Panamint begins 1.2 GW solar at Texas coal site — coal stays
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Panamint Capital broke ground on Big Rooter Power, a $1.7 billion, 1.2 GWdc solar project at its Twin Oaks power station in Robertson County, Texas — the largest solar farm built at an existing coal mining site in North America.
- Twin Oaks includes a 310 MW lignite-fired coal plant the company still lists as operating, with no announced retirement plans.
- The project splits into two phases: 491 MWdc Big Rooter West (online August 2028) and 658 MWdc Big Rooter East (groundbreaking December 2026, online August 2029), creating more than 800 construction jobs.
- Once complete, the 10,000-acre Twin Oaks complex will host roughly 1.5 GW of combined coal and solar generation, plus 20+ miles of new 345 kV transmission, 1.6 GWh of battery storage, and 790 MW of data center capacity.
- SOLV Energy handles engineering, procurement, and construction; First Solar supplies about 2 million US-made panels from factories in Ohio, Louisiana, and Alabama; the project uses more than 34,000 tons of US-made steel and Nextpower's NX Horizon tracking systems.
- Panamint signed a long-term PPA with an unnamed single investment-grade offtaker, with the contract running into the 2050s.
Why it matters: The 1.2 GW Big Rooter build shows how Texas is stacking coal, solar, storage, transmission, and data centers on one footprint rather than retiring coal — to keep pace with surging ERCOT demand. Panamint's 790 MW of co-located data center capacity targets the constraint JLL flags: power supply on the ERCOT grid.
