The Duck Curve#texas
-
Texas drilling permit issued for Deep Isolation's borehole disposal pilot
Deep Isolation Nuclear, Inc. said on October 1, 2026 that the Texas Railroad Commission has issued a drilling permit for its full-scale, non-radioactive Commercialization Pilot near Cameron, Texas, a deep borehole disposal demonstration, and that the authorization lets the project advance from engineering and design toward construction and field activities. A February 3, 2026 Form 8-K puts the demonstration test well at Halliburton's Cameron site, built by Halliburton, which keeps title, with construction, preparation and initial demonstration expected to take approximately three years.
Sunrun to supply solar and batteries for SPAN's XFRA nodes in Texas homes
Sunrun and SPAN said on September 23, 2026 that Sunrun will provide home solar and battery storage to help power SPAN's XFRA distributed data center nodes, starting in Texas new-construction communities and other unnamed markets; each host home gets a smart panel, batteries and solar through a pre-paid lease and hosting compensation, at no cost to the builder or buyer. The release names no node count, price or compute buyer; SPAN's xfra.ai page specs each node at 16 NVIDIA GPUs with a 15 kWh battery and says it is on a first 100-home proof of concept and plans to expand more broadly in 2027.
Google-sponsored pilot charged and discharged 9.2 GWh at esVolta batteries
Quintrace, esVolta and LevelTen Energy announced on September 17, 2026 the results of a Google-sponsored pilot in which esVolta's Anole (240 MW / 480 MWh) and Burksol (100 MW / 200 MWh) batteries in Texas charged and discharged a total of 9.2 GWh over three months in defined mid-day and evening windows, each hour verified by Quintrace against the EnergyTag standard. Google contracted to time-shift environmental attributes it already owned without tolling the batteries or taking merchant or dispatch risk; the release calls it the first environmental revenue stream for battery assets.
-
Natura receives Oak Ridge's 1960s FLiBE salt for its Abilene reactor
Natura Resources said on September 18, 2026 that it received FLiBE salt from DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, via Idaho National Laboratory, for the MSR-1 reactor being built at Abilene Christian University; the release says the salt contains 99.99% enriched lithium-7 and that Natura was selected through a competitive DOE solicitation issued in August 2025. ANS reports more than 2 metric tons, the secondary coolant of the 1965 to 1969 Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, now to be the primary constituent of the reactor's fuel salt. The NRC issued the construction permit on September 16, 2024.
-
Equinor's 100 MW Citrus Flatts battery starts merchant operations in ERCOT
East Point Energy, Equinor's wholly owned storage developer, has started operations at Citrus Flatts, a 100 MW / 200 MWh battery in Harlingen, Texas, Equinor announced on September 3, 2026. Equinor calls it its largest US storage project; the plant runs on a fully merchant basis in ERCOT, and the company says a four-project 80 MW / 160 MWh Virginia portfolio is on track for early 2027.
Sage Geosystems puts its 3 MW Texas geothermal plant in service
Sage Geosystems placed its SMECI enhanced geothermal facility in Christine, Texas in service on August 19, 2026, after more than 120 days of grid-connected operation. The company says the 3 MW plant held water losses below 10 percent across cycles and matched its reservoir model's predictions, results it is now applying to a planned commercial project at an Ormat site in Nevada.