El Paso judges question gas-only plan to power Meta's $10bn data centre

The proposed decision came out on Wednesday. It is the first formal obstacle the project has hit in months. Meta had already signed tax abatement agreements with the city of El Paso, cleared regulatory steps and begun construction before Texas officials paused data centre permitting this year, Inside Climate News reported on 30 September.

The plant at issue is the McCloud facility: 813 modular natural gas generators supplied by Enchanted Rock, each rated at 450 kilowatts, with a total estimated cost of $499 million. El Paso Electric applied to the Public Utilities Commission of Texas in December to build it. Once running, Meta's data centre would be the utility's largest electric customer.

The judges wrote that Wurldwide, a Meta subsidiary named in the application, drove the process. "The selection of the Project was driven by Wurldwide's prescribed timeline and preferences, and its agreement to pay the capital and operating costs," they found. They also flagged the "overall lack of analysis regarding options". The utility left open the possibility that ratepayers would eventually shoulder the plant's cost.

"We're disappointed," said Verónica Carbajal, an organizer with the Sembrando Esperanza Coalition, which submitted comments from more than 1,000 people opposing the application. "If the state was really serious about this, the commission would be denying everything related to data centers."

Why the gas plant is even possible

El Paso sits in Far West Texas, one of the few parts of the state outside the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas grid. Utilities in ERCOT are barred from owning power plants. Outside its territory the rules differ. That is why El Paso Electric could propose building generation for a single customer.

That structure is unusual. Krysti Shallenberger, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute, told Inside Climate News that a privately held monopoly utility seeking to build a plant solely for a data centre is not something seen in competitive markets: "the utility proposing to build an expensive gas plant for a data center that it will rate base. It can make a profit off this."

The gas plant would exclusively supply Meta for the first five years. After that it would connect to the wider transmission system and ratepayers could be asked to pay. El Paso Electric proposed contracting with Enchanted Rock after Meta recommended the company, and did not consider other contractors, the judges said. The utility also skipped a cost-benefit analysis and did not weigh buying capacity or investing in existing generation.

The ultimate decision rests with the five PUCT commissioners. No vote has been scheduled. El Paso Electric initially claimed solar power would supply the site before filing for the gas plant in December.

Europe has the same data problem, in reverse

Texas regulators are at least asking what a data centre costs. European regulators are being accused of refusing to say what one consumes. Lighthouse Reports filed a complaint on Monday against the European Commission under the Aarhus Convention, arguing that EU rules keep the public from seeing how much energy and water individual data centres use. POLITICO, which first reported the complaint, said the Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

The numbers the EU does publish are aggregate only. According to the Commission, Europe's data centres used 20.7 terawatt-hours of electricity and more than 8 million cubic metres of water in 2025, up 26 per cent and 52 per cent respectively on 2024. Those totals rest on incomplete data, and a 2024 law bars Brussels and EU capitals from disclosing per-site figures.

NL Times reported on 30 September that the picture is no better in the Netherlands. Of 186 commercial data centres with at least 500 kilowatts of capacity at the end of last year, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency holds public electricity figures for 44 and water figures for 47, despite the Energy Efficiency Directive requiring reporting for three years. Data centres used 5.1 billion kilowatt-hours in the Netherlands in 2024, 4.6 per cent of national consumption, according to Statistics Netherlands, and grid operator TenneT expects 10 to 15 per cent by 2030.

Transparency is not the only pressure point. On 30 September, The Guardian reported that more than 44,000 people have filed legal objections under article 21 of the UK GDPR to NHS England's Federated Data Platform, operated with Palantir technology, demanding that their data not be processed through it.

What the cooling and power debate is really about

Both fights converge on the same question: who pays for the power and water that AI infrastructure needs, and who gets to know the answer. The El Paso case is unusually explicit. A single utility is asking to build a single plant for a single customer, with the cost risk deferred for five years and then potentially transferred.

The judges' proposed condition, that El Paso Electric not pass capital and operating costs to ratepayers, is designed to close that gap. Without it, they recommend denial. El Paso Electric has not said publicly how it will respond, and the commission has not set a date.

Meanwhile, the wider build-out continues. Oracle's Project Jupiter hyperscale data centre is under construction in neighbouring Doña Ana County, New Mexico, according to Inside Climate News. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who previously championed the industry, has taken steps to slow or limit data centre development, but those measures have largely not touched the El Paso project.