(DCNF)—Tesla’s ongoing electricity usage prompted two energy agreements related to solar projects in Arizona and Texas.
The solar agreements with Zelestra and ContourGlobal on Tuesday demonstrate how the company’s clean-energy strategy has evolved alongside its AI ambitions, with utility-scale projects. These deals will generate 600 megawatts of planned capacity, amid growing energy concerns.
Zelestra develops utility-scale renewable energy projects, while ContourGlobal operates power generation facilities, including large-scale solar. Both supply electricity through long-term Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs).
Tesla has signaled that its electricity demand is expected to grow as it expands its artificial intelligence operations. In its 2025 annual report, the company said it is building “Cortex 2” at Gigafactory Texas to increase its AI training compute capacity.
“After starting operations of our first renewable plant in the U.S. in 2025, we are now moving ahead with the construction of our largest renewable project globally, located in one of the country’s most dynamic energy markets”, commented Antonio Cammisecra, Chief Executive Officer of ContourGlobal.
“Securing our biggest PPA ever – and one of the largest of its kind in U.S. renewable history – with an iconic customer like Tesla, a true symbol of the global energy transition, is a testament [to] our ability to deliver tailor-made solutions to our customers’ energy needs,” Cammisecra said in the press release. “This milestone represents a remarkable achievement of our commercial team, which spearheaded a company-wide effort to strike a major deal like this one.”
The agreement between ContourGlobal and Tesla covers a year with an output of 90%, delivering around 900 GWh operationally in 2028. Compared to the PPA with Zelestra, Tesla will have the whole 140 MWac output of the Lumen Farm, Zelestra’s solar farm.
“The Sterling solar plant highlights an engineering feat,” a ContourGlobal spokesperson told the DCNF. The energy plant will be able to provide 16 hours of continuous power per day by a combination of solar panels and battery, covering periods of power after sunset. He added that, “24/7 renewables are not that far away; it’s a matter of 12-18 months for commercial renewables. The commercial viability is not deployed yet.”
But the Lumen plant will not reach full operations until 2029. This deal expanded the relationship between Zelestra and Tesla, which received multiple agreements in 2024 in Spain.
“As a trusted global partner, we can deliver bespoke solutions for clients in multiple geographies. As such, we are excited to expand our relationship with Tesla to the US,” Phil North, Zelestra’s US CEO, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Tesla did not immediately respond to DCNF’s request for comment.
“We aim to deliver the project and bring the new solar plant online as quickly as possible to support Tesla’s growing energy needs in Texas,” North concluded.
Minnesota recently worked on phasing out one of its largest coal-powered plants in favor of solar, demonstrating the broader shift to solar amid the energy crisis in America caused by AI data centers.
The Trump administration worked on expanding its non-binding Ratepayer Protection Pledge on Thursday, which required companies to cover their energy cost, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.
The Trump administration claims that with their pledge, electricity prices will decrease for everyday Americans.
“Electricity bills for American families will actually come down,” Trump said, according to the AP. “They’re going to have a lot of electricity left over, and they’ll put that into the grid.”
The agreements reflect a broader shift in the US energy sector, where technology companies are locking in long-term electricity supplies to support AI growth. That trend comes as the Trump administration argues that expanding generation capacity will ultimately make power more abundant and less expensive for American households.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
