Nevada-based Panamint Capital announced Thursday it broke ground on Big Rooter Power, a 1.2-gigawatt solar project in Robertson County that the company says will become the largest solar development built on an existing coal mining site in North America.<\/p>\n
Construction is already underway on the project’s first phase, Big Rooter West, a roughly 491-megawatt facility expected to begin operating in August 2028. A second phase, Big Rooter East, is expected to start construction in December 2026 and go into commercial operations by August 2029, according to the company.<\/p>\n
When complete, the development is expected to create more than 800 construction jobs and anchor a larger energy complex that Panamint says will combine thermal power, solar generation, battery storage and data center infrastructure.<\/p>\n
“Big Rooter Power represents our vision for getting more out of America’s energy infrastructure and ensuring America’s energy dominance,” Panamint Capital CEO Apolka Totth said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The announcement comes just days after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) set a new all-time electricity demand record<\/a> as triple-digit temperatures pushed air-conditioning use across the state to unprecedented levels. The Houston Chronicle reported <\/a>solar generated roughly one-third of ERCOT’s electricity during the peak demand period, helping the grid operate under normal conditions despite record consumption.<\/p>\n Panamint said the project will be built using roughly 2 million domestically manufactured solar panels and more than 34,000 tons of U.S.-made steel. The company said the first phase alone is expected to contribute more than $66 million to the local economy over its lifetime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nevada-based Panamint Capital announced Thursday it broke ground on Big Rooter Power, a 1.2-gigawatt solar project in Robertson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1836,1704,85744,56,58,57],"class_list":["post-385735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-chronnews","tag-chronstaff","tag-chrontexas","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}