Construction started in July on what will be the largest solar facility in the United States, and the customer is a hyperscaler. Cypress Creek Energy and Google announced the groundbreaking of the first two phases of the Steel River Energy Center in Mississippi County, Arkansas on July 14.
The numbers behind Steel River
Phases one and two deliver 1.6 gigawatts DC of solar generation paired with 1.9 gigawatt-hours of battery storage. The complete three-phase project reaches 2.5 GWdc and 2.9 GWh of storage by 2029. Cypress Creek closed $3.5 billion in financing to build and operate the first two phases. Google is acting as anchor investor and offtaker and has signed a power purchase agreement covering most of the output, though neither company disclosed the terms.
Each phase carries roughly 700 construction jobs. The project is expected to generate about $300 million in local tax revenue over its operating life, which in a county of fewer than 40,000 people is a structural change to the tax base rather than a rounding error.
Why the storage ratio matters more than the solar
The generation number gets the headline, but the interesting engineering is the 2.9 GWh of batteries. A solar farm without storage sells power when the sun is up and competes with every other solar farm on the same grid to do it, which is why midday prices in high-penetration markets keep collapsing. Pairing storage at close to a one-to-one gigawatt ratio lets the plant shape output into evening peak and, more importantly for a data center customer, deliver something closer to firm supply.
That’s the model hyperscalers have been converging on. Buying unshaped solar was fine when the load was flexible. AI training and inference load is not flexible, and it runs at night.
Steel country becomes solar country
Mississippi County is already a steel-production hub, which is where the project name comes from and why the site works. The county has transmission capacity built for electric arc furnaces, a workforce used to heavy industrial construction, and enough flat agricultural land to host a 2.5 GW array without the siting fights that have stalled utility-scale solar in the Midwest and Northeast.
The pattern is worth watching. Solar developers spent a decade fighting interconnection queues in places with good sun and bad grids. Arkansas has moderate sun and an industrial grid with headroom, and that trade is now clearly winning. Domestic cell manufacturing is trying to keep pace: Suniva’s cell plant is one of the few U.S. facilities positioned to supply projects at this scale. Source: Cypress Creek Energy; Google.