Self-Supply Becomes the Default as Army Follows Private Capital

Self-supplied power moved from optional to architectural this week, and by Friday the U.S. Army was running the same playbook private developers wrote on Monday.

The Self-Supply Thesis Hardens

The week opened with Wisconsin's Public Service Commission ruling that Microsoft and Vantage must cover 100% of generation and transmission costs for new We Energies plants, validating dedicated generation as the cleanest political path. By midweek, the architecture had a flagship: Oracle's $165 billion Project Jupiter in Doña Ana County swapped planned gas turbines for up to 2.45 GW of Bloom Energy fuel cells, paired with closed-loop non-evaporative cooling. By Friday, Carlyle Group and the U.S. Army were sizing 3 GW at Fort Bliss with combined-cycle gas as the leading source, federal procurement following the same logic private capital priced in five days earlier.

The receipts stacked fast: - MARA Holdings acquired Long Ridge's 505 MW combined-cycle plant in Ohio for $1.5 billion plus $785M in assumed debt, bundling fuel, water, and interconnection - Core Scientific financed its 1.5 GW Pecos campus with $3.3B in senior secured notes - Kiewit booked 5.4 GW of construction for NRG as GE Vernova's turbine backlog stretched to 2029 - Combined-cycle costs jumped 66% to $2,157/kW since 2023

The pattern: anchor power first, then everything else, with capital-on-promise bets like Fermi America's $750M raise without an anchor tenant punished accordingly.

The Borderland Becomes a Cluster

Three gigawatt-scale builds now sit within 30 miles: Fort Bliss at 3 GW, Meta's $10B Northeast El Paso campus, and Project Jupiter across the New Mexico line. Combined load eclipses El Paso Electric's entire 2.9 GW system. The Army hasn't formally requested grid service. El Paso Water has only "preliminary information." The architecture is being written in real time, and Caprock Renewables' Raina Hornaday's framing, "the energization of land," reads like a regional thesis.

Texas Inverts the Moratorium Map

Out-of-state friction kept compounding. Maine's governor vetoed LD 307; Champaign County, Illinois imposed a one-year pause; Michigan Rep. Jennifer Wortz filed a statewide moratorium; Birmingham drafted 19 conditions including 500-foot setbacks. ERCOT's queue hit 432 GW against 85.5 GW peak demand, but Texas's county-level land-use structure and SB 6 buffering mandates keep the build pipeline moving where others stall. OG&E and Google's Oklahoma deal, 100% interconnection cost on the customer with rate-shielding clauses, is now the template state regulators want.

What to Watch

• •PUC Project No. 58317: SB 6 implementation rulemaking will set cost-allocation precedent that binds for decades. Developers not at the table inherit terms written by those who showed up.
• •Birmingham's 19-condition ordinance: closed-loop cooling, 500-foot setbacks, emergency-only backup. If adopted, expect copy-paste in Texas counties facing organized opposition.
• •Fort Bliss procurement timeline: power and water decisions land within months and template federal AI infrastructure nationwide.
• •Michigan Court of Appeals on the DTE-Oracle agreement: the no-cost-shift condition gets its first real test.