When Ben Alingh co-founded Monarch Energy in 2021, it was on a bet that the green hydrogen industry would soon take off and need industrial-size electrolyzers to produce the fuel at scale.
So Alingh and his co-founder Charles Koontz, both veterans of Ørsted, spent several years scouting ideal sites for those electrolyzers. The machines, which use electricity to split water into its separate elements, needed access to a lot of clean power, water, and grid infrastructure like transmission and pipelines.
Acquiring those sites involved years of complex state and local permitting processes, but by 2024, Monarch had lined up sites with a combined four gigawatts of capacity, mainly across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. There were generous tax breaks for green hydrogen under the Inflation Reduction Act — though the eligibility specifics were still being ironed out. Still, Alingh said the market signals weren’t strong enough for him to be confident in the model.
“We had this stark realization that this green hydrogen industry might not take off,” Alingh told Latitude Media. “That was based on interactions with off-takers who we felt should be more excited about buying it: The oil refiners and ammonia producers who make up 80% of hydrogen demand. But they really weren’t. Their response was, ‘We have 20-year contracts with traditional hydrogen providers. We’ve been running this refinery for 50 years and don’t want to make any changes.’ And there was no mandate to do so.”
So two years ago, Monarch started to consider a pivot. And data centers — even in the earlier stages of the artificial intelligence boom — seemed like a natural target. The company’s first investment was from Lancium, the lead developer of Project Stargate’s original data center campus in Abilene, Texas. And Monarch’s core expertise was in real estate development.
“Our core ingredients — hundreds of acres of land outside major metro areas, access to large amounts of power and water, and tax abatements and permits — those are what’s needed for a hyperscale data center,” Alingh explained.
It was a well-timed decision. In 2025, utilities and energy market analysts forecasted massive load growth, primarily from large data centers, after decades of flatlined electricity demand. Hyperscalers are now racing to find power any way they can, which is exacerbating problems that were already plaguing an outdated grid: backlogged interconnection queues for both new generation and large loads; lengthy permitting processes; and opposition from local communities who don’t want to live near energy projects or data centers.
The powered land prize
Those constraints have made part of Monarch’s portfolio of powered land very valuable to the deep-pocketed hyperscalers looking to build. About half of the sites, or 2 GW, were well-suited to their needs, Alingh said.
The rest — including sites along the Gulf Coast, where hydrogen companies have begun to build infrastructure in the vicinity of fossil fuel operations — are in areas prone to storm surge and hurricanes, and therefore risky places to build supercomputers.
“There were big pieces of our pipeline that we just had to unfortunately walk away from,” Alingh said. “But then there are other projects that are really exciting in a world where speed to power is everything.”
Alingh said Monarch is well on its way to interconnecting these sites, given they requested large amounts of power from utilities back in 2022 and 2023. He added that the company has sites across ERCOT SPP, PJM and MISO, but didn’t disclose the specific customers.
Green hydrogen setbacks
Alingh said he doesn’t know of many green hydrogen projects at a “meaningful scale” being built in the U.S., though some are advancing despite recent setbacks at the federal level.
After the IRA was enacted in August 2022, the Biden administration took nearly two and a half years to finalize the 45V tax credit rules that define what can be considered “green” hydrogen. That uncertainty kept bankers at bay, and meant few projects broke ground in the full year between the release of the strict and controversial draft guidance in December 2023, and the final rules released in the weeks before President Donald Trump took office.
While the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill in July maintained 45V after a concerted campaign by the industry, it will phase it out sooner than under the IRA. A project has to start construction by 2027 to claim the credit, as opposed to 2033.
The industry took another hit in October, when the Trump administration canceled hundreds of federal grants for clean energy projects, including four hydrogen hubs.
Plug Power is currently the largest producer of green hydrogen in the U.S., at about 40 tons per day at plants in Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Plug Power makes hydrogen fuel cells, which companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot are using to power warehouse equipment. Plug Power’s CEO Jose Luis Crespo, during a March 3 earnings call, said hydrogen fuel cells could also be used for backup power for data centers.
Meanwhile, a long-delayed green hydrogen project in New Mexico is expected to start construction in June, after securing a $231 million-dollar grant from the Department of Agriculture.
From hydrogen to hyperscalers
But other major developers that Monarch initially competed against, including Intersect Power and AES, have similarly pivoted away from green hydrogen to powered land for data centers.
Intersect Power, for example, plans to transform a previously proposed green hydrogen campus in Texas into a data center campus. Google acquired Intersect’s development arm, though not its existing project pipeline, in December.
AES in late 2022 had plans for a $4 billion green hydrogen plant in Wilbarger County, Texas. Then last week, the company landed a 20-year deal with Google to build a massive data center campus in the same county. AES is set for a private takeover, after a group of private equity investors — including a BlackRock-owned private equity fund — announced a $33.4 billion deal earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the microgrid developer Scale last week acquired the powered land company Reload. And two-year-old Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which is run by both developer and hyperscaler veterans, brought in $300 million in its first raise.
Monarch, however, isn’t looking for acquisition anytime soon. Alingh said Monarch isn’t currently in talks with any buyers, and in fact is planning another financing event this spring to grow.
“Once a marquee transaction happens, many others follow in that same trend,” Alingh said. “That Intersect transaction really changed the game. Investors understood that powered land development isn’t easy. This is a difficult business. So there’s a lot of capital chasing these deals looking to grow.”
