Meta has signed a 144-megawatt solar power purchase agreement tied to the Starling Solar project in Gonzales County, Texas, adding another piece to the company's sprawling renewable energy push across the state. The project, developed by Apex Clean Energy, will feed power directly into the ERCOT grid rather than powering a Meta facility on-site, with construction already underway and commercial operations targeted for sometime in 2027.
A Local Payday for Gonzales County
According to Apex Clean Energy, the Starling project is expected to generate roughly $27 million in local tax revenue over its operational lifetime, including $15.6 million earmarked for local public schools. The company also projects $26.3 million in landowner payments and 400 to 450 construction jobs for the surrounding community. Those figures follow years of local review — Apex first briefed the Gonzales County Commissioners Court on the project back in July 2024, when tax agreements and power purchase deals were still unfinalized, according to Citizen Portal AI.
That same 2024 briefing revealed that Starling is designed as a solar-plus-storage facility, incorporating a co-located battery storage component of 60 to 72 megawatts, per Citizen Portal AI's report. Battery storage of that kind is typically used to smooth out fluctuations in renewable output as it flows onto the statewide grid.
Grid Timeline Doesn't Match Meta's Target
Meta will receive exclusive rights to all environmental attributes and renewable energy credits associated with Starling's output, though the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, according to Data Center Dynamics. But there's a wrinkle: while Apex is targeting commercial operations for 2027, ERCOT's August 2026 queue report lists an anticipated commercial operation date of January 28, 2028, noting the project has completed its security screening study and entered the full interconnection study phase, as reported by Utility Dive. That gap highlights how ERCOT's interconnection queues can shift as projects move through formal engineering review, potentially delaying when Meta actually receives the contracted environmental attributes it's counting on.
The Starling deal marks Apex's third Texas clean energy transaction with Meta, following a 2019 power purchase agreement for the 200 MW Aviator Wind East facility in Coke County and a 2023 deal for the 195 MW Angelo Solar project in Tom Green County, Utility Dive's report notes. Company-wide, Meta and Apex have now signed seven agreements totaling roughly 1.2 gigawatts of combined capacity, spanning Texas, Virginia, Illinois, Kansas, and Iowa, according to Data Center Dynamics. Urvi Parekh, Meta's head of renewable energy, said the partnership is helping bring one gigawatt of new renewable energy to the grid across those five states, per the outlet's report.
One Deal Among Many in Meta's Texas Buildout
Starling is far from Meta's only Texas solar bet. The company has also signed a 220 MW solar PPA with Sabanci Renewables and a corporate agreement with RWE to offtake power from the under-development 298 MW Rabbit's Foot solar project in northeast Texas, according to Data Center Dynamics. And beyond Apex, Meta expanded its Texas clean energy footprint in October 2025 by contracting 100% of the output from ENGIE North America's $900 million, 600 MW Swenson Ranch Solar project in Stonewall County — bringing its total Texas capacity with ENGIE alone to more than 1.3 gigawatts, according to ENGIE North America.
The scale of that procurement traces back to Meta's rapidly expanding physical footprint in Texas. The company already runs operational data center campuses in Fort Worth and Temple, and it's developing a third campus in El Paso, slated for operations sometime in 2028. That El Paso project ballooned in July 2026 into a $14.3 billion, 960-megawatt joint venture with BlackRock on 1,039 acres, a major expansion from Meta's initial $1.5 billion investment plan announced in late 2025, according to reporting cited by Measured AI.
Renewables Alone Aren't Enough for AI Power Demand
That buildout has exposed a tension between Meta's clean energy commitments and the practical demands of running AI infrastructure around the clock. To supply the El Paso campus, local utility El Paso Electric proposed building a $473 million, 366-megawatt natural gas plant dedicated exclusively to Meta for its first five years — a plan that drew criticism from environmental advocates who expected the campus to run entirely on renewables, Hoodline previously reported. Meta has also pledged, as of March 2026, to restore 200% of the water consumed by the El Paso data center back to local watersheds, part of its broader corporate goal to become water positive by 2030.
The demand driving all of this is showing up in statewide projections. In an April 2026 filing with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, ERCOT projected that potential peak electricity demand across the state could reach 367,790 megawatts by 2032 — more than four times the state's peak record of 85,508 megawatts set in August 2023 — driven primarily by large loads from data centers and industrial facilities. Growth on that scale has already triggered political pushback: Texas state leadership ordered energy regulators in August 2026 to temporarily halt new data center grid connection approvals and suspend ERCOT's Batch Zero transmission study pending audits of power and water impacts, a freeze Hoodline has tracked as it ripples across the industry.
Apex's Broader Track Record
Apex Clean Energy, headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, was founded in 2009 and has since commercialized more than 12 gigawatts of clean energy generation. The company's current development pipeline exceeds 25 gigawatts of projects, and it counts other hyperscalers, including Google, among its power purchase agreement partners, according to Data Center Dynamics. For Gonzales County, the immediate payoff is more concrete: new jobs, landowner payments, and a substantial boost to local school funding, even as the exact date Meta starts drawing on Starling's renewable attributes remains tied to how quickly the project clears ERCOT's interconnection queue.
