Facebook is working towards building a solar farm in Texas. The farm, which will probably be the largest solar project in the U.S., is Facebook’s first direct investment in renewable energy.
Longroad Energy has partnered with Facebook on the $416 million project is expected to generate the power required for 72,000 homes. Known as Prospero Solar, the project will have a capacity of 379 megawatts.
As reported by Longroad, Facebook will be the sole tax equity investor in the project. It should be complete in 2020. The entire project will be 7 square kilometers large. This is roughly the size of Central Park in New York City.
The power generated by the farm will be shared by Shell Energy North America and Facebook, which will use it to power its data centers, which have thousands of computers servers.
Facebook is considering seven such sites for building a facility for data storage. Each data center building is immensely huge, comparable to the size of four football fields.
“Our data centers are already some of the most energy efficient in the world, and last year we set a goal for all our data centers and offices to use 100% renewable energy by 2020,” Zuckerberg wrote on his personal Facebook page. “These new solar projects will help us reach that goal.”
Plans to build one of those, in Los Lunas, in New Mexico, was declined by the state regulators because the new transition line would not benefit retail customers. The New Mexico data center is expected to house 6 buildings for data storage.
