of cloudy weather with very little wind,” Xcel said in a statement. The technology is cost-competitive with natural gas.
The battery, along with the solar and wind power, won’t connect directly to the data center but will instead feed into the broader grid. Google declined to share the facility’s expected power consumption. But the new clean energy capacity will exceed what the data center requires—a reflection, according the company, of Google’s commitment to making the grid more resilient.
“It’s serving as a grid resource,” Tian said. “And one of the things that is exciting for us about this project is it’s also serving to catalyze this new technology at a scale that it hasn’t been deployed at before.”
The battery is a major project for Form Energy, which has spent the past few years ramping up production at its factory at a former steel mill in West Virginia. The company is finishing the installation of its first commercial battery at another site in Minnesota. That first project stores far less energy—just 150 megawatt-hours. But the system is modular, with the batteries inside shipping containers that just need to be added together for more capacity.
“It’s not that we have to build a new machine at a larger scale,” said Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo, who founded the company after working on energy storage at Tesla. “It’s just more of the same.” The biggest challenge was manufacturing the electrodes; the company had to produce 100,000 of them, or around 60 miles’ worth of material, to prove to itself and customers like Xcel and Google that it was ready for large-scale production. It’s planning to quickly scale up now.
“Our hope is that this project sends that demand signal that allows them to build out their manufacturing here in the U.S.,” Tian said.
Will the industry follow?
Other tech companies, including Microsoft and Anthropic, have said they plan to cover the cost of new energy infrastructure needed for data centers. More are expected to make that pledge now after pressure from the Trump administration, though the details of those agreements—likely nonbinding—haven’t yet come out, and it remains to be seen how closely some companies will follow them. It’s also not clear how many companies will voluntarily prioritize clean energy. Meta, for example, is installing natural gas generators to power a new data center in El Paso.
Environmental advocates are skeptical. “We do believe it’s possible to responsibly build large-scale/hyperscale data centers, but it’s incredibly difficult to accomplish that task due to the resource demand of these facilities,” said Kyle Rosas, Minnesota deputy director for the nonprofit Clean Water Action.
Many also question the need for them. The new Google data center will power its core services like YouTube and Maps, but most new data centers are being built for AI. “There are significant concerns about an AI bubble, and the lack of profit from these companies are not necessarily inspiring confidence in the future of the industry as-is,” Rosas said. “So as of right now, it’s difficult for us to say these facilities should exist at this scale.“
Pressure from communities can have an impact: Last year, at least 25 proposed data centers were canceled because of protests from people living nearby over concerns about electric bills, pollution from fossil fuel power plants, and water use. (It’s worth noting that Google’s new data center doesn’t use water for cooling; the company will employ air cooling, which uses more electricity, but that will be covered by the new clean power.)
The risk of community pushback is another clear argument for tech companies to go as far as possible to do the right thing. The new Minnesota project shows how it can work. “We think this is a great example for how to do it well,” said Form Energy’s Jaramillo. “And I expect a lot more of this kind of thing to be happening.”
