A $900M Texas solar mega-farm will power Meta’s data centers

Meta just signed more power purchase agreements (PPAs) with ENGIE North America, expanding their partnership to more than 1.3 gigawatts (GW) of solar across four projects in Texas. It’s just a shame the social media giant is also going big on gas plants in Louisiana to power its data centers at the same time.

The latest PPAs include ENGIE’s new 600-megawatt (MW) Swenson Ranch Solar project in Stonewall County, southeast of Lubbock. When it comes online in 2027, Swenson will become ENGIE’s largest solar farm within its 11 GW North American portfolio of solar, wind, and battery storage projects. Meta will buy 100% of Swenson’s power to run its US data centers.

ENGIE says the $900 million project will create over 350 construction jobs and generate over $158 million in tax revenue for Stonewall County and the local hospital district over its lifetime.

“Our objective is to bring reliable, cost-competitive power to the grid as rapidly as possible, and projects like Swenson demonstrate the importance of solar to meet the timely needs of our customers,” said Dave Carroll, ENGIE North America’s CEO and chief renewables officer.

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Meta’s head of global energy, Urvi Parekh, said the expanded deal with ENGIE “enables us to continue matching 100% of our electricity use with clean and renewable energy to support our data center operations,” Parekh said.

Electrek’s Take

Meta isn’t exactly putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to matching 100% of its electricity use with clean energy. The social media giant is also building a $10 billion data center – one of the world’s largest – in Richland Parish, Louisiana, that’s going to be powered by three gas-powered plants, which utility Entergy will build especially for Meta, which is paying 50% of the costs. Those three plants will produce 2,262 MW of dirty fossil fuel power. For perspective, that’s nearly 10% of Entergy’s current energy capacity across four states.

So while the 1.3 GW of clean energy that ENGIE will produce in Texas for Meta is great, it doesn’t make up for the CO2 emissions it’s about to create with this dirty project it’s building in a lower-income farming community in Louisiana. It certainly isn’t for speed, because solar is the fastest to put up. Limited state oversight – and a 2024 state law that lets the company skip paying sales tax – likely helped Meta make that destructive decision.

Read more: Texas just became No 1 in the US for most utility-scale solar

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