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Houston unveils details for first-of-its-kind art installation that generates clean energy

power of art

The new "Arch of Time" in Houston’s East End will generate 400,000 kilowatt-hours of power annually. Photo courtesy Land Art Generator Initiative.

Local and state leaders shared updated plans this month on a first-of-its-kind structure that uses art to generate solar energy.

Slated to be located at Mason Park in Houston’s East End, the new "Arch of Time" is a freestanding sundial art installation that will generate 400,000 kilowatt-hours of power per year using 60,000 solar photovoltaic cells on its south-facing exterior.

The project will be part of a larger pavilion at the park and is being led by the renewable energy organization Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). Architect Riccardo Mariano will design the space. It will be funded by donations and cost $20 million, organizers say.

The project, originally known as "Arco del Tiempo," was announced in 2023. At the time, the city shared the installation would be installed at Guadalupe Plaza Park in 2024.

The project's latest update was announced during Houston City Hall’s Earth Day 2025, where organizers described it as "a monument to Houston's past, present, and future leadership as the energy capital of the world."

The 100-foot structure will also serve as a 25,000-square-foot shaded area, or microclimate, during hot days. It will also feature a stage performance space and a power hub for emergencies. Due to the artwork's north opening and south narrowing, it is also expected to help channel the breezes, according to LAGI.

The organization says it is also expected to generate enough power to fuel all of Mason Park.

“Mason Park will soon, perhaps become the first major park in the country that is powered entirely by the sun,” Houston City Council Member Joaquin Martinez said at the news conference. “The economic benefits are clear.”

Former Houston Park and Recreation director Joe Turner selected the East End park as the location of the arch and believes it could be used as a STEM tool for students.

“All the STEM education that can come from the way we use the solar collectors, the way it has a water collection system that's going to collect the runoff water, there's so much we can do to teach kids STEM,” said in a Houston Park and Recreation Department video.

The project is about two years away from being completed. LAGI says the Arch of Time will be the “first public art project of its scale to stand as a net-positive contribution to a sustainable climate.”

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Small Places grows a variety of vegetables at their East End based farm, selling them at a weekly farm stand. Photo courtesy Small Places

Nonprofit looks to grow Houston’s urban farming movement from the East End

seeing green

Small Places, a Houston-based urban agricultural nonprofit, is looking forward to putting down roots beyond the fresh vegetables they grow in the East End.

After securing a 40-year land agreement with Harris County, the organization, which provides produce to families facing food insecurity in the Second Ward, is expecting to open their new farm in February 2025. Small Places’ founders hope the 1.5 acres of land named Finca Tres Robles, located at 5715 Canal Street, will be the beginning of Houston’s urban farming movement.

Founded in 2014 by brothers Daniel, Mark, and Thomas Garcia-Prats, Small Places was born out of the latter brother’s desire to work on an organic farm in his hometown of Houston. After farming in Maine, Iowa, and Nicaragua, Thomas had hoped to manage an urban farm but was unable to find a place. He then roped his brothers, who had no agricultural background at the time, into creating one.

“I joke that my journey in agriculture started the day we started out there. We didn’t grow up gardening or farming or anything of the sort,” says Daniel, Small Places’ director of operations. “It was a big learning curve, but how we approached it to our benefit was through our diverse set of backgrounds.”

Brothers Mark, Daniel, and Thomas Garcia-Prats are the co-founders of Small Places, a Houston-based urban agricultural nonprofit growing fresh produce for families in the East End. Photo courtesy Small Places

Small Places began their need-based produce distribution programs through a partnership with nearby pre-school, Ninfa Lorenzo Early Childhood Center, providing food insecure families with fresh produce and later cooking lessons in 2017. When COVID-19 hit Houston in 2020, Daniel says Small Places pivoted towards becoming a redistribution center for their farming contacts who needed to offload produce as restaurants shut down, selling their crops through the organization. Their neighborhood produce program was then born, providing free boxes of produce to nearly 200 families in the East End at the pandemic’s peak.

“We found ourselves in the middle of two communities who were in need, one being people in our community who were losing jobs and were in need of food as well as our farming connections who were losing restaurant accounts,” Daniel explains.

Small Places currently assists 65 families living predominantly within two miles of their original location and they recently restarted their programming with Ninfa Lorenzo Early Childhood Center, and accepts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (SNAP) at their farm stand. Daniel says once Finca Tres Robles opens, Small Places plans to bring back cooking classes and educational seminars on healthy eating for which his brother Mark, a former teacher, created the original curriculum. The farm will also have a grocery store stocked with Finca Tres Robles' produce and eventually food staples from local vendors.

“Being social and preparing a meal can be fun, interesting, and delicious. Being able to pull all of that into a program was really important for us,” Daniel explains.

Farming successfully in the middle of Houston for their subsidized programs and produce market requires Small Places’ team to be strategic in their operations. Using his background in engineering and manufacturing, Daniel says they’ve closely monitored trends in which crops perform the best in Houston’s varied, humid climate over the past decade.

They also follow Thomas’s philosophy of allowing nature to work for them, planting crops at times when specific pests are minimal or integrating natural predators into their environment. And lots of composting. Daniel says they accept compostable materials from community members, before burying the raw organic matter in the earth in between their plant beds, allowing it to mature, then later using it to nourish their crops. Daniel says he and his co-founders hope to see more community-focused, sustainable operations like theirs spring up across Houston.

“Small Places is about hopefully more than one farm and really trying to turn urban agriculture and a farm like ours from a novel thing into something that’s just a part of communities and the fabric of Houston for generations to come,” Daniel says.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

The City of Houston is aiming to have Arco del Tiempo installed in 2024. Photo courtesy of The City of Houston

Sustainable sculpture to power Houston multicultural arts building

arts meets energy transition

The City of Houston has unveiled the first look at the latest permanent public artwork that will be installed in the Second Ward in 2024. The sculpture is the first-ever environmentally sustainable art piece that will generate electricity for the nearby City-owned Latino multicultural performing arts theater.

Arco del Tiempo (Arch of Time) is a 100-foot tall arch designed by Berlin-based artist and architect Riccardo Mariano. Several years have been put into the making of this project, dating as far back as 2019. Mariano had entered the idea into a Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) design competition in the Houston sister-city of Abu Dhabi. From there, it was chosen to be developed full-scale and installed at Guadalupe Plaza Park.

According to a press release, the sculpture can measure time and cast beams of sunlight onto the ground, creating a connection between "the celestial and the terrestrial" through the geometry of the design.

The light beams are different based on the four seasons and the time of day, constantly shifting and responding to the latitude and longitude of the city from space. Mariano said that his sculpture is a "practical example" of how physical art can interact with the abstract, such as the Earth's movement around the sun.

"The apparent movement of the sun in the sky activates the space with light and colors and engages viewers who participate in the creation of the work by their presence," said Mariano. "Arco del Tiempo merges renewable energy generation with public space and into the everyday life of the Second Ward. Inspired by science and powered by renewable energy, the artwork is a bridge between art and technology and encourages educational purposes while improving public space. At night the space within the arch will be used as a stage for outdoor public events.”

"At night the space within the arch will be used as a stage for outdoor public events,” Riccardo Mariano said.Photo courtesy of The City of Houston

Arco del Tiempo will do more than just be an aesthetically pleasing sight for the community. Its meaningful, functional purpose will be to generate about 400,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, and power the Talento Bilingüe de Houston. LAGI founding co-director Elizabeth Monoian said in the release the sculpture will generate over 12 million kilowatt-hours of power throughout its lifetime, which equals the removal of 8,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"Through the clean energy it produces, Arco del Tiempo will pay back its embodied carbon footprint," Monoian said. "In other words, all the energy that went into its making—from the smelting of the steel to the drilling that puts the final cladding into place—will be offset through the energy it generates. Beyond its break-even point, which we will track and celebrate with the community, the artwork will be a net-positive contributor to a healthy climate and the planet will be better off for its existence.”

In a statement, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner praised the unique art piece as more than just a sculpture, but as a "monument to a new era of energy."

"The City of Houston has always stood at the vanguard of energy innovation and the Arco del Tiempo artwork stands in that tradition, highlighting Houston’s role as an art city and as global leader in the energy transition," Mayor Turner said. "We are inspired by the vision and creative thinking. Marrying clean energy, the built environment, and truly World Class art is Houston.”

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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Fervo Energy officially files for initial public offering

going public

Fervo Energy has officially filed for IPO.

The Houston-based geothermal unicorn filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 17 to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq exchange. Fervo intends to be listed under the ticker symbol "FRVO."

The number and price of the shares have not yet been determined, according to a news release from Fervo. J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, RBC Capital Markets and Barclays are leading the offering.

The highly anticipated filing comes as Fervo readies its flagship Cape Station geothermal project to deliver its first power later this year

"Today, miles-long lines for gasoline have been replaced by lines for electricity. Tech companies compete for megawatts to claim AI market share. Manufacturers jockey for power to strengthen American industry. Utilities demand clean, firm electricity to stabilize the grid," Fervo CEO Tim Latimer shared in the filing. "Fervo is prepared to serve all of these customers. Not with complex, idiosyncratic projects but with a simplified, standardized product capable of delivering around-the-clock, carbon-free power using proven oil and gas technology."

Fervo has been preparing to file for IPO for months. Axios Pro first reported that the company "quietly" filed for an IPO in January and estimated it would be valued between $2 billion and $3 billion.

Fervo also closed $421 million in non-recourse debt financing for the first phase of Cape Station last month and raised a $462 million Series E in December. The company also announced the addition of four heavyweights to its board of directors last week, including Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and Spring-based HPE.

Fervo reported a net loss of $70.5 million for the 2025 fiscal year in the S-1 filing and a loss of $41.1 million in 2024.

Tracxn.com estimates that Fervo has raised $1.12 billion over 12 funding rounds. The company was founded in 2017 by Latimer and CTO Jack Norbeck.

Houston lawmaker may kill data center tax breaks due to $8B revenue loss

looking at the data

An influential Houston-area state senator is raising concerns about potentially billions of dollars in lost state revenue from tax breaks for Texas data centers—and is pondering legislation that would abolish the tax incentives.

Citing data from the state comptroller’s office, The Texas Tribune reports the state stands to lose nearly $8 billion in revenue from 2026 to 2030 due to sales tax and use tax exemptions for data centers. During the state’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended on Aug. 31, these tax exemptions caused Texas to lose a little over $1 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $130 million.

“These new numbers are extremely concerning, and I will say they’re unsustainable,” Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, chairwoman of the state Senate Finance Committee, tells The Texas Tribune. “I plan to look at filing legislation to either repeal the exemption or take a very close look at it and see.”

Texas on track to be No. 1 data center market in U.S.

Scrutiny of the tax breaks comes amid an explosion of data center development in Texas, where data provider Aterio identifies nearly 1,000 centers that are operating, under construction or planned.

A report issued in January by Bloom Energy says the state is poised to become the No. 1 U.S. market for data centers within three years. By 2028, according to the report, Texas is projected to exceed 40 gigawatts of data center capacity—representing nearly 30 percent of total U.S. demand.

Among companies benefiting from the data center boom are:

  • Tech titans like Apple, Google, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, which are spending billions of dollars to build data centers in Texas.
  • Spring-based ExxonMobil and Houston-based Chevron, two oil and energy giants that are developing natural gas plants to supply power for data centers.
  • Houston-based energy technology company Baker Hughes, which is collaborating with Google Cloud to develop AI-enabled power optimization and sustainability software for data centers.
  • DataBank, Data Foundry, Equinix, Digital Realty, Lumen Technologies, and IBM, all of which operate data centers in the Houston area.

The Texas Legislature will begin debating tax breaks for data centers in July, when Huffman’s Senate Finance Committee meets for an interim hearing before the 2027 legislative session, according to the Tribune.

Data center industry defends tax breaks

Leaders in the data center industry warn that watering down or halting the tax breaks could slow down or even end Texas’ ascent in the data center sector.

A 2025 report commissioned by the Data Center Coalition found that in 2024, data centers provided more than $1.6 billion in state tax revenue and almost $1.6 billion in local tax revenue in Texas. Over the next several years, according to the report, planned development of data centers in the Lone Star State could generate almost $3.8 billion in state tax revenue and more than $4.9 billion in local tax revenue.

In 2024, the Houston area had 8.1 million gross square feet of data centers, with the properties’ real estate investments sitting at $10 billion, according to the report. That year, data centers in the region produced a little over $700 million in state and local tax revenue. About 60 data centers operate in the Houston area.

Watchdog group warns of tax breaks’ danger to state budgets

On the other side of the debate over tax breaks for data centers, a report released last year by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks economic development incentives, decries the tax breaks as dangerous to state budgets.

“We know of no other form of state spending that is so out of control. Therefore, we recommend that states cancel their data center tax exemptions,” says Good Jobs research analyst Kasia Tarczynska, co-author of the report. “Shy of that, states should amend … legislation to cap how much any facility and company can avoid paying in taxes each year.”

Helix Earth closes $12M round and more Houston energy headlines

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Editor's note: The top energy transition headlines for the month include Helix Earth's Seed 2 funding and Chevron's plans for a West Texas power plant. Below are the five most-read EnergyCapital stories published April 1-15, 2026:

1. Houston cleantech company closes $12M seed round

Helix Earth is developing a retrofit technology that has the potential to cut HVAC energy use by up to 50 percent. Photo via Getty Images

Houston-based Helix Earth Technologies has closed a $12 million Seed 2 funding round to scale manufacturing of its energy-efficient commercial HVAC add-on technology. Veriten, a Houston-based energy investment firm, led the round. Rua Ventures, Carnrite Ventures, Skywriter LLC and Textbook Ventures also participated. Continue reading.

2. Chevron eyes $7B Texas power plant for Microsoft data center campus

Chevron is in talks with Microsoft and Engine No. 1 about a massive natural gas power plant in Texas. Photo via Getty Images

Software giant Microsoft is negotiating exclusively with Houston-based oil and gas titan Chevron and investment firm Engine No. 1 about the development of a $7 billion power plant in West Texas that would supply electricity for a Microsoft data center campus. Continue reading.

3. 3 strategies to strengthen the Gulf Coast as a global energy hub

The Gulf Coast is one of the most critical energy hubs in the world. Photo via Getty Images.

The Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast is the backbone of America’s energy and chemical economy. Texas produces roughly 43% of U.S. crude oil and 28% of natural gas, while Texas and Louisiana together account for about half of the nation’s refining capacity, processing 9.3 million barrels of crude per day across 50 refineries. The region also produces approximately 80% of the nation’s primary petrochemicals and ships more than $117 billion in chemical products annually from Texas alone. Continue reading.

4. 8 CERAWeek 2026 takeaways from a new Houston energy leader

Kelsey Kearns (right), the new director of Greentown Houston, shared her takeaways from her first-ever CERAWeek with Energy Capital HTX. Photo courtesy Greentown

My first CERAWeek was a blur. Having top energy executives, policymakers, and technologists all gathered in Houston—over 11,000 of them this year—was both overwhelming and energizing. The theme was “Convergence and Competition: Energy, Technology, and Geopolitics,” and walking through the George R. Brown Convention Center, it was immediately clear that this was no ordinary industry conference. As a first-timer with a Greentown Labs lens, here’s what really stuck with me. Continue reading.

5. Greentown Labs names new COO, appoints new Head of Houston

Lawson Gow and Kelsey Kearns have stepped into new leadership roles at Greentown Labs. Photos courtesy Greentown/LinkedIn

Greentown Labs has reshuffled its leadership, elevating Houston leaders into new roles. Lawson Gow was named COO of the Houston- and Boston-based climatech incubator in February 2026. In his new role, he will focus on optimizing Greentown's structure, building new internal and external systems and developing a plan for growth. Continue reading.

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