Tesla has signed a long-term power purchase agreement to buy the entire output of a 140-MWac solar farm being built in northeast Texas.
The plant, called Lumen Farm, is being developed by Zelestra, an EQT-backed renewable developer. Construction is expected to start in 2027, with the farm going online in 2029.
Neither company disclosed pricing or what the electricity will power. Zelestra confirmed only that Tesla is taking “the entire output” of the plant. In practice, a 140-MW solar farm in Texas is the kind of clean-power supply a company uses to match a big, growing electricity load — and Tesla has plenty of those in the state, from Gigafactory Texas to its rapidly expanding AI compute.
It’s the second deal between the two companies. In 2024, Zelestra signed a 57-MWac PPA with Tesla covering three solar plants in Spain’s Castilla-La Mancha region. This is their first in the US.
“As a trusted global partner, we can deliver bespoke solutions for clients in multiple geographies,” said Zelestra US CEO Phil North. “As such, we are excited to expand our relationship with Tesla to the US.”
Tesla is now competing with the hyperscalers for Texas solar
Zelestra isn’t a household name, but it’s become one of the busiest solar developers in Texas. The company runs a portfolio of more than 16 GW of renewable projects and was recently ranked by BloombergNEF among the top 10 corporate clean energy sellers in the world.
Its other big Texas customer is Meta. Over the past year, Zelestra has signed a string of solar PPAs with Meta to feed data centers, including the 180-MWdc Palmera project and the 176-MWdc Skull Creek plant. It also locked in $600 million in green financing for a 440-MW Texas portfolio backed by those Meta contracts.
So Tesla is now buying from the same developer that’s powering Meta’s data centers, in the same grid (ERCOT), for the same reason: a fast-growing electricity load that needs cheap, clean supply. The competition for solar power in Texas is heating up, and Tesla is now on the buyer side of it.
The strange part: Tesla could have built this itself
What makes this deal odd is that Tesla is a solar company. It bought SolarCity in 2016, the largest residential solar installer in the US at the time. It sells solar panels and the Solar Roof. It makes the Powerwall and the Megapack, the best-selling grid battery on the market. And it’s now building a 100-GW solar panel factory near Houston, in the same state where this Zelestra farm will go up.
And yet, to green its own Texas operations, Tesla is buying power from someone else’s solar farm.
That’s the legacy of Tesla spending years gutting the solar business it paid $2.6 billion for. After the SolarCity deal, deployments collapsed, falling from SolarCity’s peak of roughly 870 MW a year to a fraction of that, as Tesla shut down sales channels and let the business wither. For years, solar was an afterthought while the company poured everything into vehicles and Megapack.
Only recently has Tesla started rebuilding. It brought back solar leasing in late 2025, launched a US-made solar panel in January, and is now standing up that giant Houston factory. But rebuilding takes time, and Tesla clearly can’t wait for its own utility-scale supply. So it’s buying.
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