Our BTM series has covered what behind-the-meter storage is, how the technology works, and why it saves customers money. This time, we're looking at one use case that has exploded over the past year: AI data centers, and the race to get them plugged into the grid.

The real problem isn't cost. It's the wait.

Building a data center used to be limited by money, construction crews, and available land. Now a growing barrier is something else: getting permission to draw power from the grid. In much of the country, that permission, called grid interconnection, can take five to seven years. Think of it like applying for a building permit, except the office reviewing your application has a waiting list years long, and everyone else building a data center is standing in the same line. PJM, the grid operator serving 13 states and Washington, D.C., expects about 32 GW of new peak demand by 2030, and data centers account for almost all of it. Its most recent power auction still came up 6.6 GW short of what's needed. In Texas, data centers now make up most of a queue asking for over 400 GW of power. For any company trying to build a data center, every year spent waiting is a year of paying for land, buildings, and equipment that can't do anything yet.

Behind-the-meter batteries are the fastest way around that wait.

Instead of waiting on the utility to build new power lines and substations, developers are installing their own batteries (and sometimes generators) right at the site. This lets the facility control how much power it pulls from the grid at any given moment, almost like a dimmer switch instead of an all-or-nothing power draw. When a utility sees that a data center can smooth out its demand this way, it's much less risky to connect, so it gets approved faster. PJM's new Bring Your Own New Generation program, or BYONG, makes this official: any large customer needing 50 megawatts or more gets a faster path to connection if it brings its own power source, including batteries, to help offset its load. Customers who don't do this risk getting cut off first when the grid is under stress. Similar fast-track programs are showing up in Texas, the Midwest, and other major grid regions. Developers using this strategy are cutting wait times from five or seven years down to as little as a year and a half to two years in some places.

This is already happening, not just a future idea.

One data center in the Pacific Northwest paired its project with a 31-megawatt battery system (able to store 62 megawatt-hours of energy) specifically so it could connect to the grid years earlier than normal. Across the country, dozens of data center projects, representing tens of gigawatts of power, are now building their own on-site power systems instead of waiting in line.

Here's what this means for how these systems need to be built.

A battery system meant to speed up grid approval has to do more than just store energy. It needs to be sized exactly right for the site's power needs, fit in the space the developer actually has (data center real estate is expensive), and run on a battery management system, or BMS, that the operator can trust to keep mission-critical equipment running 24/7. Think of the BMS as the battery's brain: it's constantly watching voltage, temperature, and charge levels to keep everything safe and working correctly. This is exactly what our CORE architecture is built for. CORE battery modules combine and scale to match a site's exact voltage and capacity needs, in a smaller footprint than comparable rack systems. That smaller footprint means more space for the equipment that actually makes money, like servers, or a smaller building footprint overall. Every CORE-Critical system runs on our American-made BMS, which matters for two reasons. First, it gives data center operators the domestic supply chain confidence they increasingly require for critical infrastructure. Second, it keeps projects clear of new federal rules limiting how much foreign-made battery equipment can qualify for tax incentives, sometimes called Foreign Entity of Concern, or FEOC, restrictions.

Getting connected to the grid, not the price of batteries, is now the biggest hurdle standing between a data center and going live. Behind-the-meter storage is turning from a nice-to-have backup system into a core part of how these sites get designed from day one. The developers moving fastest aren't adding storage as an afterthought. They're planning around it from the start.