This is the Widows Creek power plant on the Tennessee River in Alabama, soon to become a Google data center. Or Google will use the site, anyway — I’m not sure about the future of the buildings. Big chunks of riverfront land are highly desirable to any company that processes a lot of data, because the water can be circulated through the center to help cool the machines that we overheat with photos and videos.
But there are enormous coal plants throughout America that can’t be so readily repurposed, and the creativity devoted to remaking them is quite remarkable: here’s an MIT Technology Review post on the subject.
Text Patterns
June 29, 2015