Groundbreaking for big NAS Lemoore data center and energy project near | John Lindt
NAS Lemoore is expected to announce groundbreaking for construction of a new $1 billion data center, solar farm and battery storage project that has been proposed by the company Ameresco. The Massachusetts energy giant has a lease for 930 acres with the US Navy on land surrounding the Kings County base.
Ameresco has been working on the project since they bought the company Bright Canyon in 2023 who was talking to the Navy. Even before that, in 2016 the Navy and Recurrent Energy signed a lease agreement to build a 167-megawatt solar facility on the same 930 acres of land at Naval Air Station Lemoore in Kings County, before anyone dreamt of data centers.
So, will it finally happen?
“NAS Lemoore should be announcing soon (within the next couple of months) a ground breaking ceremony for this project,” reports Sarah Thrasher, public affairs officer at Naval Air Station Lemoore as of April 10.
Ameresco and their partner KKR-owned CyrusOne emphasized the data center part of the plan not mentioning solar but describing the project as an “AI-optimized data center to be — with a dedicated on-site energy generation facility built by Ameresco, forming a microgrid system that includes engine generators, control systems, and infrastructure upgrades.”
Last summer in a news release, the base executive officer said, “This initiative directly supports our national priorities in AI and energy dominance,” said NAS Lemoore Captain Jeffry Findlay. “By enabling secure, reliable power and compute infrastructure at NAS Lemoore, we’re strengthening our ability to support critical missions and ensure operational continuity for those who serve.”
An Ameresco news release said CyrusOne has been tapped to deliver the data center infrastructure, which will be part-based on the capabilities of its Intelliscale platform. The platform is designed for AI and high-density computing.
The project is expected to have a construction value of over $1 billion by one speculative estimate. The data center would employ 20 although the construction would need 400 workers. According to the 2023 EIR, the data center would be 600,000 square feet. When the formal announcement comes, we may know if these details are the same.
The lease of land has been around since 2015, passing through a number of private hands and now owned by Ameresco. A 2024 Supplemental EIR was done and is still on the base website saying the project includes 450MW of solar and” additional resilient energy systems (including electric vehicle charging stations, battery energy storage systems [BESS], and backup generation/microgrid.”
The big solar farm would join a dozen or so other big solar farms nearby including one being proposed by KKR-owned Avantus in the Buttonwillow area that is said to be the largest single solar project in California sprawling over both sides of I-5
Last September an Ameresco news release described the Navy project as follows.
The facility at NAS Lemoore will provide our federal customers with the secure, on-premise computing solution they need—paired with the resilience of onsite energy supply,” said John Hatem, EVP and CEO of CyrusOne. “Data centers are foundational to our information economy and critical to maintaining U.S. leadership in technological innovation, especially in AI. We’re proud to deliver this solution through our alliance with Ameresco.”
The first segment of the project is expected to come online in 2027 on land leased by Ameresco from the Department of Defense. The capacity of the data center and associated generation assets has not been disclosed. Ameresco has stated that, although the development agreements are still being finalized, it anticipates that it will be one of its largest energy assets.
“Ameresco is proud to develop energy infrastructure at NAS Lemoore that directly supports the growing demand for AI-ready data centers and related energy infrastructure,” said Nicole Bulgarino, president, Federal Solutions & Utility Infrastructure at Ameresco. “We look forward to working with the Navy and CyrusOne to develop this critical infrastructure that supports energy resiliency for the installation and meets the unique energy and reliability requirements of advanced AI data center workloads.”
A data center publication last summer pointed to the fact that the solar farm was not mentioned in the latest description.
News on the project first emerged back in October of last year, when it was reported that the Navy was working on a deal to lease 920 acres of land around Naval Air Station Lemoore to Ameresco.
According to reports, Ameresco was planning to construct a 425MW solar farm, which would have supplied power to an on-site data center. No news of a solar array was mentioned in the release announcing the partnership with the US Navy and CyrusOne.
One theory might be that the change in administrations and their priorities prompted Ameresco to emphasize the data center aspect of the project while downplaying the renewable power that will allow it to operate. President Donald Trump has expressed opposition to utility-scale solar and wind projects even as data center developers scramble to find power sources needed for these energy-hungry AI related centers.
Data centers are known to be water thirsty as well, an issue that will need to be addressed. One estimate is that large data centers can consume 1 to 5 million gallons of water daily for cooling, equivalent to a town of 10,000–50,000 people.