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Hugh Pickens writes:

Quentin Hardy reports at The New York Times that Google just announced it is opening its 14th data center inside a former coal-fired power plant in Stevenson, Alabama. While there is considerable irony in taking over a coal-burning plant and promoting alternative power, there are pragmatic reasons Google would want to put a $600 million data center in such a facility. These power facilities are typically large and solid structures with good power lines.

The Alabama plant is next to a reservoir on the Tennessee River with access to lots of water, which Google uses for cooling its computers. There are also rail lines into the facility, which makes it likely Google can access buried conduits along the tracks to run fiber-optic cable. In Finland, Google rehabilitated a paper mill, and uses seawater for cooling. Salt water is corrosive for standard metal pipes, of course, so Google created a singular cooling system using plastic pipes.

Once fully operational, Google's Alabama data center will employ up to 75 employees in a variety of full-time and contractor roles, including computer technicians, engineers, and various food services, maintenance and security roles. "This a fantastic and exciting day for Jackson County," says Jackson County Commission Chair Matthew Hodges.

Phoenix666 writes:

Google, probably the company with the most internet servers in the world, has recently announced a new project that has a very nice symbolic angle. They're going to build a new datacenter in Alabama, which will be their 14th site globally. But they're not going to just build it in any regular spot; they will be taking over the Widows Creek Plant, a shut down coal power plant located on Guntersville Reservoir on the Tennessee River, in northeast Alabama, and convert the location to host this vital part of the internet infrastructure. Widows Creek began operating in 1952, so it wasn't exactly a modern facility.

It makes more sense than it might first seem: Datacenters require a lot of power, so they need high-capacity connectivity to the grid. Few places are as well connected as power plants... "Decades of investment shouldn't go to waste just because a site has closed; we can repurpose existing electric and other infrastructure to make sure our data centers are reliably serving our users around the world," writes Google.

Is your friendly neighborhood coal power plant soon to become another Google/Amazon/Apple data center?