When Trump Country Starts Listening to Democrats Over a Data Center

KNICKERBOCKER, TX — About 150 people filled the old Knickerbocker Community Center on Tuesday night. The pressed-tin ceiling, wooden seats and stage that once hosted schoolchildren still carry the weight of a different era.

The red-brick building was constructed in 1926 as the Knickerbocker School, with three classrooms, an auditorium and a central hall. It replaced earlier one-room and frame schoolhouses that had served the Dove Creek valley since the late 1870s. After rural school consolidation in the late 1950s, local children were bused to Christoval. The building sat mostly empty for decades and was nearly lost before the community converted it into a post office and gathering place in 1989. Last year it marked its 100th birthday. On Tuesday it hosted a different kind of lesson.

The signs made the subject clear: “STOP THE DATA CENTER.”

What began as a meeting about the proposed Beacon/Westline data center and its accompanying natural-gas power plant near Dove Creek and Spring Creek quickly became a platform for three Democratic candidates and one Republican county commissioner. On stage were Claire Reynolds, who is challenging U.S. Rep. August Pfluger; Riley Rodriquez of Abilene, who is challenging state Sen. Charles Perry; and Shiloh Salazar, who is challenging state Rep. Drew Darby. Tom Green County Commissioner Pct. 4 Shawn Nanny, a Republican, was also present and engaging with the crowd — unusual company for a GOP officeholder in this part of the county.

A flier passed around the room made sweeping claims about the data center’s proposed gas plant: 240 Bergen engines, 240 exhaust stacks listed at 180 feet, 440 million cubic feet of gas burned per day, 2.7 gigawatts of capacity, “Largest AI Power Plant in US,” and nearly 9.8 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Those figures go well beyond the public summaries of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality air permit application, which describe modular reciprocating engines with typical stack heights and significantly lower permitted emission totals. The discrepancy is one reason residents keep demanding more transparency and a local public hearing.

After the meeting, state Rep. Drew Darby confirmed he has formally requested that TCEQ hold a public meeting in Tom Green County. He has also sent Beacon executives a detailed list of questions covering emissions, water use, jobs, buffers, traffic and grid impacts.

Darby pointed to Senate Bill 6, the 2025 law that created new rules for large loads of 75 megawatts and above in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The bill requires registration, financial commitments and disclosure of backup generation. It also gives the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT clearer authority over behind-the-meter and net-metering arrangements, known today as the “batch” process. The Beacon facility appears to be a behind-the-meter project.

One of the Legislature’s concerns was that generators and natural gas providers might pull capacity off the ERCOT grid entirely if data center developers paid them enough for private deals. SB 6 was meant to keep grid reliability and cost impacts on ordinary ratepayers in check.

Gov. Greg Abbott is using the authority granted under SB 6 to demand audits and accountability from proposed data centers across Texas. That has slowed the batch process that had the PUC and ERCOT on a timeline to announce Batch Zero grid connection approvals on Aug. 7. That date has been pushed back at least eight weeks pending compliance with the governor’s executive order to audit data center proposals.

The political picture inside the old schoolhouse was hard to miss. This is not progressive territory. The room looked and sounded like the kind of place that votes heavily Republican and follows Fox News. Yet the intensity of the fight over water, air quality, noise, traffic, property values and the scale of a gas-fired plant next to rural homes created an opening. Democrats who would normally struggle for attention in these districts got face time with voters who, under ordinary circumstances, would never give them a second look. A Republican commissioner stood with them on this single issue.

That is what a concentrated local grievance can do. Whether the energy lasts beyond this project is another question. The same voters furious about a data center campus may still reject the wider cultural agenda that travels with many Democratic candidates, including gender issues, anti-capitalism and open borders. But on Tuesday night in a 100-year-old schoolhouse in Knickerbocker, the data center was the only subject that mattered.

Beacon still faces the TCEQ process. Darby is pushing for a local hearing and answers. Commissioner Nanny is opposing the project from inside county government. And three Democratic challengers just spoke to a room full of people who rarely hear them out.

In West Texas politics, that is not nothing.