Power is money, based on an Aiken County property now on the market for data center development.
A 150-acre tract at 142 Hard St. in Graniteville is up for sale for $22.5 million. Five 9’s Digital, a Charlotte-based real estate company specializing in the development of data centers, is touting the property as a 100-megawatt site pre-approved for just such a project, possibly scalable to 200 or 300 megawatts.
The real estate listing notes that the land would be powered by Dominion Energy, which would pay for all substation and infrastructure cost upon a customer’s agreement and after a power purchase agreement is executed.
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The site also boasts a 50% renewable power blend, and an average five-year power cost of approximately 62 cents per kilowatt hour with an incentive rider (about 68 cents without).
A 110,000-square-foot building currently sits on the land, formerly the location of the Avondale Mills steam plant, near the site of the 2005 Graniteville train crash. The building is equipped with solar panels on its roof and a small hydro-plant is onsite.
The listing comes on the heels of Meta’s announcement to build its own data center in Graniteville’s Sage Mill Industrial Park. Though the projects are unconnected, their proximity bespeaks the significance of viable energy resources for data center production.
According to a report on global data center trends published this past June by real estate investment company CBRE, worldwide power shortages have given power sourcing a prime urgency in the industry. However, in North America, data center inventory grew by nearly 25% in the first quarter of this year, with more than 800 megawatts added in the sector’s key regions in Chicago, Dallas, Silicon Valley and especially northern Virginia.
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“Today, data centers are really looking for power,” said Stephen Bollier, a broker and partner with Five 9’s. “ There’s multiple sites that we work with around the country that all are potentially opportunities for data center given the power profile of the various sites.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
