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.
“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.
