Brian Boland was CFO at utility-scale energy developer BrightNight when he was approached by Chris James, the founder of investment firm Engine No. 1, in early 2025. James had procured four gigawatts of gas turbines from GE Vernova two years earlier, before energy demand started to skyrocket and the sector ran headlong into a turbine crunch.
“He saw where the puck was going, and realized that the U.S. had been massively underinvesting in its electrical supply chain, particularly the thermal and gas turbine side,” Boland told Latitude Media.
Those turbines became the cornerstone of Joulent, an energy developer building power plants for large-scale new industrial loads, and AI data centers specifically. Boland left BrightNight to be Joulent’s CFO and head of strategy while the company was being incubated by Engine No. 1.
On June 22, 2026, Joulent emerged from stealth, spinning out of Engine No. 1 and announcing Project Kilby, a West Texas gas-powered facility Joulent is developing through a 50-50 joint venture with Chevron. Kilby aims to deliver 2.67 GW of power to a co-located data center, via a 20-year power purchase agreement Microsoft signed with Energy Forge One, a Chevron subsidiary. Engine No. 1 and Chevron originally announced a partnership to build gas generation for data centers in January 2025.
Then, in early July, National Grid Ventures, the commercial arm of National Grid, announced a $1.75 billion investment in Joulent, for a 35% stake in the company.
It’s a solid entrance into the growing behind-the-meter market, as hyperscalers and data center operators are increasingly turning to GW-scale, co-located microgrids to avoid long interconnection timelines.
According to Boland, Joulent’s strategy is well-suited for the AI sector and its exacting energy needs.
“Given the constraints that these new large loads are putting on the grid, plus the pricing pressure they’re putting on consumers, the right thing to do is to design purpose-built power solutions to serve these loads directly next door,” he said. It’s like in “the old days,” he added, when the refineries and steel mills built in the World War II era had their own dedicated power plants. Once the grid “got built out,” he added, “industrials got a little bit spoiled.”
Like many co-located power plants, Joulent’s approach relies mostly on gas, though Boland describes the company as “technology-agnostic.” (This heavy reliance on gas generation makes off-grid data centers a poor choice for decarbonization efforts, according to a recent Rhodium Group assessment.)
“We are not a gas power developer, but today, the only [proven] thing that could provide baseload power at this scale is gas complemented with batteries,” Boland said.
That’s the model Joulent is adopting for the Kilby development, which is intended as a blueprint for the multiple, GW-scale projects the company plans to build across the U.S. in the coming years. Eventually, Joulent plans to add “a meaningful amount of solar,” as well as a grid connection. The latter would be for reliability and inject power into the grid when possible.
“[We have] no intention of using the grid to serve additional capacity, but we are building the physical infrastructure,” Boland said. “Over time, our turbines will occasionally need to be brought down for maintenance, and that may require some grid support, but it will be very short-term.” The grid power consumed would be negligible compared to what Joulent plans to inject onto the grid when the data center is running at low utilization, he added.
Unencumbered by legacy ways, but backed by them
Because Joulent is new and laser-focused on large, AI data centers, Boland says it has an advantage over traditional power developers marketing their gas resources, old and new, to data centers. Those developers aren’t used to building at the speed required by the AI era, he explained. They’re also out of practice when it comes to building thermal generation, having in large part pivoted to renewables in the past ten years. Joulent, on the other hand, is “not biased by legacy ways of developing power,” he said.
Joulent may be taking a different path from legacy developers like NextEra or Vistra, but it’s nonetheless being validated by established players including hyperscalers, utilities, and developers. Adding to the contract with Microsoft and the close collaboration with Chevron, the National Grid investment, in particular, gives Joulent access to the balance sheet, expertise, and industry contacts of a major multinational utility company.
“The electrical side of these solutions is very complex,” Boland said. “All the interfaces between the power plant and the data center, and the opportunity that exists in that space, are something that National Grid is extremely experienced in.”
In terms of the supply chain, the partnership allows Joulent to keep the advantage that the four GW of turbines gave it at the outset, by leveraging National Grid’s relationships with vendors when it comes to high- and medium-voltage grid equipment, which have become “the longest lead time item in some ways, in the space,” Boland said.
“EPC contractors are often overlooked, but they are becoming the most acute supply chain issue in the industry,” he added. That’s another area where National Grid brings contacts and expertise: “It’s very hard to get the attention of the big EPCs, those that can build these types of projects and attract skilled labor.”
While Joulent hasn’t announced the EPC contractor for its Kilby project yet, Boland says it’s finalizing a contract with “a brand name.”
Finalizing that contract, securing its air permits, and lining up project financing — which shouldn’t be too hard given the 20-year PPA with Microsoft is already in place — are the last steps before it can break ground on the project.
“We are planning to achieve first power in 2028,” Boland said.
