In Mississippi County, Arkansas, workers are currently breaking ground on the largest solar and battery storage project ever built in the US.
It is called the Steel River Energy Center.
When finished, it will have a generation capacity of 2.5GW and a storage capacity of 2.9GWh, which will make it by far the country’s largest solar project to date.
The company behind this US$3.5bn project is Cypress Creek Energy, a developer, owner and operator of large-scale energy projects across the US.
In the 12 years since its founding, Cypress Creek has become a major player in the American energy sector, capable of handling the biggest energy projects the country has ever seen.
Cypress Creek was not always a gigawatt-scale operator, though.
Historically, the company developed small solar projects known as QFs, or qualifying facilities, typically 5MW in size and concentrated in the Carolinas.
That changed in 2021, when EQT Partners acquired the business and set it on a different course.
“We needed to change how we procured, how we constructed, how we financed and how we commercially operated our assets,” says Jeremy Wodakow, the firm's Chief Commercial Officer, of the period that followed.
The company rebuilt itself around three pillars, in his words: people, processes and systems.
“When everything runs on rails and on time, you can be flexible with how you approach the customer needs,” he says.
Since its founding, Cypress Creek has commercialised roughly 19GW of projects across the country.
Today, it has around 7GW either in operation or under construction, with a further 20GW in the pipeline across the country.
The company's stated ambition is to commercialise 3 gigawatts of new projects every year, a target Kevin Smith, Cypress Creek's CEO, describes as a strong growth goal.
Kevin is a fairly new addition to the Cypress Creek set-up, having joined in the springtime.
The energy sector is not new to Kevin, however. He has now worked in the industry for more than 40 years now, having started as a power plant engineer fresh out of college.
His career has spanned nuclear design, natural gas projects in the US and abroad, including six years leading Rolls-Royce's power ventures new project development business in London, and then a move into large-scale wind in 2004 with Invenergy, before he moved into solar and battery storage in 2008.
Being so steeped in the sector, he understands which way the wind is blowing – or in which direction the sun is shining.
“I believe solar is going to dominate the markets as we go forward,” he says. “We're headed for a solar world.”
He took the top job at Cypress Creek five months ago, drawn by a growth story built around projects of exactly the scale that Steel River represents.
Alongside him sits Ishan Jaithwa, the firm’s Vice President of Data Centre & Utility.
Before joining Cypress Creek, Ishan led the energy infrastructure team for machine learning and artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, where he helped build the first gigawatt-sized machine learning campus ever.
Jeremy, the company’s CCO, joined Cypress Creek in 2023 shortly after the EQT acquisition to build its commercial team into the formidable department it is today.
Between them, these three executives represent decades of experience across nuclear, gas, wind, solar and the fast-emerging world of AI infrastructure.
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