A New York State energy provider has approved delivery of 1MW of power for the second phase of Yahoo!'s data center in Lockport.

The company has been expanding capacity of the facility as part of a US$500m global data center consolidation effort its VP of operations Scott Noteboom announced at the DatacenterDynamics conference in New York City in March. The plan includes consolidating the company's current 31-data-center footprint into 13 new facilities.

The New York Power Authority, a publicly owned utility, said in a statement that Yahoo! would receive an additional 1MW of hydroelectric power to support the $130m expansion that will add 120,000 sq ft to the existing campus. In May 2009, NYPA approved 15MW of hydroelectric power for the existing Yahoo! facilities in Lockport.

The recent power allocation was part of NYPA's allocation of a total of 4.07MW of power generated by the organization's Niagara Power Project to six companies. Each power-delivery contract is for five years.

In a statement, NYPA trustee John Dyson said Yahoo!'s expansion plans demonstrated NYPA's ability to leverage its resources to improve and diversity the region's economy. "Yahoo! has demonstrated its commitment to investing in New York State and to continuing to add new high-tech jobs," he said.

The data center in Lockport attracted a lot of publicity when the company launched it in September 2010 because of its original energy-efficient design the company called "computing coop".

In March, Noteboom said the company had come up with a next-generation data center design called Flex Tier Data Center. Many of the new data centers that are part of the global infrastructure revamp project will be built to this design.