Panamint Capital Lines Up $1.8 Billion Financing for Texas Solar Project on Coal Mine Site
Nevada-based energy investor Panamint Capital has closed financing for the first phase of Big Rooter Power, a roughly 1.2 GW solar project rising on reclaimed coal-mining land next to its own Twin Oaks coal plant in Robertson County, Texas, between Dallas and Houston. According to PV Magazine and a separate report from trade outlet iRecruit, the project’s total green loan package is valued at about $1.8 billion, with the first phase — a 491 MW stage called Big Rooter West — already financed at $769 million and under construction since July.
A coal site that keeps its coal plant
Big Rooter sits on 1,804 hectares of reclaimed surface-mine land that once fed the 342 MW Twin Oaks coal plant, which Panamint has not retired. Instead, the company is building solar capacity alongside the existing coal units as part of a roughly 10,000-acre energy campus that it says will eventually combine thermal and renewable generation, battery storage and data-center infrastructure on one site. Panamint describes the approach, in its own sustainability reporting, as a way to “extend the productive use of existing infrastructure through clean energy investments that support local employment.”
A second, larger phase still has to close
The project’s second stage, Big Rooter East, is a larger 658 MW build that is set to start construction in December 2026 and reach commercial operation in August 2029. Its financing — reported at more than $1 billion and, according to iRecruit, structured as a $336 million construction-to-term loan, a $587 million tax-equity bridge loan and a $91 million letter-of-credit facility arranged with Lloyds, MUFG and SMBC — is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. Added together, the two phases total 1,149 MW, short of the 1.2 GW figure used in headline coverage of the project; neither PV Magazine nor iRecruit explains the gap, so it may reflect a rounded AC/DC capacity convention or a planned third increment not yet detailed.
Who is buying the power
Panamint has signed a long-term power purchase agreement for Big Rooter’s output with what the company’s managing director of development, Bill Stanton, described only as “one of [the] country’s largest companies.” Neither Panamint nor its coverage named the buyer, but the campus plans point toward a data-center customer: Twin Oaks is also slated to host 790 MW of “Batch Zero” data-center capacity and 1.6 GWh of battery storage, alongside more than 20 miles of new 345 kV transmission line built to move the additional power. Panamint CEO Apolka Totth said that once Big Rooter is finished, “the Twin Oaks complex will have 1.5 GW of operating thermal and renewable power.”
A large, if familiar, supply chain
SOLV Energy is the engineering, procurement and construction contractor for the solar array, substation and transmission work. The project will use roughly 2 million First Solar thin-film panels manufactured in Ohio, Louisiana and Alabama, mounted on Nextpower’s NX Horizon trackers running Hail Pro-75 and NX Navigator software, and more than 34,000 tons of domestically produced steel. Panamint and its contractors expect the two phases together to create more than 800 construction jobs. For a sector increasingly defined by the race to power AI data centers, Big Rooter is a reminder that some of that new demand is still being met the conventional way: with large-scale solar, financed project by project, built next to the very coal plants the broader energy transition is meant to replace.
Related: NextEra Energy: Ownership, Leadership and Major Projects profiles another major player in the US renewables and grid build-out that Big Rooter is part of.
Sources
- PV Magazine, “Massive solar project at Texas coal plant secures $1.8 billion green loan,” November 9, 2026 — project structure, capacity figures, financing, supply chain, executive quotes. pv-magazine.com
- iRecruit, report on Panamint Capital’s $1.8 billion renewable energy loan close, November 5, 2026 — independent confirmation of financing terms, lender names. irecruit.co
Illustrative image. Photo: Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source
