The state with the fastest-growing market of renewable energy is Texas. Last year the Lone Star State deployed more solar capacity and energy storage than any other state (including California!), owing largely to the abundance of cheap land and an isolated electricity market that places comparatively few logistical burdens for new energy projects to interconnect with the grid. The growth of multiple energy-storage projects in the state, many with capacity in the hundreds of megawatts, has also proved to be enormously profitable for developers who understand the value of plugging into all that new solar and wind power. The grid is more reliable, the price of energy is less volatile, and communities are turning a profit.

With that in mind, Texas seems like the ideal place to host energy parks. Energy parks are basically micro-grids but deployed at scale. These occur when sources of large electricity demand, like data centers, are strategically co-located with large renewable energy resources, like a solar or wind farm, and energy storage facilities. This allows low-cost renewable energy to be deployed on-site while avoiding the “line loss” that occurs when electricity is transmitted over long distances. Finally, even though energy parks are designed to be self-sufficient, most are connected to the grid for the purposes of exporting excess power generation (and increasing grid reliability), or in some rare cases, importing from the grid as well to meet increased demand.

“Locating large demand next to good resource areas is a really interesting opportunity, especially in places like the Great Plains that have great wind resources but limited transmission capacity to get power to big cities,” says Brendan Pierpont, director of energy modeling at Energy Innovation Policy & Technology LLC. “The idea of co-locating [demand] with resources is starting to gain steam.”

It’s not just deregulation

In Gray County, a sparsely populated block in the Texas panhandle east of Amarillo, clean-energy company Intersect Power has proposed an energy park called the Meitner project. The project combines 340 MW of solar and 460 MW of wind to power a 400-MW plant of on-site electrolyzers, which can produce nearly 1/2 ton of clean hydrogen per day. That hydrogen (aka energy intermediary) will be used to manufacture sustainable aviation fuel, all made from variable renewable energy sources. Any excess power will go to the grid. (The project remains in the permitting stage, with construction estimated to begin in 2026.)

Meitner’s purpose represents just one example of what Intersect CEO Sheldon Kimber calls the “five inevitable industries.” In addition to green hydrogen and e-fuel, Kimber highlights direct air capture, electrification of industrial thermal loads, mass EV charging, and the desalination and transportation of water. “Clean electricity is reaching unprecedented levels of affordability and availability, and not all of it can or should find its way onto the power grid,” Kimber wrote in 2022.

Elsewhere in Texas, Soluna Holdings, a developer of green data centers used for Bitcoin mining and AI, firmed up an agreement last year to develop Project Kati (the corporation’s second project in the state). This energy park will be co-located with wind farms and will eventually deliver 166 MW of renewable energy. The project exited the planning phase in February and is “shovel ready.”

“Texas is the easiest place to do this,” says Eric Gimon, a senior fellow and policy advisor with Energy Innovation. “And it’s not just deregulation.” Gimon further highlights the state’s generations-old mindset of making energy production a key economic driver. As oil and gas facilities begin to fade away, the prospect of lost tax revenues has some communities worried. But with a steady influx of new wind and solar, and co-locating these massive resources with flexible loads, any short-term losses are made up and then some with these capital improvements.

Flexible and fast

The value-adds for building energy parks is their ability to deliver faster access to clean energy and provide flexible loads that can be sold to the grid in times of need, and for a profit. This makes them particularly attractive for developers of large data centers and other industrial hubs where power demand is great but has a tendency to fluctuate.

“Current power grids are still organized in ways that would be very familiar to a mechanic or power engineer of the early 1900s,” reads an excerpt from a 2024 report on energy parks published by Energy Innovation. “Energy parks by their very nature will challenge that paradigm and force a reckoning with more modern methods of organizing large numbers of interacting machines in a resilient and reliable way.” To that point, for any energy park looking to become the exclusive provider of power to any large customer, industrial development, or municipality, the regulatory framework from state to state will need to change to allow more competition—be it from energy parks or other novel renewable sources—to enter the marketplace.

Getting around state-sanctioned monopolies is the biggest logistical hurdle, to say nothing of how certain states’ utility codes might preclude the possibility of energy parks even entering the equation. That said, states with a lot of existing (and outdated) energy infrastructure, a lot of land, and the right environmental conditions to produce and store wind and solar power would be wise to consider the energy park route.

According to Gimon (who also co-authored the Energy Parks report), the speed and scale energy parks provide cannot be overlooked. “Wind, solar, and batteries are the fastest to build, and they’re pretty cheap. And they work when they are connected to the grid … There is also the benefit of having a flexible customer [located] close to variable generation.” Gimon admits there are some fiscal risks associated with co-locating large developments with large power loads (putting all your eggs in one basket is an apt metaphor), but in Gimon’s estimation those are more than offset by dividends. “With co-location and grid interconnection, you get extra industry, extra investments, extra jobs—all extra benefits for the community.”

The need to diversify

However attractive Texas may be to developers, many are understandably wary of pooling their investments into a single state. In what may be a warning signal, Gimon mentions a newly proposed bill in the state Senate (SB 819) that would make permitting of new renewable energy projects extremely cumbersome (including 3000-ft. setbacks for wind turbines from property lines), ostensibly placing a block on wind and solar in favor of fossil-fuel power plants.

Diversification also extends to energy parks themselves and their intended uses. Similar projects built or underway are generating power to aid in the production of things like green steel and green ammonia. Another route gaining momentum is using solar farms to channel excess electricity into industrial-scale thermal batteries, which have proven to be great tools for maximizing energy park revenues while ensuring a steady, cost-efficient energy supply for on-site demands.

Other examples of energy parks abound across the globe, from Australia to the UK, and are growing in popularity, particularly as AI ventures, Bitcoin mining operations, and other sophisticated, power-hungry enterprises are built with greater frequency. When considering the future of these endeavors, Gimon admits, “There will be stumbles along the way.” He also takes a modicum of comfort in knowing that huge demands will have clean and efficient resources to feed them and, in the process, motivate states and public utilities to make the critical upgrades the grid sorely needs.

---

Justin R. Wolf is a Maine-based writer who covers green building trends and energy policy. He is the author of Healing Ground, Living Values: Stanley Center for Peace and Security, published by Ecotone.