wind in the west

Low-carbon energy company with U.S. HQ in Houston to launch Texas wind energy plant later this year

Located in Callahan County, Texas, outside of Abilene, ENGIE's Century Oak Wind Project is nearing completion. Photo courtesy of Engie

A wind energy project being built just east of Abilene by Houston-based ENGIE North America will annually supply 65 megawatts of power to Ferguson, a distributor of hardware, tools, plumbing supplies, and other industrial items.

Under a newly signed agreement, ENGIE’s 153-megawatt Century Oak project is expected to generate enough wind energy to meet most of Ferguson’s electrical needs in the U.S. and Canada. This energy would power the equivalent of 34,000 typical homes in the U.S. The project features 45 wind turbines.

The Century Oak project is creating about 300 to 400 construction jobs. It’s scheduled to be completed by the end of 2023.

Paperwork submitted in 2021 to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts indicates ENGIE North America, a subsidiary of French utility company ENGIE, is investing more than $140 million in the project.

Across North America, ENGIE is building or operating nearly seven gigawatts’ worth of wind, solar, and storage capacity.

“We have activities in more than 100 counties across the U.S. and Canada — the energy transition is really one that will be powered by communities across the continent,” says Dave Carroll, chief renewables officer at ENGIE North America.

ENGIE’s other wind energy customers in Texas include Akamai, Allianz, GetBlok Farms, Ingersoll Rand, Microsoft, and Walmart.

Last year, ENGIE North America wrapped up $800 million in financing for three renewable energy projects in the U.S., including a wind farm in Texas, that are capable of generating 665 megawatts of renewable energy.

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A View From HETI

Meta will use electricity generated by one of ENGIE's Texas solar farms to power its U.S. data centers. Photo via engie.com.

Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, has agreed to buy all of the power from a $900 million solar farm being developed near Abilene by Houston-based energy company ENGIE North America.

The 600-megawatt Swenson Ranch solar farm, located in Stonewall County, will be the largest one ever built in the U.S. by ENGIE. The solar farm is expected to go online in 2027.

Meta will use electricity generated by the solar farm to power its U.S. data centers. All told, Meta has agreed to purchase more than 1.3 gigawatts of renewable energy from four ENGIE projects in Texas.

“This project marks an important step forward in the partnership between our two companies and their shared desire to promote a sustainable and competitive energy model,” Paulo Almirante, ENGIE’s senior executive vice president of renewable and flexible power, said in a news release.

In September, ENGIE North America said it would collaborate with Prometheus Hyperscale, a developer of sustainable liquid-cooled data centers, to build data centers at ENGIE-owned renewable energy and battery storage facilities along the I-35 corridor in Texas. The corridor includes Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Waco.

The first projects under the ENGIE-Prometheus umbrella are expected to go online in 2026.

ENGIE and Prometheus said their partnership “brings together ENGIE's deep expertise in renewables, batteries, and energy management and Prometheus' highly efficient liquid-cooled data center design to meet the growing demand for reliable, sustainable compute capacity — particularly for AI and other high-performance workloads.”

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