Yet another company has abandoned Edgecombe County, one of the poorest corners of North Carolina, after making promises it couldn’t keep. This time, it’s Natron Energy, the battery manufacturing company that planned to bring 1,000 jobs and a $1.4 billion investment — until the company shut down.
It’s the latest in a string of failures at Kingsboro Business Park. Other companies, such as Triangle Tyre, have made and failed to keep similar promises in recent years.
Edgecombe County confronts an urgent question: How can it break its cycle of economic development disappointments?
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Last year, Bobbie Jones, mayor of Princeville, a small town in Edgecombe, told Carolina Public Press he doesn’t get too excited about economic development announcements until he sees the building going up.
It looks like he had the right idea.
Now, the county has cleared the way for a controversial industry to set up shop: data centers.
Clean energy on the decline
Natron Energy planned to use sodium-ion to create batteries that store renewable energy. It was a clean energy startup, and its demise was due in part to the shifting priorities as the Trump administration took charge in Washington. In the time it took Edgecombe to ready the site for Natron, the Department of Energy had cooled on clean energy projects.
“These are huge projects: tying up 400 acres, all the engineering, all the survey work, all the due diligence of various sundry aspects, it took a long period of time (to get the site ready for Natron),” said Bob Pike, president of the Gateways Carolina Partnership, an economic development group out of Rocky Mount.
“Because it was basically a startup, Natron’s funding period only went so long. And then because of the new Trump administration, we had delays in the Department of Energy funding for the project.
“It just kept being delayed and delayed and delayed and the company expended their startup funds.”
Hence, the abrupt cancellation of investment in Edgecombe County.
Forty-two clean energy projects were canceled across the country in the first nine months of 2025, compared to nine total canceled projects in 2024.
Trump’s policies are responsible for the broken promises of Triangle Tyre as well, a Chinese company that promised to come to Edgecombe, then was spooked by the trade war Trump initiated at the end of his first term.
Dealing with Natron’s departure
For David Farris, president of the Rocky Mount Area Chamber of Commerce, Natron’s dissolution is a huge disappointment.
“It was a blow economically, and it was a blow psychologically for this area,” Farris said.
Edgecombe County is currently tied with an adjacent county, Halifax, for highest unemployment rate in the state. This northeastern group of struggling counties is also part of the cluster of counties that are home to the highest percentage of Black North Carolinians. Some of the persistent unemployment and poverty is rooted in the history of racial economic disadvantage going deep into the region’s history.
Edgecombe is designated Tier 1 under North Carolina’s system of economic distress tiers. Because of this designation, Edgecombe County received a job development grant and other incentives from the state that helped the county attract Natron Energy.
These state incentives are enough to get companies interested in North Carolina’s poorest areas, but not enough to ensure follow-through.
“We learn a little bit with each project, whether it’s a long shot or a near miss,” said Eric Evans, Edgecombe County manager. “We try to get better at knowing the right questions to ask.”
In this case, one mistake was giving exclusive rights to Kingsboro Business Park. Edgecombe County stopped showing the site to other interested companies, per Natron’s wishes. Now, all of those interested companies they turned away are missed opportunities.
Edgecombe did charge Natron $700,000 over seven months for those rights. Now Evans wants to reinvest that money to make the property more attractive to developers — though the only takers so far appear to be data centers.
Data centers and Edgecombe
In a surprising about-face, the Edgecombe County board of commissioners voted to add data centers to permitted zoning in November, with new standards for set-back requirements, noise limits, landscaping and light pollution.
A Rocky Mount-based data center company, Energy Storage Solutions, is planning to build a $19.2 billion, 900 MW campus at Kingsboro Business Park. It would be one of the largest in the southeast, according to Data Center Knowledge.
The company’s proposal to build a similar site in Tarboro was shot down by the same board earlier this year. The developer is appealing that decision while moving forward with the much larger Kingsboro project.
“We’ve said no to another data center project, because the other data center project is what I would call a typical data center — a big building with a lot of servers on racks,” Evans said.
“They plug into your grid and they suck up a lot of electricity. We didn’t want to bring a data center here that uses up all of our electrical capacity and does not create a lot of jobs.”
But Energy Storage Solutions is different, according to Evans. They plan to hire 1,000 people to work at Kingsboro. It will feature a natural gas generator and a carbon capture facility.
“We kind of leaned back in our seats when they told us that number, because generally, there aren’t too many people working at a data center, it’s just a lot of computers with flashing lights,” Evans said.
“But this will have a data center, natural gas power generation, as well as a carbon capture operation. All three of those components require different people to run those and fix them and monitor them and all of that.”
Whether this is just another promise waiting to be broken remains to be seen.
But for now, Edgecombe is betting on an industry that has divided other rural communities.
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