The Twin Oaks coal power plant, the site of the upcoming Big Rooter solar project – credit, Panamint Capital
Coal power has a huge role still to play in the American energy mix—by turning over its substantial grid infrastructure to renewable energy projects.
Energy investment firm Panamint is putting up $1.7 billion to build Big Rooter Power, an enormous solar-storage power complex in Robertson, Texas that will add 1.2 gigawatts of solar power to the local grid.
It’s strategic placement next to the Twin Oaks coal-fired plant will allow it to leverage tens of million of dollars worth of existing infrastructure to deliver electricity from the Sun to millions of Texans.
“We believe deploying new capacity at existing energy sites is the clearest way to benefit communities, ratepayers, and the environment alike,” said Apolka Totth, CEO of Panamint.
It replicates a growing movement across the nation to build solar and wind energy resources on brownfields sites like mines that are no longer in operation. Brownfields refers to land that’s already been converted for extractive, industrial, or productive uses, and is much cheaper than developing “greenfields” or undeveloped land.
Canary Media recently published a roundup of such projects, including in Illinois, Kentucky, and Louisiana, all of which went up or are being built on reclaimed mine land.
Planning Big Rooter near the Twin Oaks coal plant was done “with the express intention of leveraging the site’s existing characteristics to massively and rapidly expand generating capability at the lowest possible cost,” Totth told Canary Media by email.
For clean energy purists, however, the news might raise an eyebrow or two, since Panamint which backed by the national investment fund KKR, not only has no intention of closing the Twin Oaks plant and mine, but is in fact investigating the expansion of them both, part of Panamint’s strategy of squeezing the most out of aged fossil fuel projects while simultaneously constructing massive solar and wind infrastructure.
And Big Rooter will indeed by massive: one of the largest solar projects in the country, and that’s saying a lot because Texas has already gone big—as is her wont—on renewable energy.
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Texas accounts for 30% of national wind energy production—thrice as much as its nearest competitor and neighbor Oklahoma, and 8-times as much as the left-wing stronghold of California, which while leading the nation in solar power with 55 installed gigawatts, only sits a hair above the Lone Star State.
Big Rooter, as is often the case with exceedingly large infrastructure projects like mines, power plants, or railways, will take place in stages. The first stage is already under construction and will see 491 megawatts of solar panels come online in August 2028.
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The second stage, slated for ground-breaking that December, will seek to have the remaining 658 MW available in August of 2029. These will be delivered with 1.6 GW of battery storage, and 20 miles of new, high-transmission power lines.
Taking advantage of previous tax incentives, long lead-time items like transformers and circuit breakers have already been ordered, and the project is believed to qualify for a Federal investment tax credit worth 50% of the project’s costs.
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