Build it, and they will come.
The Field of Dreams? I was talking about generation and data centers, but that works too!
Danish multinational energy company Ørsted has commissioned the Eleven Mile Solar Center in Pinal County, Arizona, southeast of Phoenix. The 300-megawatt (MW) solar farm and 300 MW/1200 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) will power homes and businesses in Salt River Project (SRP) territory as well as Meta’s planned data center in nearby Mesa, AZ. Meta secured the majority of the site’s generation capacity via a Power Purchase Agreement last year. Its $1 billion, 2.5 million square foot data center in Mesa is expected to be online in 2026.
“Solar energy paired with battery energy storage will be critical to the reliable delivery of power as the demand for electricity grows,” noted David Hardy, executive vice resident and CEO of Region Americas at Ørsted.
Fluence Energy, which started producing battery modules at a facility in Utah last month incorporating battery cells manufactured in Tennessee, shipped all enclosures for the Eleven Mile Solar Center from its Utah plant.
In May, Ørsted announced an investment from J.P. Morgan for $680 million in tax equity financing for a portfolio of solar and storage assets that included Eleven Mile Solar, which is Ørsted’s first completed project in Arizona. The transaction is one of the largest solar and storage tax equity transactions using a combined production tax credit (PTC) and investment tax credit (ITC) structure since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August 2022. The Eleven Mile Solar Center will receive a one-time investment tax credit for its battery storage system while the solar farm will generate production tax credits over a ten-year period. The project represents a roughly $1 billion investment from Ørsted.
The J.P. Morgan deal also included Sparta Solar, a 250 MW solar project in Mineral, Texas. This summer, Ørsted completed work on that project, a part of the Helena Energy Center, a 518 MW combined wind and solar farm in Bee County, South Texas.
“Helena Energy Center is unique in that it’s Ørsted’s first co-located wind and solar project and the largest renewable energy project in our global onshore portfolio,” said Hardy. Ørsted’s total onshore portfolio is now about 5.7 GW, including roughly 1.8 GW in the United States.
Meta isn’t the only company using renewables to power its data center operations in Mesa, Arizona. Last month, SRP and NextEra commissioned the Babbitt Ranch Energy Center in Williams, AZ. The 161 MW, 50-turbine wind farm will feed Google’s forthcoming $600 million data center in Mesa, quickly becoming a hub for such development.
