Panamint Builds 1.2GW Solar Farm on Active Texas Coal Mine
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- Panamint Capital broke ground on the $1.7 billion, 1.2-GW Big Rooter Power solar farm on 10,000 acres in Bremond, Texas, claiming it is the largest solar array ever built on a brownfield site in North America; the 491-MW first phase comes online in August 2028 and the 658-MW second phase in August 2029, with 1.6 GWh of battery storage and 20 miles of new transmission lines
- Big Rooter Power sits adjacent to Panamint's 310-MW Twin Oaks coal plant and the Calvert surface coal mine, both acquired in 2023 and both still operating; Panamint has no plans for early coal retirement, calling Twin Oaks "economically competitive," while also reserving room for at least 800 MW of new gas-fired generation on the same site
- Panamint secured its incentives before Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025, locking in a 50% federal investment tax credit by qualifying as an "energy community" brownfield; CEO Apolka Totth said ordering long-lead transformers and circuit breakers early "largely insulated" the project from OBBBA's repeal of IRA clean energy credits
- Solv Energy is the contractor building Big Rooter's solar array, substation, and transmission infrastructure; Panamint is sourcing U.S.-made modules and racks from First Solar and Nextpower, and is backed by private equity firm KKR
- The Trump administration scrapped the DOE Mineral Basin Solar Power mine-land award and cancelled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants across 16 states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, while phasing out tax credits that helped finance brownfield solar — moves The Nature Conservancy's Jessica Wilkinson said make mine-land solar "more complicated" but not commercially dead
- Texas solar generation is expected to exceed coal this year for the first time, fueled by demand from data centers, manufacturing, and air-conditioning load during hotter summers
Why it matters: Panamint's Big Rooter shows how brownfield solar survives the post-OBBBA landscape: lock in incentives early, source domestically, and pair the array with—not instead of—an active coal plant. With Texas solar on track to outgenerate coal in 2025, the state is now adding 1.2 GW of panels next to a mine the developer still plans to expand, a template the coal-to-solar subsector's economics alone may force on future projects priced out of federal tax credits.
