The debate over Texas’s 765-kV transmission lines is heating up, and your wallet is caught in the middle. Last Friday, the Public Utility Commission of Texas held a hearing on the 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan (STEP), and this Friday, the Commission will decide whether to approve or deny the northernmost line of the three proposed lines running from Central to West Texas. Life:Powered’s Policy Director Brent Bennett will be testifying before the House State Affairs Committee this week, and the message is simple: you can’t solve a reliable generation problem with more transmission lines.
Here’s what nobody’s saying loudly enough: ERCOT built this entire expansion plan around the assumption that 90% of new generation coming online would be wind, solar, and storage. In other words, the state is being asked to greenlight nearly $100 billion in lifetime transmission costs, roughly $3 billion a year, largely to haul intermittent power from West Texas wind farms hundreds of miles to Houston and Dallas, and presumably to bring more reliable power to West Texas when the wind doesn’t show up. Even under the rosiest projections, the average Texan will see their bill climb by $100 or more per year. And that’s on top of the 30%-plus rate increase Texas residential consumers have already absorbed since 2020.
Here’s the kicker: while families have been getting squeezed, industrial customers have barely felt a thing. Texas ranks 4th best in the country for industrial electricity rates but 28th for residential rates. The current system is effectively transferring costs from the big guys to the folks at home. More transmission built under the same broken rules doesn’t fix that. It makes it worse.
The core problem is that the ERCOT market pays wind, solar, and batteries the same price as reliable gas and nuclear plants, even though they can’t be counted on when it matters most, like during a winter storm. Batteries drain. The wind stops. The sun doesn’t shine. A gas plant runs whenever you need it to. Pretending they’re equivalent isn’t just bad economics; it’s a ticking time bomb for reliability. Life:Powered’s research predicts that a 1-in-10-year winter storm in 2030, even with adequate new transmission, could still result in nearly three days of outages and cost tens of billions of dollars.
Texas needs more transmission to accommodate demand growth, both in the cities and in West Texas. Life:Powered fully supports new lines that connect reliable, dispatchable generation to growing demand, especially in the Permian Basin. But the 765-kV STEP is designed around moving intermittent and diffuse wind and solar across the state, and there is no indication that it will increase the proportion of reliable power or lower electricity costs for Texans.
Imposing a $100 billion buildout before fixing the market that created this mess in the first place isn’t the right solution. It’s an expensive government mandated band aid, and Texas ratepayers and landowners will be picking up the tab. Texas can come up with a better plan, and the PUC should delay the approval of these lines and provide alternative plans for the Texas Legislature to debate during the legislative session next year.
This was originally published in Life:Powered’s “Facts:Powered” newsletter.
Click here to sign up and stay informed about energy policy.