Renewable energy developer Zelestra has closed a $600 million green project financing package to fund the construction and development of two utility-scale solar plants in Texas. The projects, totaling 440 MW, are backed by long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Meta.
The financing credit facility was secured through Societe Generale and HSBC. The capital will support the 252 MW Echols Grove project in Lamar County and the 187 MW Cedar Range project in Hopkins County. Both facilities are currently under construction, with McCarthy Building Companies serving as the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) lead.
The deal reinforces the dominant role of hyperscalers in the energy transition. Zelestra and Meta now have seven signed PPAs totaling nearly 1.2 GW of capacity.
This activity comes despite a broader market slowdown; according to BNEF, global corporate PPA volumes fell 10% in 2025 to 55.9 GW. While the number of unique U.S. buyers dropped by over 50%, Big Tech firms like Meta, Amazon, and Google accounted for nearly half of all global procurement activity last year.
The Texas projects are situated in the ERCOT market, a region increasingly targeted by developers as data center load growth accelerates. Wood Mackenzie recently reported that while the U.S. data center pipeline has slowed due to grid constraints, large load commitments now represent 22% of total U.S. peak load, with significant concentration in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic.
As developers face long interconnection queues and rising infrastructure costs, some are turning to private power grids and “islanded” microgrid configurations to bypass traditional utility bottlenecks. These off-grid solutions often integrate solar-plus-storage to meet the high uptime requirements of AI-driven data centers.
Furthermore, the industry is navigating supply chain volatility as solar panel prices have seen recent increases of 7% to 15%. This inflationary pressure is largely attributed to a 147% surge in silver prices, prompting some manufacturers to pilot copper-based metallization to stabilize costs.
Regulatory headwinds also remain a factor for large-scale energy users. California lawmakers are currently debating legislation that could eliminate certain environmental exemptions for data centers and introduce new tariffs to account for the heavy strain these facilities place on the public grid.
Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and backed by EQT, Zelestra maintains a global development pipeline of approximately 15 GW. The company was recently ranked by BNEF as one of the top 10 sellers of clean energy to corporate customers in the United States.
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