Google buys power from record-busting solar-battery site in Arkansas

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.

A planned third phase will bring the total capacity on-site to 2.45 gigawatts of solar production and 2.9 gigawatt-hours of battery storage by the end of 2029. Google is not contracted to purchase that power.

This scale places Steel River at the forefront of U.S. solar facilities. While several operating projects have broken the gigawatt barrier in other parts of the world, U.S. developers have only crept up to that threshold. The Edwards & Sanborn plant came online in California’s Mojave Desert in early 2024 with a national-best 875 megawatts of solar and nearly 3.3 gigawatt-hours of storage. Steel River would blast past that solar capacity level, though it won’t store quite as much in its batteries.

“In my view, that’s where we’re headed as a country,” Cypress Creek CEO Kevin Smith said. ​“Solar right now is the most affordable electricity supply. It’s also fastest to market.”

Cypress Creek secured $3.5 billion in project financing in June to cover the costs of building and operating the first two phases. Lenders for the project include Barclays, BNP Paribas, Santander, and Wells Fargo. The developer and its financiers can move forward knowing that a cash-rich anchor customer will pay an agreed-upon rate for every unit of power the project generates.

The solar industry has endured a series of withering policy blows during the second Trump administration. President Donald Trump’s fluctuating tariff policies raised the costs of key materials unpredictably. Then, just over a year ago, the president’s budget law revoked a lucrative tax credit for solar, and subsequent executive-branch actions stymied development on public lands. (Cypress Creek managed to lock in the project’s tax credits before their July 4 expiration.) Despite all that, solar is still the single largest source of new electricity getting built in the U.S. this year, as it has been for many years running.

The AI surge has stimulated a historic level of demand for electricity, and though solar can’t power data centers 24/7, it can typically deliver the cheapest and quickest new electricity production. Steel River stands as a testament to those qualities. It will generate more instantaneous power than the state’s two nuclear reactors (1.8 gigawatts, taken together), but at a far lower price tag and with a manageable three-year construction effort, instead of the yearslong drift of recent U.S. nuclear construction.

Arkansas has a lot to offer solar developers, Smith said. The state provided good access to transmission and allows power producers to sell into the 15-state wholesale market managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. And Cypress was able to lease 11,000 acres, largely from the Lawrence Group, a major private farm owner based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Notably, Arkansas has no state-level renewable incentives or mandates, said Lauren Waldrip, executive director of the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association, who attended the Steel River groundbreaking Tuesday. Solar projects have to succeed there on a competitive market basis.

“Coal used to hang its hat on being the cheapest. That’s just not the case anymore,” Waldrip said. ​“We’re seeing that solar is one of the best options, especially when you couple storage with it. We can store this power and dispatch it on demand in a very reliable and affordable way. Those are just the facts.”

Agriculture has long led the state’s economy, but the sector faces a historically turbulent time; indeed, Arkansas led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year. For smaller family farms, solar lease payments can help keep the rest of the farm financially viable; for large landowners like the Lawrence Group, it offers a diversified revenue stream.

“People are realizing the generational impact that these projects can have in these rural communities that so desperately need a shot in the arm,” Waldrip said. The Steel River plant is expected to inject $300 million into the local tax base over its lifetime.

The project also showcases how far the solar industry has come in onshoring its supply chain. In fact, Cypress Creek will source much of its construction materials from the project’s own backyard. 

The power plant’s moniker references how Mississippi County produces more steel than any other county in the nation. Cypress Creek will buy an estimated 400,000 piles from Paco Steel, about 30 miles north, in Blytheville, Arkansas. Those piles will be sourced from steel coils produced at U.S. Steel’s Big River Steel in Osceola, Arkansas, roughly 10 miles from the new solar project; and the piles will hold up steel trackers from Nextpower, which has a network of domestic steel factories from Pittsburgh to Memphis to Las Vegas to supply its equipment.

Cypress is buying 3 million domestic panels for the first two phases from First Solar, which opened a 3.5-gigawatt solar factory in Lawrence County, Alabama, in 2024. And the batteries will come from LG Energy Solution Vertech, which has led the charge to onshore grid battery cell production in the U.S. and Canada. That effort is going so well that the U.S. is on track to become self-sufficient in grid battery supply by the end of this year.

In the 1950s, former General Motors CEO Charles Wilson told Congress that ​“what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” The Steel River project makes an implicit case that the success of the nation’s largest solar project is good for the nation, too.