Clean energy news: December 2023
ASU Collaboration Expands Sustainability, Climate and Equity Upskilling for Deloitte Leaders and Professionals
Deloitte announced expanded collaborations with renowned academic institutions, including MIT Sloan School of Management, NYU Stern Executive Education and Center for Sustainable Business, and most recently, Arizona State University, to create a differentiated, integrated learning program intended to enhance Deloitte professionals’ ability to help guide clients in identifying and engineering solutions to support what’s good for their business, people and the planet. Read more >>
Meta selects DPR for $1B Arizona data center with 100% renewable energy
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, selected Redwood City, California-based contractor DPR Construction to build its $1 billion data center in Mesa, Arizona, the contractor told Construction Dive. The project, first announced in August 2021, is a greenfield development of a five-building campus encompassing over 2.5 million square feet of data center and admin space. Read more >>
Community That Boasts Some of the Most Sustainable Features in the Multifamily Industry Opens in Mesa
The completion of one of the most energy efficient multifamily projects in the state was celebrated with a ribbon cutting ceremony recently. ECO MESA apartments transformed a small, infill parcel of land in Downtown Mesa into a community that boasts some of the most sustainable features in the industry. ECO MESA was developed by Habitat Metro and Willmeng Construction was tasked with delivering the project, which was designed by CCBG Architects. Read more >>
Plug and Play accelerateAZ Announces New Sustainability Accelerator Program
Plug and Play accelerateAZ, a program of the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA), announced today a new Sustainability program that will support the growth of Arizona sustainability-focused startups. The new program, announced at the Plug and Play Silicon Valley Summit in Sunnyvale, California, will launch in Spring 2024. Read more >>
Meta Teams Up with SRP to Support Data Center with Clean Energy from New Solar and Battery Project
Meta announced its Mesa data center will soon be supported by new solar energy from Salt River Project (SRP) through a contract with a leading U.S. clean energy provider, Ørsted. Under the contract, Meta will receive the majority portion of the solar energy generated by Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center, a 300-MW solar farm and 300-MW, four-hour battery energy storage system currently under construction in Pinal County, Arizona. Read more >>
New Poll: Arizonans Support Clean Air and Climate Action More than Ever
The American Lung Association in Arizona released updated polling that shows Arizona voters continue to support strong actions on clean air and climate change. Arizonans also overwhelmingly want to see policies to boost clean energy and solidly support efforts to encourage the transition to pollution-free vehicles. Read more >>
Meta secures power for Mesa data center through deal with SRP, Orsted
Meta has signed on with Salt River Project and clean energy provider Orsted in a solar energy deal to power the Facebook owner’s new data center in Mesa. The partnership is focused on a 300-megawatt solar farm and 300-megawatt four-hour battery energy storage system that is currently being built for Tempe-based SRP by Orsted in Pinal County. Under the deal, most of the energy generated at that site will go to Meta. Read more >>
UA’s College of Public Health secures $3.8 million NIH grant to pioneer climate change and health research
The University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health received funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to fund research that examines the cross-section between climate change response and public health for the Southwest Center on Resilience for Climate Change and Health (SCORCH). Read more >>
SRP Partners to Commission Solar-Charged Battery System
Salt River Project (SRP) and NextEra Energy Resources, LLC have officially commissioned a 100-megawatt (MW) battery energy storage system to store the energy produced by the operating Saint Solar Energy Center in Coolidge, Arizona. The Saint Solar facility has been serving SRP commercial customers since the end of 2020 and is one of nine SRP-contracted solar resources delivering more than 650 MW of clean energy to SRP customers. The new battery energy storage system can store enough of the solar facility’s clean energy to provide power to more than 22,500 average-sized homes for four hours. Read more >>
Q&A: Nikola CEO Steve Girsky envisions building a ‘hydrogen highway’