Story Highlights
- GridStor bought the Birdseye battery project from Accelergen on Wednesday.
- The 199-megawatt battery storage station will serve over 150,000 households.
- Construction begins late 2027 and finishes between late 2028 and early 2029.
A battery project is planned on more than 12 acres in Adams County, spearheaded by a Goldman Sachs-owned company.
Portland, Oregon-based GridStor is going through permitting to develop a 199-megawatt battery storage station dubbed Birdseye that ties into Xcel Energy’s Riverdale substation. GridStor said it expects to begin construction in late 2027, finish between late 2028 and early 2029 and provide enough power equivalent to serve over 150,000 households during peak demand when it’s fully operational, according to the company.
GridStor bought the project on Wednesday from Austin, Texas-based Accelergen, which had begun the interconnection studies for the battery facility.
“We just look at this as having a stake in the ground in the state of Colorado as our first asset, and in a location that serves multiple purposes,” said Lance Titus, GridStor’s chief commercial officer. “So, if you think about the prolific load growth that the Front Range has experienced over the last several years … you think about constraints and congestion, and where storage can really serve not only just for keeping the lights on, but support peak demand.”
Colorado’s largest power company, Xcel Energy, forecasts energy demand that backs up Titus’s statement. Xcel, which provides electricity to 1.6 million customers and natural gas to 1.5 million in Colorado, has projected needing to spend billions of dollars to upgrade its electrical transmission infrastructure to meet rising demand, most of which the company predicts will come from data centers in the future.
The battery storage project, if completed, is meant to bolster grid reliability and lower blackout risks during periods of high electricity demand, GridStor said. It will create 115 construction jobs while it’s being built, according to the company.
“Having something that close to a major load pocket is quite valuable when you think about where generation is generally cited to where demand sits,” Titus said.
GridStor did not disclose the financial terms of buying the project from Accelergen. The company is based in Portland, but Titus, who previously worked for Xcel Energy as an energy and derivatives trader, is part of a seven-person team in Denver.
The company currently has 530 megawatts of battery storage assets being built and operating, alongside a pipeline of more than 3 gigawatts of battery storage projects in the western and central U.S., according to GridStor.
“A lot of the territories that we’re in, we’re seeing this load growth going from what used to be 1% to 2% to multiples of that, given not only just agentic AI or hyperscaler demand, but also the way we see electrification as a whole growing in a more electrified universe,” Titus said.
Read the full article here.
