This is THE biggest news for Alabama since development of NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville!
JACKPOT!
Google Announces $600,000,000 data center investment in Jackson County, AL
https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/jackson-county/
100% powered by Renewable Energy
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-power-plant-for-internet-our-newest.html
A power plant for the Internet: our newest data center in Alabama
Every time you check your Gmail, search on Google for a nearby restaurant, or watch a YouTube video, a server whirs to life in one of our data centers. Data centers are the engines of the Internet, bringing the power of the web to millions of people around the world. And as millions more people come online, our data centers are growing, too.
We’ve recently expanded our data centers in Iowa, Georgia, Singapore and Belgium. And today we’re announcing a new data center in Alabama—our 14th site globally.
This time, we’re doing something we’ve never done before: we’ll be building on the grounds of the Widows Creek coal power plant in Jackson County, which has been scheduled for shutdown. Data centers need a lot of infrastructure to run 24/7, and there’s a lot of potential in redeveloping large industrial sites like former coal power plants. Decades of investment shouldn’t go to waste just because a site has closed; we can repurpose existing electric and other infrastructure to make sure our data centers are reliably serving our users around the world.
TVA Widow’s Creek fossil plant will be the site for Google’s 14th, and newest Data Center, and represents a $600,000,000 investment in Alabama.
At Widows Creek, we can use the plants’ many electric transmission lines to bring in lots of renewable energy to power our new data center. Thanks to an arrangement with Tennessee Valley Authority, our electric utility, we’ll be able to scout new renewable energy projects and work with TVA to bring the power onto their electrical grid. Ultimately, this contributes to our goal of being powered by 100% renewable energy.
In 2010, we were one of the first companies outside of the utility industry to Read the rest of this entry »
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