Texas regulators approve two massive West Texas transmission lines amid outcry from landowners

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ODESSA — In a move that could dramatically reshape the state’s electricity infrastructure, alleviate a years-long energy bottleneck and anger landowners, the Public Utility Commission of Texas has authorized the buildout of more than 400 miles of transmission lines to deliver electricity to the power-starved oil and gas and industrial manufacturing industries.

The five-panel commission voted unanimously to approve amendments to two Certificates of Convenience and Necessity (CCN) filed by Oncor, contrary to calls from the Texas Senate and certain House members to delay approvals until the Legislature could reform the process. Commissioners tabled a decision on the Howard Solstice transmission line, which would run through South Texas, to conduct further deliberations.

Barring successful legal challenges against the applications, it is the last administrative hurdle before the two transmission companies can break ground on the billion-dollar projects.

“I understand the proceedings are not just about infrastructure to you,” Commissioner Courtney Hjaltman told landowners at the Friday hearing. “They’re about your land. They’re about something deeply personal. They’re about your heart … and we understand that. We appreciate your participation in the process. We recognize the importance of the decision before us, and we don’t take it lightly. We have to constitutionally weigh certain factors in making our decisions, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The approval means the companies, known as transmission service providers, can begin construction on two 765-kilovolt transmission lines that will ship electricity southwest from Bosque County and northwest from San Antonio into the Permian Basin. The two applications span at least 30 counties.

They represent the first proposals in the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, passed by lawmakers in 2023 for the oil and gas industry, to earn regulatory approval amid a year of staunch opposition from landowners and scrutiny from the Texas Legislature. It was also in the crosshairs of a fight over a data center boom in Texas, which has raised alarms about the environment and electricity costs.

The decision came after an hours-long meeting in which landowners told commissioners the proposed transmission lines would harm their land, the surrounding natural resources and wildlife. Some testified Oncor did not give them enough time to contest their applications, an assessment the commission’s administrative court agreed with. Ultimately, commissioners sided with Oncor, saying the company satisfied the requirements of the law.

Industry leaders have said the lines are meant to support the flow of electricity in West Texas’ oil-rich region, the Permian Basin, which they said has been overcrowded with oil companies with no means of powering their operations. The manufacturing sector argued that energy forecasts for the industrial sector did not adequately reflect its growth, creating a more than a decade-long delay.

At the Friday hearing, oil and gas leaders warned that failing to approve the applications could endanger operations and risk rolling outages in West Texas.

“The fact is, America’s most important energy security region is at risk,” Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, told commissioners. “West Texas operations, West Texas homes, schools, and businesses are all threatened today because it lacks access to dependable, reliable, affordable interconnection into the ERCOT grid. This is not hypothetical or conceptual. It is real. It is tangible. It’s immediate.”

Betsy Madru, a lobbyist representing Midland-based Diamondback Energy, said the company has been generating its own power, 80 megawatts, to make up for the deficit. Diamondback gets 330 megawatts from the grid.

“We wouldn’t expect Dallas or Houston or businesses right here in Austin to generate their own power, and the Permian Basin is no different. Current wait time for business interconnection is over two years,” Madru said. “Not supporting the Permian Basin reliability plan is short-sighted at best, seeing as this industry sent $27 billion to the state last year for roads and schools. In closing, our current power situation is simply unsustainable.”

All five of the applications faced hundreds of administrative protests and interventions from landowners who said their property would fall along the route. Most feared the construction would do irreparable damage to the land, leaving scars in farmland that families have inhabited for generations. Landowners contesting the applications also said the 180-day timeframe was not enough for regulators to process every case.

At issue was whether the state’s grid managers, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, proved that the lines are needed, an assessment regulators heavily relied on in their decision-making. Landowners said ERCOT should have looked at more options, arguing the plan should not have called for 765kV lines.

“The current state of fearmongering by the gas industry is very inconvenient because we already know that this grid reliability is not intended to help the average resident,” said Amanda Griffin, vice president of the Hill Country Preservation Coalition, which has represented thousands of landowners on this matter. “We know that it is intended to increase power to the Permian Basin … however, now this ERCOT plan is traversing the state; more than half of the Texas counties are affected by this. So rural voters are awakened. We’re aware. We’re prepared to clean house in November.”

On Friday, landowners asked commissioners to rethink some of the proposed routes.

“Our cattle and hunting business would be irreparably harmed by the installation of one of these routes. We routinely use helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft for gathering cattle, deer surveys, seeding, planting, herbicide application, and other essential tasks,” said Rocky Sullivan, owner of Two Rivers Ranch, south of Sabinal, and in Medina and Uvalde counties.

Transmission companies, throughout public meetings at the Utility Commission and legislative hearings, have maintained that the applications complied with procedural requirements. Company representatives have told legislators and regulators they would work with landowners to avoid significantly damaging the land.

Early Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an amicus brief supporting American Liberty Stewards, a national landowner group, in their legal challenges against Oncor, AEP Texas and CPS Energy.

“Both sections (of the law) mandate the Commission to develop a reliability plan to implement, but nowhere in the plain language of the statute are 765KV lines mentioned,” Paxton said in his brief. “Without that express mandate, the Commission should pause to allow the Legislature time to evaluate the benefits and risks of these massive transmission lines. While the potential benefit of such lines may be significant, so is the risk of damage to privately owned lands and natural resources and the Legislature has not yet had the ability to balance those interests.”

The need

In 2023, state Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, authored a bill directing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid managers, to design a plan to bring desperately needed electricity to oil companies in the Permian Basin and the state’s industrial manufacturing sector. At the time, the bill got little opposition. It passed near-unanimously in both chambers.

ERCOT presented drafts of the plan to the Utility Commission for about a year, which included options for different upgrades and power generation upgrades. One blueprint proposed building the first-of-their-kind 765-kilovolt transmission lines.

Trade groups representing the state’s oil and gas industry pushed for a version of the plan that would bring electricity online fastest for oil companies. In letters to the Utility Commission in 2025, the Texas Oil and Gas and the Permian Basin Petroleum associations, two of the state’s largest trade groups, asked commissioners to avoid delays, at one point signaling that if the 765-kV lines would take too long to study, they should not be considered.

Commissioners approved the draft plan in Oct. 2024. The plan approved three 765kV transmission lines.

In July and August of this year, the Texas Oil and Gas Association argued on behalf of the draft transmission plan, which included three 765kV lines — asking the Utility Commission to move forward with the plan.

Senate lawmakers pushed Todd Staples, the oil and gas association’s president, on whether new transmission lines would encourage more wind and solar farms, which are the predominant generators of electricity for the industry. Staples told lawmakers that the transmission lines were a precondition to building natural gas plants.

Walt Baum, president of Powering Texans, which represents power generators, agreed that transmission lines will attract investment and construction of natural gas plants in a House State Affairs Committee in August.

Also in August, Katie Coleman, on behalf of the Texas Association of Manufacturers, told lawmakers that the transmission lines would account for growth in the industrial community, which she said had been systematically underserved for more than a decade. She also warned lawmakers that rejecting the plan would restart the process and add more years of delay to the state’s beleaguered transmission planning.

“If you were to backtrack on approved projects now … you would be looking at potentially having to redo hundreds of load studies, hundreds of generation interconnection studies … once you change the topology in that map, you would have to go all the way back through the process,” Coleman said. “It would be extremely disruptive.”

The politics

The political tides that spurred support for the reliability plan shifted as hundreds of landowners across the state protested the applications. Opposition in Austin soon followed.

The bulk of the protests began in Dec. 2025, when landowners received letters about transmission lines that would cut through their properties. Some landowners said they had 21 days to respond, a timeframe the opposing groups found deficient.

Throughout 2026, lawmaker sentiment turned. Many sent letters to the Utility Commission to consider the cost to the environment and infrastructure. As the clock ticked and public outcry spread, lawmakers too became more emphatic about halting the project until they could reform the application process in the next legislative session, in 2027.

Senate lawmakers have coalesced around the issue. State Sen. Kevin Sparks, who represents parts of the Permian Basin and Panhandle, told regulators in August to pause the plan.

“These cross-state, high-voltage lines are designed to bring the consistency needed by (the oil and gas industry), but at what cost?” Sparks said at an open meeting with the Utility Commission. “Tens of billions of dollars in construction costs would get socialized in residential bills, permanently affecting hundreds of landowners.”

Following a July hearing in the Senate Business and Commerce Committee regarding the lines, Charles Schwertner, its chair, called on the Utility Commission to deny the applications until the Legislature had an opportunity to reform the application process. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, backing Schwertner’s letter on X, said the testimony “made it abundantly clear the current process being utilized by the PUC for proposing and approving transmission lines is broken and must be reformed.”

In August, state Rep. Ken King similarly asked the Utility Commission to give them a chance to fix the application process. But the lower chamber itself has not opposed the plans as one body, experts said.