On a quiet Monday morning in downtown Stevenson, Ala., it’s difficult to remember that you’re standing in one of the most talked-about cities in the state. The town, located in Jackson County, 135 miles north of Birmingham and less than 13 miles from the Tennessee state line, is slow to start its day. Aside from the blaring horns of frequent freight trains, the only sounds in downtown Stevenson come from inmate laborers working to restore a demolished storefront.
But the buzz surrounding Stevenson has never been louder. Last week, Gov. Robert Bentley announced plans for Google to build a $600 million data center in the city, making Stevenson the seventh city in the U.S. — and the 14th worldwide — to hold such a distinction.
The AP reports that the center will “process Internet search requests, show digital video, give directions, deliver email and store photos.”
It’s the tech giant’s first announced data center in the U.S. since 2007, not counting expansions of its existing data centers in Oklahoma and Iowa in 2012, and the announcement predictably received widespread attention. The New York Times’s Quentin Hardy placed the move within the context of data center announcements in Singapore and Belgium earlier this year, writing that the center was the latest in a “building binge” for the company.
Others appeared to be outright baffled by the move. CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk reacted to the news with unmasked skepticism and a headline reading, “Google makes a big bet on… Alabama?”
But while these reports highlight the broader importance of this move for both Google and the state of Alabama, they ignore the people living in the area who will be most affected by the presence of the new data center.
Stevenson, for its part, seems unfazed by the attention. One of the few places in Stevenson’s historic downtown district open before 11 a.m. is the Stevenson Depot Museum, a historic landmark built in 1872 — and the namesake of Depot Days, an annual community festival that dominates Stevenson’s downtown area for the first week in June.
That festival seems to embody the majority of activity in downtown Stevenson in most years. Most of the storefronts are empty or for rent, with windows covered by curtains or obscured by painted murals of the Depot Days logo (a silhouette of a train moving toward the viewer, with “STEVENSON” appearing in a plume of steam billowing from its smokestack).
Apparently still operational, if not open on Monday mornings, is the Michael Scott Learning Center, which offers free GED and ESL courses to Stevenson residents, and Jones-Light Furniture & Appliances, which opens later, but before noon. A decal on the store’s door urges customers to “Check us out on Google.”
The Depot Museum, which curates history in the form of Civil War memorabilia and unearthed Native American artifacts, meanwhile, opens at 8 a.m. five days a week. (The door to the adjacent hotel, also a historical landmark, is labeled with a firmly worded handwritten note: “DO NOT ENTER. Judge’s chambers. Judges ONLY.”)
Inside the museum is its director, Loretta Barbee, whose opinion of the Google news is positive, if measured. “I think any new jobs is good news in this economy,” she says, but defers any other opinions to the mayor: “He likes everything to go through him.”
City Hall, separated from downtown by two sets of railroad tracks, is open — but city clerk Sandy Evans is on vacation and mayor Rickey Steele is in meetings all day. Instead, Monica Davis, who attends to a citizen’s request at City Hall before moving downtown at 11 a.m. to open up the city’s public library, shares her own opinion on the new data center.
“I’m excited about it,” she says, “But we really don’t know enough about it yet. I know Google brings other technology companies with it… I just hope they can help this town grow.”
Many who live in Stevenson travel to Chattanooga to work, Davis says. Even Steele, who serves as mayor part-time, travels outside of the city for his job. Davis says she hopes the potential for a local job at Google will encourage students in Stevenson to apply themselves.
“Seems like you have to have a fancy degree to work for them,” she shrugs.
Other Stevenson occupants register a variety of reactions to the news. Some, such as Jo, a waitress at a Jack’s on the opposite end of Stevenson, seem indifferent to the news. “My daughter is on Google all the time,” she says. “A lot of the young people around here are.”
Others, such as lifetime resident Cecil Hicks, are enthusiastic. “I haven’t talked to Mayor Steele in probably a month and a half, but I know he was excited about this deal and making it happen,” Hicks says, pulling out his smartphone to show on Google Maps where the data center will be located. Though Hicks says the Tennessee Valley Authority really made the deal with Google happen, he thinks that Stevenson will benefit from Google’s presence nonetheless.
“They’ll be a good neighbor,” he adds.
Repurposing Widows Creek
Google’s new data center will be built on the grounds of the Widows Creek Fossil Plant, a coal-fired power station located just east of Stevenson and run by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The plant, which was commissioned in July 1952, featured eight operational units until 2013, when the TVA began its gradual shutdown of the plant.
Kristine Cooper, a TVA representative, says that the decision to decommission the Widows Creek plant came after an analysis of the cost of implementing regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We had to start closing them down at different stages for mostly economic reasons but also based on environmental conditions,” Cooper said. “Requirements from the EPA had compounded over the years. Each time, we had to look at, is it economically feasible to keep these running under the current or soon-to-be environmental regulations that are coming down. Each time we had to make very difficult decisions on what units we could close and what units we could give additional equipment.”
Cooper appears to be referring to a 2011 settlement between the TVA and the EPA following allegations that Widows Creek had violated the Clean Air Act — including failing to maintain pollution control devices, failing to comply with acid rain requirements and failing to report non-compliance with the Acid Rain Program. According to the EPA’s website, the TVA agreed to pay a $450,000 civil penalty as part of the settlement, as well as to gradually shut down six of the eight units between July 2013 and July 2015. While the final two units were to remain functional, the costs of the NOx-reducing selective catalytic reduction devices required by the EPA appear to have been too high.
“Unfortunately, it’s at the point that we have to close down all the units,” Cooper said, adding that the plant’s final active unit “will operate until at least October of this year,” at which point the TVA plans to “idle that one and retire the entire site.”
Google will break ground on the new data center next year, using an area of land previously used by the Widows Creek plant to dispose of ash. Google plans to use approximately 360 acres of the 2,000-acre property, which the TVA has said was provided to the corporation through a permanent easement, giving Google the rights to the property but allowing the TVA to retain ownership of the land.
The deal between the TVA and Google, Cooper says, has been underway “for a little over a year,” after representatives from the two entities met at a conference.
“It became apparent that there was an opportunity to work together on what Google had planned for their next data center,” Cooper said. “What was very appealing to Google [about Widows Creek] was that the site itself has great infrastructure — its great access to water, its existing transmission lines. On top of that, [the idea of] reutilizing existing plants was appealing to them.”
“At Widows Creek, we can use the plants’ many electric transmission lines to bring in lots of renewable energy to power our new data center,” wrote Patrick Gammons, Google’s senior manager of data center energy and location strategy, in a blog post. “There’s a lot of potential in redeveloping large industrial sites like former coal power plants. Decades of investment shouldn’t go to waste just because a site has closed; we can repurpose existing electric and other infrastructure to make sure our data centers are reliably serving our users around the world.”
“…and Available Workforce”
As for the citizens of Stevenson, the benefits of the Google data center may come less in the form of jobs than in the form of the company’s charitable contributions to the community. According to the webpages for Google’s various data centers, Google have given back to the respective communities surrounding its data centers in various ways, largely with contributions to local schools and nonprofit organizations.
Google has donated $1 million to schools and nonprofits surrounding its Berkeley County, S.C., data center. The company also created a free downtown Wi-Fi network in the nearby town of Goose Creek. Similar contributions have been made to the communities surrounding the company’s data centers in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Douglas County, Ga., among others.
But unlike those data centers, Google does not appear to anticipate occupants of Jackson County joining its workforce. On webpages for its individual data centers, Google provides a brief explanation of its reasoning for choosing those centers’ locations. For almost every case, the explanation is boilerplate: the location “has the right combination of energy infrastructure, developable land, and available workforce for the data center.”
The sole exception to this is the page for the recently announced plant, which conspicuously lacks mentioning the location’s available workforce: “Jackson County has the right combination of energy infrastructure and developable land,” it states. “Jackson County and the state of Alabama have also worked incredibly hard to make this site work for one of our data centers. We are looking forward to being a part of this community for many years to come.”
This omission may be, in part, to Stevenson’s population statistics. According to the 2010 census, Stevenson is home to 2,046 people, 69.3 percent of whom have a high school diploma and 5.9 percent of whom have college degrees. The city also features a relatively high unemployment rate of 18.8 percent and a poverty rate of 26.7 percent.
While Google says that it makes it “a priority to hire from within the community whenever possible because it’s good for business and the right thing to do,” it seems likely that the 75-100 “high-paying jobs” the data plant is bringing with it, many of which require highly technical knowledge of Linux operating systems and, for some positions, college and post-graduate degrees, may draw on an imported workforce instead of those who already live in Stevenson.
“Who’d Have Ever Thought They’d Come Here?”
David “Bubba” Hughes says the new Google data center belongs to his town.
Hughes is the mayor of Bridgeport, Ala., a city located 10 miles northeast of Stevenson. Despite widespread reports that the data center will be located in Stevenson, Hughes argues that’s only technically the truth.
“It’s amazing that they picked Bridgeport,” he says, sitting at a conference table in Bridgeport’s city hall. “And it is in Bridgeport, not Stevenson. The address [of Widows Creek] is in Stevenson, but it’s not going to be built on that exact site. It’s a pretty good ways from the steam plant. [The data center] isn’t in the city limits, it’s outside, but it’s considered Bridgeport.”
Many, including Monica Davis, agree with Hughes. “Yeah, it’s in Bridgeport,” she says. “A lot of people don’t know that.” The front page of the North Jackson Progress, the county’s local newspaper, features a photo of Hughes shaking Gov. Bentley’s hand under the headline “Google: Welcome to God’s Country.”
Hughes, who says that he’d first heard of the TVA’s deal with Google three weeks ago — “I had to sign a letter of confidentiality so I wouldn’t talk about it,” he says — acknowledges that because of the placement of the data center, the distinction is a tiny one. “As close as Stevenson is to Bridgeport, it’s going to affect them as much as it is us,” he says. “[But] from my standpoint, if you’re the mayor, you’re going to want it in Bridgeport.”
While Hughes says he does expect that Google will bring in people from outside Jackson County to work at the data center, he is optimistic about the other jobs that the center will bring to the community. “I was reading in the paper [that] when they built the one in North Carolina, at peak construction they had a thousand construction workers. That’s going to bring money into town, into our eating places, everything. It’s big. A $600 million investment, that’s no small number. It’s probably going to be more than that by the time it’s through.”
Hughes describes Bridgeport as “a small, loving community. Everybody knows everybody. There’s not much crime. There was a murder the other day, but they brought the body in from Tennessee and dumped it in Bridgeport. [Otherwise] we get along good. Our people are some of the best people around.”
Hughes sighs and stands up, preparing to return to his day job at Bridgeport Utilities. Google tends to build data centers in rural areas, he says, but the development still amazes him.
“Who would have ever thought they’d come here?” he muses. “Thank God for Google.”