By Jordan Blum
Publication Date: 2026-02-28 07:58:00
Google announced this week it’s developing a new data center complex south of Minneapolis to be powered by a practical utopia of clean energy: lots of wind, solar, and, notably, the world’s largest battery storage system.
While the battery business is now booming, most storage systems provide power in four-hour durations, or increasingly, eight hours. But the Form Energy technology Google will utilize aims to dispatch up to 100 hours of power at a time. Form’s iron-air battery technology offers multiday durations intended to keep the power on during prolonged severe weather events, peak summer demand, or just a particularly cloudy week that weakens solar power.
The idea is that renewable power—when coupled with shorter- and long-duration batteries—can finally shed the reliability concerns of critics and offer the equivalent of baseload power provided by fossil fuel generation and nuclear power.
“This is the largest announced energy storage project in the…