Longtime solar developer Cypress Creek Energy has not only broken ground on what could be the largest solar-plus-storage plant in the country, but also secured a blue-chip customer to pay for the clean power.
Google will buy all the electricity from the first two phases of the forthcoming Steel River Energy Center in Mississippi County, Arkansas, just upriver from Memphis, Tennessee — totaling 1.6 gigawatts of solar capacity and 1.9 gigawatt-hours of battery storage. Once fully online in 2029, its power won’t flow directly to the tech giant but instead onto the grid managed by Entergy Arkansas, which supplies one of the company’s data centers and will serve a future data center planned for West Memphis, a Google spokesperson told Canary Media.
This marks the latest and largest effort by the tech giant to generate clean power for its rapidly expanding data center fleet, and it comes as the AI boom drives a growth spurt in carbon emissions from Google and other tech companies that have adopted voluntary decarbonization targets.
“As one of the nation’s most significant new solar plus storage projects, Steel River helps address growing electricity demand with reliable, cost-effective power, utilizing battery storage systems to strengthen grid dependability while also unlocking new clean capacity,” the Google spokesperson said in an email.
