Power, water, permits and carbon

Who we are, and what we're building in West Texas

A data center campus that brings its own power, water and carbon answer, and the companies that make it work.

AI data centers are being funded faster than the power to run them can be built. A new connection to the US grid now takes about five years from request to operation, and the makers of large gas turbines are selling delivery slots years out. Developers are left choosing between waiting in a queue and burning gas on site with nowhere to put the carbon. Water and local permits come next, and in more and more places that is where projects stall.

Greenfield Hyperscale Holdings (GHH) is developing a sustainable industrial campus in the West Texas Permian that answers all four on the site itself: power, water, permits and carbon. A data center is the anchor tenant. The campus is built so the same answer can later be offered to other industries.

How the power works

The campus will run on solid oxide fuel cells fed by pipeline natural gas. A fuel cell turns gas into electricity electrochemically instead of burning it, so there is no flame and very little of the nitrogen oxides that come with combustion.

It also changes what comes out of the exhaust. The fuel side of the cell is kept apart from the air, so its exhaust is mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, not a few percent of CO2 diluted in nitrogen as it is from an engine or a turbine. Condense the water out and what is left is a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, ready to compress and store.

We are planning our own US factory to build the units, 500 kilowatts to 1 megawatt each, in a standard 40-foot container. We build on proven fuel cell stacks rather than developing the technology from scratch, which is what lets units ship in months. Containers also mean the power plant grows in step with the data center, one block at a time.

Where the carbon goes

The campus is designed to capture essentially all of the CO2 from its fuel cells and store it permanently, deep underground, in a depleted gas field beside the site. We are developing that storage well now, with experienced CO2 storage advisors and a university energy research center leading the permit work. The carbon goes back into the same ground the gas came from.

The well can take carbon from others too. Every fuel cell produces a stream that is easy to capture, so every fuel cell customer is also a potential storage customer, and so are the gas-fired plants being built across the region.

Water

Fuel cells make water as they run, about 1,500 gallons a day for every megawatt by our estimate. The campus is planned to cool its data halls without drawing on local drinking water, and to use the water its own power plant makes.

The people who run it

A campus this size needs people who live close to it. We are planning homes on site, not a work camp: one-, two- and three-bedroom houses, with meals included and made in part from vegetables and fish grown on the campus. We expect more than 1,500 jobs at above-average wages, with full benefits.

How we work with our neighbors

We are not asking for local tax breaks. We intend to pay local taxes in full, sign no non-disclosure agreements with counties, make our agreements with them public, and publish how much water and power the campus uses. The point is that the people nearby can check what we said against what we did.

The companies behind it

GHH is the parent company. Greenfield Power Systems will build the fuel cell units. Greenfield Industrial Campus will run the power plant, the water, the land and the storage well. The data center is the campus's first and largest tenant. Each company has a market of its own beyond the campus: fuel cells for anyone who needs power without waiting for the grid, and permanent storage for anyone who needs somewhere to put their carbon.

GHH was formed by Greenfield Hyperscale Partners, the founders' company. Our founding team has records in manufacturing, construction, national technology programs and large-event delivery, and our CFO has been CEO of three public energy companies. Our carbon storage work is chaired by a former President and COO of Denbury Resources, who oversaw sixteen oil-field CO2 projects.

Where we are now

The storage well site is being surveyed and documented. Talks with an established European fuel cell stack maker on a joint venture for our US factory are under way, and we are lining up vendor lead times now so the first pilot unit can be built as soon as it is funded.

On this blog we will write about the problems every data center developer is running into, and how we are answering them. Next: what Texas is now asking data centers to prove.

← All posts · Greenfield Hyperscale Partners

What Texas is now asking data centers to prove

The rules changed before the election, and the new administration is keeping them. Here is what a new project will be asked to show.

For most of the last five years, Texas sold itself as the easiest place in the country to build a data center. That changed this year, and it changed before the election.

On 3 August the governor ordered a full audit of the data centers waiting to connect to the ERCOT grid, and said projects that did not comply would be denied connection. On 14 September he told the state water board to penalize data centers that had ignored its water-use survey, up to criminal referral. On 21 September he ordered the state environmental agency to stop issuing permits for data center projects until the audit was finished. Law firms advising developers read that order as possibly covering off-grid campuses too, not only those connecting to the grid.

On 3 November, Gina Hinojosa was elected governor. She has said she will keep the pause in place until the Legislature passes new protections, and her stated priorities are specific: proof that households will not pay more for power or water, no public subsidies, no non-disclosure agreements, and water contracts that can be set aside if they threaten a community's supply. The audit report is due on 10 December, and the state's rules for large new loads under SB 6, the 2025 grid law, are due by the end of the year. A draft of those rules would require $50,000 of financial security for every megawatt a project asks for.

Read together, the message to developers is clear. Speed is no longer the selling point. A project will be asked to prove four things:

1. It will not raise anyone else's power bill.
2. It will not take water a community needs.
3. It is not asking for public money.
4. It can account for its emissions.

Many of the projects planned for West Texas will find that hard. Most of the large ones are powered by gas turbines or engines on site, which release their carbon into the air and, in many designs, use water for cooling.

How we are answering it

We are building our campus in the West Texas Permian to meet those four tests on the site itself, rather than argue them at a hearing.

Power bills. The campus makes its own power with solid oxide fuel cells, so the data center does not draw on the grid that serves homes and businesses nearby. We also plan to sell additional power back into the communities around us at below market prices.

Water. Fuel cells make water as they run, about 1,500 gallons a day for every megawatt by our estimate. The campus is planned to cool its data halls without drawing on local drinking water.

Public money. We are not asking for local tax breaks. We intend to pay local taxes in full, sign no non-disclosure agreements with counties, make our agreements with them public, and publish how much water and power the campus uses.

Emissions. A fuel cell's exhaust is a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide, which makes it practical to capture. The campus is designed to capture essentially all of it and store it permanently in a depleted gas field beside the site. That same storage can take carbon from other plants in the region.

We will need permits like anyone else. The difference is what we can show when we apply for them. Texas is asking developers to prove they will be good neighbors, and we think that is a fair question. We would rather build the answer into the campus than write it into a brief.

← All posts · Greenfield Hyperscale Partners

What a data center owes the towns around it

Jobs and a tax base used to be the whole offer. We think the towns next door should expect a lot more.

Most data center projects arrive in a community with the same offer: construction jobs, a bigger tax base, and a request for a tax break to go with it. The power comes off the same grid the town uses. The water comes out of the same ground. The details often sit behind a nondisclosure agreement with the county.

Towns have started asking harder questions, and we think they're right to. Here is what we think a data center should bring instead, and what we're building into our sustainable industrial campus in the West Texas Permian.

Its own power, with some to spare. The campus runs on solid oxide fuel cells that make power without combustion, built in 500 kW to 1 MW units and added as demand arrives. We plan to sell the spare power to the surrounding towns below market price, so homes and small businesses nearby pay less for electricity because we're there.

Its own water, with some to spare. The fuel cells make water as part of making power, more than the campus uses. The extra goes to local utilities, also below market.

Carbon kept out of the air. The CO2 from the fuel cells is captured and stored permanently underground nearby.

Jobs that stay. More than 1,500 jobs remain after construction ends, across the power plant, the factory that builds the fuel cell units, the data center and the campus itself. A remote site can't hire people it can't house, so homes for the workforce are part of the plan from the start.

Taxes paid in full. We aren't asking for local tax breaks. We pay county and school district taxes like everyone else in the community.

A share of the revenue. On top of the lower power and water bills, we're setting up a regional revenue share: part of the data center's revenue goes back every year to the public hospitals, schools and fire and rescue services in the towns around us. The money goes straight to those institutions, with no fund or board in between.

No secrets. No nondisclosure agreements with the county. What we offer the community is published.

That's the standard we're holding ourselves to. If you live near a proposed data center, it's a fair list to hand the developer.

← All posts · Greenfield Hyperscale Partners