Green Power EMC and Silicon Ranch have announced they will bring 252 MWAC of new solar energy online over the next three years to serve 16 subscribing electric cooperatives across Georgia. Silicon Ranch will own, operate and maintain the arrays. Green Power EMC will purchase all the energy and environmental attributes generated by the facilities on behalf of its member cooperatives.
The first site, Snipesville III, will be a 107-MW solar facility located in Jeff Davis County. Construction is expected to commence later this year, and the facility is scheduled to be operational by mid-2023. The site will be in close proximity to two other cooperative solar projects. Snipesville I (86 MW) was commissioned in December 2020, and construction was completed on Snipesville II (107 MW) in December 2021. Snipesville II will provide power to one of Green Power EMC’s member cooperatives, Walton EMC, as part of the utility’s agreement to supply renewable energy to Meta’s data center in Newton County.
The second site in the portfolio, DeSoto II, will be a 65-MW solar facility located in Lee County. Silicon Ranch expects to begin construction in late 2022 and plans to bring the facility online by late 2023. The facility will be built next to DeSoto I, where construction is already underway and, like Snipesville II, the DeSoto I facility will serve Walton EMC to support Meta’s Georgia operations.
The third site, Ailey, will be an 80-MW solar facility located in Montgomery County. Silicon Ranch plans to construct the project in 2024 and projects the facility to be online late that year.
“Over the past eight years, Silicon Ranch has been proud to work shoulder to shoulder with Green Power EMC and the Georgia cooperatives to deploy more than one gigawatt of solar power and invest more than $1 billion across the state of Georgia,” said Silicon Ranch Co-Founder and CEO Reagan Farr. “Over the past year, Silicon Ranch employed more than 1,000 Georgians to help us construct solar facilities across the state, and thanks to the leadership of Green Power EMC and Georgia’s electric cooperatives, we will hire 1,000 more to help drive meaningful economic impacts in the communities where we locate.”
Silicon Ranch has committed to make significant capital investments and hire local craft workers in Jeff Davis, Lee, and Montgomery Counties to construct the projects over the next three years. Once the projects are operational, they will generate millions of dollars in new tax revenues to support the local economies, governments, and school systems of these rural communities for decades to come.
News item from Silicon Ranch
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