On July 1, National Grid Ventures invested $1.75 billion for a 35 percent stake in Joulent, a US-focused power infrastructure company that builds co-located natural gas generation for data centers. Joulent's flagship project is Kilby: a 2.67 gigawatt facility in Reeves County, West Texas, built as a 50/50 joint venture with Chevron to supply a Microsoft data center under a 20-year power purchase agreement starting in 2028.
National Grid owns the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales. Its name is the grid. Its business is the grid. It just paid $1.75 billion to invest in a company whose entire model is making sure power never touches one.
The Activist
Joulent was developed over three years by Engine No. 1 and launched publicly in June 2026. Engine No. 1 is the investment firm that won three Exxon board seats in May 2021, holding just 0.02 percent of shares, budgeting up to $30 million on what became the first proxy fight in corporate history focused on climate change. Backed by BlackRock and major pension funds, the campaign argued Exxon needed to accelerate its transition away from fossil fuels.
Five years later, Engine No. 1's incubated company builds natural gas power plants next to server racks. Joulent trademarked the phrase "Across the Meter." The model is co-located, modular gas generation that delivers power directly to customer loads without connecting to the public grid. No utility interconnection. No transmission queue. No regulator setting the rate.
The climate activist's most commercially successful creation is fossil fuel infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
The Wellhead
Project Kilby sits in the Permian Basin. Chevron's Energy Forge One, a wholly owned subsidiary, controls the chain from wellhead to data center load. Fuel is sourced directly from Chevron's upstream production. GE Vernova supplies the primary turbines. Solar Turbines, a Caterpillar subsidiary, provides additional capacity. The project targets a final investment decision before the end of 2026 and first power delivery in 2028. Total cost is approximately $7 billion.
Chevron is not selling oil to a utility that sells electricity to a data center. Chevron is producing gas, generating electricity, and delivering it to Microsoft's servers in a single vertically integrated operation under a 20-year contract. The oil company became the utility.
The Pipeline
Kilby is not unusual. Data center developers have announced approximately 101 gigawatts of on-site natural gas generation to bypass grid interconnection bottlenecks. Only about 2 gigawatts is operating as of mid-2026. xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 facilities near Memphis account for roughly 1,498 megawatts of that operating capacity. Texas alone has approximately 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter data center projects in development.
GE Vernova expects to reach 20 gigawatts of annualized gas turbine output in 2026. The company that makes the turbines is already capacity-constrained against a pipeline that exceeds 100 gigawatts. The bottleneck is no longer grid interconnection. It is turbine manufacturing.
The arithmetic is clarifying. One hundred and one gigawatts announced. Two operating. A hundred-to-one ratio between ambition and reality. The pipeline dwarfs the installed base by a factor that suggests either a construction boom of historic proportions or an announcement bubble. GE Vernova's 20-gigawatt annual capacity means delivering the full pipeline would take five years of dedicated output, assuming every turbine goes to data centers and none to the rest of the global economy.
The Inversion
National Grid earns regulated returns by moving power through transmission lines. Every electron that flows through the grid generates revenue. Every electron generated behind the meter is a customer that will never exist. The grid company invested $1.75 billion in its own displacement.
But the logic is straightforward. If behind-the-meter generation is where growth is going, the grid company that does not participate in it gets left behind while the growth happens on the other side of the fence. National Grid is not investing against its grid business. It is investing in the business that replaces it, before someone else does.
Chevron did the same calculation from the other side. The oil company's upstream production has a customer with a 20-year contract and no commodity price exposure. The gas goes from Chevron's wells to Chevron's turbines to Microsoft's servers. Demand is contractual, not cyclical. For an oil company, that is the most valuable barrel it produces.
The deal is a map of where the energy system is going. The oil company wants contracted demand. The grid company wants exposure to load growth. The climate activist wants returns. The hyperscaler wants power it controls. Every party in the transaction is acting rationally. What they built together is a gas-fired power plant.