Morgan Hill will soon be the new manufacturing home for power grid electronics manufacturer Heron Power, the company and the City of Morgan Hill announced in a joint press release Aug. 13.
The Scotts Valley-based industrial electronics company plans to convert an 286,000 square foot former distribution warehouse at 850 Jarvis Drive into Heron Power One, the manufacturer’s first full-scale factory.
According to Heron officials, the facility will create more than 600 jobs across the fields of manufacturing, engineering, automation, supply chain and operations.
“Heron Power’s decision to locate here reflects the strength of our advanced manufacturing ecosystem and the collaborative approach our city takes to supporting business investment,” said the city’s economic development director, Matt Mahood. “We look forward to partnering with the company as it creates hundreds of high-quality jobs and makes a lasting investment in our community.”
Heron’s primary product is the Heron Link, a power device that combines multiple pieces of traditional power infrastructure into a single unit designed to streamline construction of large-scale energy projects like solar plants, energy storage facilities and data centers. The 5-megawatt medium-voltage device is made to be modular and infinitely scalable.
The company contends that while technologies like electric vehicles, storage batteries and solar have advanced rapidly in recent decades, grid technology has failed to keep up, resulting in power shortages that are expected to worsen as more high-energy facilities like AI data centers are coming online.
Heron aims to help relieve this stress by manufacturing more than 10,000 units of its modernized Heron Link system annually at the Morgan Hill factory.
“For decades, California has been an incubator of new energy technologies—utility scale solar and wind, electric vehicles, battery energy storage to name a few—on their trajectory to global scale,” said Drew Baglino, CEO and Founder of Heron Power. “With our factory in Morgan Hill, Heron is continuing that tradition, manufacturing leapfrog critical grid technology for the first time at scale in the Golden State.”
The new facility was made possible in part by a $26.4 million tax credit from the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development awarded in May as a part of the state’s California Jobs First Initiative. The company also rallied more than $100 million in private investments to bring the new factory into reality.
“We are thrilled to welcome Heron Power’s Factory One to Morgan Hill,” said Mayor Mark Turner. “Heron will make a significant contribution to our innovation economy by bringing hundreds of high-quality jobs and substantial private investment to our community.”
Heron plans to begin moving into the Jarvis Drive facility immediately with a target of late 2027 for full production capacity.
