Arizona’s largest battery storage system is now online and, along with solar and wind, will help power a new Google data center – here’s why that matters.

Arizona’s largest battery + Google

Arizona utility company Salt River Project and renewables developer NextEra Energy Resources developed Sonoran Solar Energy Center, a 260-megawatt (MW) solar farm able to charge a 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) battery energy storage system.

The $600 million solar + battery storage project sits on 3,000 acres south of Buckeye. It created 500 construction jobs and is expected to generate $17.5 million in tax revenue over 35 years.

Salt River Project has an eight-year energy supply agreement with Google for over 430 MW of clean electricity, so the tech behemoth will tap into Sonoran Solar Energy Center to power its new data center campus in Mesa, which was announced last year and will come online in 2025.

Google’s Mesa data center will also draw clean power from the new 88 MW solar + storage Storey Energy Center in Coolidge, Arizona. Together, Sonoran and Storey generate enough clean energy to power nearly 80,000 households and can store clean energy for up to four hours to support the grid during high power demand periods.

But that’s not all – SRP and NextEra Energy Resources’ under-development 161-MW wind farm, Babbitt Ranch Energy Center, north of Flagstaff, is also going to feed Google’s new data center.

Electrek’s Take

Without electricity, Google is nothing, and it uses an insane amount of power. Statista reports that Google’s energy consumption reached 22.29 terawatt hours in 2022 – more than what the entire country of Jordan consumes.

It’s not really something we think much about when we use Google’s offerings on a daily basis.

So it’s a good thing that Google has a net-zero target across its operations and value chain by 2030, which it’s working to achieve with power purchase agreements. Arizona is just another important step in that process.

Read more: The US’s largest renewable developer says it’s ‘unlikely’ GOP would gut clean energy tax credits

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