Private use networks.

A private use network is electric infrastructure that serves load without using the public grid: generation, wires, and consumption on the same side of the utility meter, privately built and privately operated. In Texas, it is an established way for very large loads to take power off-market entirely — the framework under which a data center and its dedicated generation can run as one self-contained system.

The concept

The public grid is a shared machine, and everything that touches it gets studied, queued, and regulated to protect everyone else on it. A private use network opts out of the sharing. Generation is built at the load; power moves over private conductors; nothing flows onto the transmission system. Because the arrangement creates no effects on the shared network, it does not inherit the shared network's obligations — no interconnection study, no queue position, no exposure to wholesale prices. The load and its power source face each other directly, under contract, with nobody else's grid in between.

Why Texas is favorable

Texas's electricity culture is unusually permissive toward self-supply. The state runs its own grid with a market-first philosophy, and its framework has long left room for private parties to generate for their own use and serve co-located load over their own facilities. Private industrial power systems are established practice rather than an exotic structure — refineries and processing plants have run them for generations. The specifics of any given structure are a matter for counsel; the general posture is that Texas expects builders to build.

What it enables

For co-located generation and load, the private use network is what makes speed possible. The timeline collapses to equipment, permitting, and construction, because there is no shared-network process to clear. The economics change with it: the load buys power at the cost of producing it, insulated from scarcity pricing and transmission charges — arithmetic laid out in behind-the-meter vs grid: the cost math.

The design changes too. One engineering effort sizes generation, redundancy, and load together, as a single system, instead of bolting a data center onto whatever the grid happens to offer. The private use network is the structural half of a model whose physical half is the power foundry — dedicated generation built where the fuel is, serving the load beside it.

About Corley Energy

Corley Energy is a behind-the-meter independent power producer, founded in 2024 by Jake Corley, Tim Bozeman, and Mark Meyer. We convert stranded Permian Basin natural gas into firm, contracted electricity for AI data centers at Power Foundry, our ~1,000-acre development in Upton County, Texas. Start with what a power foundry is, see the company facts, or check current capacity on the Sites page.

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