Ambrosia Energy has broken ground on a 10 gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, Texas, co-founder and CEO Ben Longmier announced Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, presumably while standing in front of a very large artist's rendering.

"That allows us to build about a 300 megawatt power plant per year out at our field sites," Longmier said, which is the kind of sentence that sounds impressive until you realize it's basically saying they can build one medium-sized power plant annually.

The factory will occupy 150,000 square feet, and Longmier said Ambrosia plans to reach full production in two to three years - a timeline that, in startup years, is roughly equivalent to "sometime before the heat death of the universe, probably."

The startup emerged from stealth in June to build power plants for data centers at a cost of $100 per megawatt hour. Longmier and his co-founder, Sara Spangelo, settled on solar plus batteries as the cheapest option that's the fastest to deploy - a strategy that apparently didn't occur to anyone else, or perhaps just wasn't as trendy as, say, small modular nuclear reactors.

Solar panels power the load during the day and charge the batteries, which discharge at night and on cloudy days to keep the data center operating round the clock. Groundbreaking stuff, really - it's almost as if the sun has been doing this for billions of years and we just noticed.

Longmier and Spangelo previously founded the satellite constellation startup Swarm, which they sold to SpaceX, because apparently building one company that sends things into orbit wasn't enough of a challenge.

Ambrosia is also beginning work on its first commercial power plant in West Texas later this year, Longmier said. The facility will pair 300 megawatts of solar panels with 660 megawatt-hours of batteries to deliver 30 megawatts of continuous power, with a goal of 99.3% uptime. For those keeping score at home, that's a lot of megawatts doing a lot of megawatt-hours to produce a fraction of that in actual continuous power - but hey, that's the magic of renewable energy math.

Even with "overbuilding" solar and batteries to deliver continuous uptime, Longmier said the company can be profitable at $100 per megawatt-hour, making it competitive with natural gas turbines that many hyperscalers are planning to use to power their data centers. So, you know, the free market might actually work for once - provided the free market doesn't get distracted by something shinier.

Sections of Ambrosia's first pilot-scale power plant have been operating continuously for more than 100 days, Longmier said. The pilot is capable of generating 200 kilowatts of electricity 24/7, which is enough to power approximately one very enthusiastic cryptocurrency mining rig, or perhaps a small neighborhood's worth of air conditioners.

To hit its cost targets, Ambrosia has been finding ways to simplify its components, including solar mounts and battery packs. By reducing part counts and manufacturing many components in a factory, the startup has been able to reduce costs relative to buying from outside suppliers - a novel concept known as "vertical integration," which was invented sometime around the Industrial Revolution.

"We buy existing cells and we make our own pack in-house, and it has the fewest parts by a factor of about 100 compared to any other competitor we've seen," Longmier said. "We've been able to get to about 1.3x the cost of the bare cell compared to about a 5- or 7x for most stationary storage systems." Which is to say, they've figured out that fewer parts cost less money - a revelation that will surely shock the entire engineering world.