The State of Virginia has been awarded an $85.3 million federal grant along with South Carolina and private sector partners for renewable power projects.
The grant will be used to install new battery technology at a Prince William County data center, as well as to set up batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines at a former textile plant in Lancaster, South Carolina, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The grant is a part of $2.2bn awarded by the US Department of Energy from a $10.5bn fund dubbed the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program.
The data center to receive battery technology is an Iron Mountain facility that will eventually house nine data centers on a 142-acre site.
Iron Mountain will be installing a battery energy storage system which will help maintain the charge in battery cells, and handle conversion of the direct current into alternating current for the transmission lines and vice versa.
Iron Mountain has been developing its data center campus for many years, having first announced the project in 2016. The company has since expanded its plans several times.
The funding will also go towards a renewable energy project at the Grace Complex in Lancaster, South Carolina.
Other recipients include the California Harnessing Advanced Reliable Grid Enhancing Technologies for Transmission project which aims to expand transmission capacity and improve access to renewable energy across California, Power Up New England via the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, the Montana Department of Commerce to build a 3,000MW high voltage direct current voltage source converter transmission line, and the New York Power Authority’s project Clean Path New York which is an underground and underwater High-Voltage Direct Current transmission line that will deliver 1,300MW of renewable energy from upstate and western New York to New York City.
Also set to receive funding is the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality State Energy Office in partnership with Duke Energy, and the Tribal Energy Resilience and Sovereignty Project in Northern California that will help four tribes to develop, own, and operate microgrids.
Data center developments are a key driver in increasing electricity demand and grid constraints in the US. A report from Newmark released in January suggested that data centers alone are expected to use an annual 35GW of electricity by the end of the decade.
Earlier this year, the Department of Energy announced it planned to set up ten corridors across the country which would allow for the rapid expansion of the power grid.
It has drawn up a list of 10 of what it calls “national interest electric transmission corridors,” (NIETCs) which cover more than 3,500 miles of the US.
