Dive Brief:

• Google last week announced plans to convert an outdated Alabama coal plant to a data center fueled entirely by renewable energy.

• Once the Tennessee Valley Authority closes its Widows Creek coal plant in Stevenson, AL, in October, Google will begin a $600 million retrofit of the building, which eventually will run on solar or wind power, or a combination, the search engine giant said. Construction is scheduled to begin early next year.

• The new data center will be the company’s 14th, and the first new one in eight years. Google has said it needs additional capacity to accommodate traffic on its search engine. Its centers in Iowa and Oklahoma run on wind power.

Dive Insight:

In what The New York Times called “a building binge,” Google has expanded its data centers in the United States, Singapore and Belgium over the last few months. A Google executive told The Times that the company is less vulnerable to falling short of its needed capacity if it builds several centers at once. If one project runs into a delay, the others will supply enough capacity to fill the company’s growing need.