America’s Biggest Solar-Powered Steel Mill Has a New Owner
Steel News | 2025-07-16 12:40:50
The deal, which could reach up to $500 million, arrives at a complex moment for U.S. steelmakers working to decarbonize their facilities.
By Paul Ploumis
SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): An enormous array of over 750,000 solar panels blankets the prairie landscape in Pueblo, Colorado, providing clean energy to one of the largest electricity-based steel mills in the country.
The Rocky Mountain Steel mill, which opened in 1881, today uses electricity instead of coal to produce steel rails and pipes. In late 2021, it became the first and largest solar-powered steel plant in the United States — and possibly the world — when electricity began flowing from the 300-megawatt Bighorn Solar project next door, supplying roughly 90% of the power used by the facility’s electric arc furnace.
The storied steel mill recently marked a different kind of milestone. Atlas Holdings, a private-equity firm in Connecticut, said last month that it plans to acquire Evraz North America, which owns the facility in Pueblo as well as steelmaking operations in Portland, Oregon, and Western Canada. The sale is expected to close later this year.
“This [is] a major investment in creating a more vibrant domestic steel production industry right here in the United States and Canada,” Sam Astor, a partner at Atlas, said in a June 27 news release.
The deal, which could reach up to $500 million, arrives at a complex moment for U.S. steelmakers working to decarbonize their facilities.
Recent U.S. efforts to build cutting-edge, low-emissions ironmaking facilities that use green hydrogen — made with renewable power — have all but vanished due to challenging economics and shifting political tides. Building large clean-energy projects like Bighorn Solar to power industrial sites just got much harder to do under the megabill that President Donald Trump signed into law this month, which slashes incentives for and imposes restrictions on wind and solar.
At the same time, the nation’s steel industry is slowly getting cleaner as manufacturers invest in new capacity that relies on electricity and fossil gas, not coal. And Rocky Mountain Steel is no longer the country’s only solar-powered steel plant. U.S. Steel’s Big River Steel mill in Arkansas draws from the 250-MW Driver Solar project, while steelmaker Nucor Corp. has a deal to buy 250 MW of power from the Sebree Solar farm under construction in Kentucky.
Courtesy: www.canarymedia.com
