Good morning.
BlackRock financed a $12 billion debt package for Meta's near-gigawatt campus in El Paso and simultaneously closed its $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, a 6.4 GW pipeline, in the same week. That is roughly $52 billion of capital concentration in seven days from a single firm. The El Paso campus matters specifically for ERCOT: a load of this scale at the western edge of a grid that already struggles with west Texas transmission constraints is a reliability event. Anyone holding generation or storage interconnection rights in the El Paso load zone should be re-underwriting those positions today.
El Paso responded the same week by tightening zoning rules for future data center developments. The BlackRock-Meta project is presumably already entitled. Anyone looking at a second or third campus in that market just got a harder permitting environment.
Today's issue also covers FERC's show-cause order on PJM large-load tariffs failing to resolve regional cost allocation for network upgrades, with ratepayer advocates from five states calling it an administrative law vulnerability that will succeed on remand. WIRAB is drafting a large load interconnection framework for the Western Interconnection, which currently has none. And Crusoe is pre-contracting 5 GW of UPS capacity across its data center pipeline before the projects are built, which is the right move when transformer and battery lead times are measured in years.
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The Morning Read