Ford Motor Company has been quietly working on a secret side hustle. The automaker announced Monday the formal launch of Ford Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary that will manufacture and sell US-assembled battery energy storage systems for utilities, large industrial customers and — perhaps most importantly — data centers. Ford hopes to deploy at least 20GWh of storage capacity annually, with the first customer deliveries planned for late 2027. The pivot has been telegraphed since Ford and SK On killed their $11.4 billion BlueOval SK joint venture last year, splitting the factories and leaving Ford with a very large, very underutilized Kentucky battery plant and a decision to make. Repurposing that Glendale plant for grid-scale energy storage production is the kind of move that looks obvious in retrospect — though “obvious” and “well-executed” are different things. Ford still has to prove it’s capable of the latter. The DC Block is a shipping container-sized battery built around LFP prismatic cells. Ford Energy The Ford Energy DC Block Ford Energy’s flagship product is the DC Block, a …