Vistra's 5% Stake and 207 MW Firm PPA Open New Era's 1.4 GW Midland Path

New Era Energy & Digital locked a 20-year firm power purchase agreement for up to 207 MW at Phase 1 of its Texas Critical Data Center in Midland, supplied by Luminant ET Services (Vistra) from the adjacent 1,180 MW Odessa plant with first power in Q3 2027. Vistra takes a 5% non-voting interest in the served portion, plus ROFR on later TCDC phases and a right of first offer on other New Era power work; the 493-acre campus is built to scale toward 1.4 GW. CEO Charlie Nelson called the stack the pivot from a site with a power plan into permitted powered land.

Choctaw County, Oklahoma is running a one-year moratorium on data center approvals, in force since May, after a proposed data center and gas plant along the Bryan-Choctaw line drew a Boswell town hall over water, power costs, and who funds infrastructure. Rhonda Eastman, a nominee for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, put open evaporative cooling at 1.1 billion gallons per year at the center of the case for study-first rules.

PJM’s sequencing gap is sharper. A Synapse Energy Economics, Mondre Energy, and Aspen Technologies High Load Low Supply case shows loss-of-load expectation rising from 0.28 in 2029 to 13.20 in 2030, against PJM’s 0.1 standard, on about 229 TWh of added demand with more than 200 TWh from data centers. PJM is already haircutting forecast loads until projects show site control, executed power agreements, and construction schedules.

Kairos Power brought Samsung C&T in for up to $100M equity and in-kind EPC on the 50 MW Hermes 2 SMR in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, aimed at 2030 under a TVA PPA serving Google.

Meta and Apex Clean Energy signed a 144 MW solar PPA for Starling Solar in Gonzales County, their seventh deal and part of a combined book near 1.2 GW. Apex targets 2027 commercial operation; ERCOT’s queue lists January 2028, so interconnection timing, not the developer calendar, sets delivery.

Meta’s Texas path includes a planned 1 GW El Paso campus backed by more than $10B, which is why firm procurement is chasing real load. POWERGEN 2027 agenda materials flag the same national mismatch: hyperscale blocks want 12 to 24-month delivery while queues run five to eight years and combined-cycle quotes reach 2029; ERCOT supervisors are slated to detail connect-and-manage individual studies, and behind-the-meter campus generation can flip minor sources to major under New Source Review on a one-to-two-year air-permit clock.

TD World prices the co-location cyber gap. Over 70% of U.S. high-voltage lines are older than 25 years, large power transformers past design life handle 90% of supply, and only 36% of CISOs own both IT and OT; a hyperscale network on a baseload fence line can force operators to shut generation when they can’t prove malware stayed out of controls.

Bottom line: put private generation permits, queue date, and OT separation on one critical path, or carrying cost between hall COD and energization owns the deal.

Senator Charles Perry, who chairs the Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, used Texas Water Development Board and Public Utility Commission input to restate the scale claim in plain units: Texas uses about 17 million acre-feet a year; data centers draw roughly 4,000 acre-feet, or 0.024%. He also flagged Childress-area and West Texas projects that pair campus demand with larger community brackish systems, including one site at 25,000 gallons daily that funds broader supply.

National totals still move county politics. The Genetic Literacy Project cites about 66 billion liters of U.S. data center use in 2023 and Cornell work projecting much higher figures by 2030 when load concentrates in drought basins; generation source and basin choice remain the siting levers developers control. Oklahoma’s Boswell record shows how a 1.1 billion gallon open-loop figure becomes the petition number.

Liquid-cooling fluids are in forced requalification after PFAS exits. SNS Insider puts the global market at $290M in 2025 on a path to $4.05B by 2035; the U.S. book is $100M heading to $1.28B, with Texas and Virginia dominant. Water-glycol held 45.4% share in 2025; synthetic hydrocarbons lead growth at a 34.8% CAGR as operators buy multi-quarter compliance packages, not commodity drums.

Bottom line: publish closed-loop design, offsets, and qualified fluids before the first county hearing, not after the petition lands.

Justin Koch filed public comments on PUCT Control No. 58317, Item 73 (September 22, 2026) from Bowie County, arguing Governor Greg Abbott’s pay-their-own-way standard should cover transmission, substations, distribution, water and sewer extensions, roads, abatements, PILOTs, and grants. He ties the ask to Datahub Developers’ purchase of about 581 acres of economic-development land near Hooks and New Boston with loads measured in hundreds of megawatts, and cites New Boston FY2026 lines including $1.5M for utility extensions and $356,133 in REDI engineering reimbursements.

CBS “60 Minutes” put the same transparency gap on camera in Red Oak, where Marine veteran Jazmin Villegas opposes a nearly 3,000-acre campus she says the city council approved with no public support in the room. University of Texas professor Michael Webber’s short brief to operators: pay taxes, hire people, stay power-flexible and water-positive, and don’t break the grid.

ERCOT’s large-load information request is still live, with responses due October 12 and findings targeted for December 10. Governor Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to pause new data center environmental permits until the ERCOT and PUCT audits conclude, with TCEQ reporting compliance by October 19. New Era Energy & Digital and Meta both sit on the firm public-commit roster for the Abbott standards.

Bottom line: treat October 12 and open PUCT comment files as balance-sheet dates; thin ownership and incentive records become the exhibits opponents read into 58317-style dockets.