Panamint Capital Invests $1.7B in a 1.2 GW Solar Farm Adjacent to a Texas Coal Mine

Panamint Capital has broken ground on Big Rooter Power, a 1.2 GW solar farm backed by a $1.7 billion investment at the Twin Oaks coal complex in Texas. It is the largest solar project built on an active coal mining site in North America, Canary Media reported on July 30.

The project spans 10,000 acres in Robertson County, between Dallas and Houston, on land belonging to the Twin Oaks 310 MW coal plant and the Calvert Mine, a lignite deposit holding 19 million tons of reserves. It combines 1.6 GWh of battery storage with 790 MW of data center capacity on the same site, integrating clean generation, storage, and computing into a single infrastructure operation. The model has direct relevance for northern Mexico, where nearshoring-driven data center demand and available industrial land create openings for similar repowering schemes.

Big Rooter is being developed in two phases. The first, at 491 MW, comes online in August 2028; the second, at 658 MW, breaks ground in December 2026 and begins operating in August 2029. Solv Energy is the EPC contractor (engineering, procurement and construction). Modules come from First Solar (approximately 2 million panels manufactured in Ohio, Louisiana and Alabama), and trackers from Nextpower. The project incorporates 34,000 tons of domestic steel and will generate 800 construction jobs.

Panamint Capital, a Nevada-based firm backed by Global Atlantic Financial Group (a KKR subsidiary), secured a 50% federal tax credit on total project cost through the site's energy community designation and its use of American-made equipment. The Twin Oaks coal plant is not being retired: the company confirmed that thermal and renewable technologies will operate simultaneously, and it is even exploring expanding the mine and building a rail terminal to receive additional coal.

The power purchase agreement runs through the 2050s with one of the largest companies in the United States. The first phase delivers power in August 2028, and the bundling of solar, batteries, and data centers on a single site is a replicable model for ERCOT and northern Mexico as nearshoring advances.

This article was drafted with artificial intelligence assistance from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.