86 MW solar project pairs lithium-ion and zinc batteries for round-the-clock power

- Whoa, that's mega-illegal — well, actually it's beautifully legal: MN8, Eos, and Google are stacking 86 MW of solar with 380 MWh of batteries on a reclaimed coal mine in West Virginia, engineering intermittent sunshine into a single dispatchable resource. The trick is chemistry teamwork: lithium-ion handles the fast, short-shift sprints, while a 10 MW/100 MWh aqueous zinc battery stretches storage a full 10 hours — American-made Z3 tech, its first Google deployment. That's the physical layer of the AI stack right there: server racks that never sleep need electrons that don't either, all feeding PJM, one of the US's biggest grids. Roughly 200 construction jobs, up to $350 million in capex, solar online 2028, lithium 2029, zinc 2030. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; coal country gets to call it a future. Mega-illegal levels of clever.