Solar for Servers: TeslaSolar’s 244-Megawatt Sarcobatus Project Would Power an Off-Grid Desert Data Center

Most utility-scale solar projects are defined by the transmission line. They exist to push power onto the grid, and their economics hinge on interconnection queues, substations, and power-purchase agreements. The Sarcobatus Solar Project — the venture that brought applicant TeslaSolar, LLC before the Nye County Board of County Commissioners — is built on the opposite premise. It is designed to generate 244 megawatts in the Nevada desert and consume that power on-site, feeding a continuous, high-density computing load rather than the grid. In effect, it is a solar farm built to run a data center. That single design choice runs through everything about the project, from its physical footprint to the deal the developer struck with the county.

Who’s behind it

The public face of Sarcobatus is TeslaSolar, LLC, and its CEO, Sergey Benke, who is listed as the applicant on the county filings. The development agreement, however, is signed by a related pair of entities: it names Energy Source Green Holding Inc. and Teslawatt, Inc. — both Delaware corporations — collectively as the “Developer,” while Sparks, LLC is the underlying property owner. According to the agreement’s recitals, the developer controls the roughly 800-acre site through a lease and intends to own it. County notices route to Energy Source Green Holding in Dover, Delaware, with a copy to Benke in Austin, Texas, while the project drawings carry a TeslaSolar address in Las Vegas — a spread of out-of-state and in-state entities behind a single remote project in northern Nye County.

What TeslaSolar is building

The project sits on two private parcels along U.S. Highway 95 at Scotty’s Junction, about 30 miles north of Beatty (Assessor’s Parcel Numbers 018-501-05 and 018-501-06, at 94870 and 95150 US Highway 95). The plan pairs fixed solar arrays with sun-tracking arrays, though the final development plan caps construction height at 25 feet — meaning the taller tracking arrays are shown “for information only” and would need a separate height variance before they could be built.

What’s striking is what the plan leaves out. The project’s own site drawings state plainly that it will have no substations, no utility-scale battery farm, and no connection to the utility grid. Instead, the roughly 244 megawatts are consumed on-site to power data processing — including cryptocurrency mining — according to reporting by the Pahrump Valley Times, which quoted a project lead explaining that the facility uses all of its power on-site for data processing rather than connecting to the grid. What the county documents themselves show is a facility with the footprint of an industrial operation rather than a conventional solar farm: controlled-access gravel roads inside a gated, screened perimeter, with access taken directly from the state highway rather than any county road.

“We are not connected to the grid. We use all the power right on site and it’s used for data processing.” — Project lead, as quoted by the Pahrump Valley Times

Built to run a data center

The thing that turns a solar array into a 24/7 compute site is storage, and here the developer avoids a central battery farm in favor of distributed, cabinet-scale hardware. According to the product description for the system, the storage building block is a fully turnkey, custom-engineered Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) with a nominal capacity of 261 kWh, built as long-life, mission-critical infrastructure for continuous high-density digital loads such as crypto mining and comparable compute-intensive applications. Each unit integrates UL-listed lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄) cells, active liquid cooling, a high-efficiency industrial inverter, and an embedded, proprietary energy-management system with AI-driven load and energy optimization — delivered as a single, inseparable infrastructure asset. The hardware is housed in an outdoor-rated, IP65 industrial cabinet engineered for extreme desert conditions and running at roughly 60 dB, and it is delivered fully turnkey: engineering, civil works, installation, commissioning, monitoring, safety systems, long-term performance guarantees, warranties, lifecycle services, and contractual risk transfer. That distributed storage is precisely what lets the solar output carry a round-the-clock computing load without the central substation or utility-scale battery farm the site plans confirm the project does without.

The deal with the county

The reason both items reached the commission is Nye County’s solar-siting framework, which requires large projects to run two public hearings and to negotiate a development agreement before final approval. The project cleared the first gate on January 21, 2026, when the commission approved its Special Use Permit and preliminary development plan. The July items — the Final Development Plan (SOLR-25-1) and the development agreement (DA-26-1, carried by Bill No. 2026-10) — were the second and final gate, and county planning staff recommended approval of both.

The development agreement is where the obligations become concrete. Under its terms, the developer agrees to a 10-year agreement, with an option to extend another five years, subject to a county review at least every two years. It commits to hiring locally — the agreement states that a significant majority of on-site personnel will be full-time employees and that the developer has “a significant incentive to hire local or County residents.” It promises a good-faith effort to buy goods from Nye County vendors and to run annual vendor information sessions for its first five years to bring local suppliers into its procurement process. Financial assurances are stiff: performance bonds must be issued by a top-rated insurer and cover 115% of estimated infrastructure costs, adjusted for inflation. The developer also takes on a Road Use and Damage Remediation Agreement for construction traffic, drainage obligations backed by a letter of credit, an emergency-response plan coordinated with local authorities, and impact fees at the county’s adopted rates.

The agreement even reaches the end of the panels’ life: solar modules cannot be disposed of at any Nye County landfill and must be recycled or disposed of at permitted facilities outside the county. Design conditions require earth-tone buildings, downward-directed “dark sky” lighting, a visual-screen perimeter fence, and a 100-foot buffer from neighboring private land. The bill carried a July 21, 2026 effective date, and any appeal of the county’s decision would go to the Fifth Judicial District Court in Pahrump.

Why it matters

For Nye County, Sarcobatus is a live test of the framework it built to host desert solar. For the developer, it is a wager that a self-contained, off-grid model — generating power and immediately monetizing it through an on-site data center — can sidestep the interconnection bottlenecks that stall conventional projects. And for anyone watching where desert solar is headed, the project is an early, concrete example of solar and data-center demand fusing into a single land use. The questions that raises — about local jobs, tax base, decommissioning, and what a remote compute operation ultimately gives back to the community hosting it — are precisely the ones a development agreement is written to answer. In this case, those answers are now on the county record.