Pacifico Energy's GW Ranch: Off-Grid & Gas-Fired Power for Texas Data Centers

Global renewables developer Pacifico Energy is wagering that the “ranch” in the fossil-rich Lone Star State will come to the rescue for a data center industry that will need and expect gigawatts of new and clean power in coming years.

That’s the GW Ranch, a newly announced endeavor which is Pacifico’s planned off-grid power generation project under development in Pecos County, Texas. The 8,000+ acre site, presumably named for “gigawatt,” is being designed to pair natural gas-fired turbine generation with vast amounts of battery storage capacity.

All of that will be focused on directly meeting hyperscale data center and artificial intelligence (AI) load that would locate in the general area. Pacifico Energy expects to eventually build out 5 GW of off-grid and gas-fired energy capacity, starting with 1 GW by 2028, to meet developing demand.

“GW Ranch isn’t just about scale—it’s about certainty,” said Constantyn Gieskes, vice president at Pacifico Energy. “Every aspect of the project has been designed to solve problems with the status quo in data center development. By building off-grid and working hand-in-hand with local officials, we’re delivering the speed, reliability, and responsible development that our customers and communities both demand.”

Hype abounds in the energy transition industry and so-called "Industrial Compute Age." All kinds of ideas are going forward, only some of which will succeed, but the off-grid concept is gaining momentum due to the long interconnection queues in trying to integrate distributed energy resources with the utility grids.

Los Angeles-based Pacifico Energy plans to build GW Ranch completely unconnected to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid system, thus avoiding many permitting delays. The company is working with Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Pecos County and local officials on the permitting it does require. TCEQ is leading the state permitting process.

“Pecos County’s continued effort to diversify the local economy directly aligns with the development of GW Ranch,” Remie Ramos, Pecos County Economic Development Director, said. “The minimal impact of an off-grid data center will increase the county tax base, create new jobs, and have an overall positive impact on our county while conserving water and placing no constraints on local infrastructure.”

Pecos County is situated in west Texas above the oil and gas-rich Permian Basin which supplies a large percentage of U.S. production. Pacifico is designing GW Ranch to include 5 GW of dedicated off-grid and gas-fired power generation, as well as 1.8 GW of energy storage.

The ERCOT grid nearly shut down in early 2021 after an extended winter storm coupled with 52 GW of electricity capacity knocked off-line. Those outages included gas-fired, renewable, nuclear, wind and gas wellheads within drilling sites.

Various forecasts predict that the race to achieve AI dominance for the U.S. will drive some 125 GW of new data center capacity online by sometime in the early 2030s. Many of those operational data centers are in northern Virginia and California, but Texas is growing as an attractive site for tech companies due to favorable regulatory and legislative moves in recent years.

Developer Crusoe, which is supported with private equity funding from an offshoot of Google parent company Alphabet, started construction on a data center in Abilene, Texas, which is focused on serving OpenAI and Oracle.

Pacifico Energy has worked on power projects across the world, including Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Many of those projects in the U.S. and abroad have distributed energy and microgrids, but the company is shifting into prime power projects which directly meet main load for facilities.

Pacifico is financially backed by a variety of large-scale investors, including Sumitomo, Goldman Sachs, GE Energy Financial Services, Shinsei Bank and Dragon Capital, among others.