Monday Musings #60: ERCOT, CPS Energy & AEP Texas Should Hit “Pause” on Howard-Solstice Transmission Line
For the second time this month, the bigcitysmalltown podcast and this newsletter are putting a spotlight on two multi-billion publicly funded infrastructure plans that would inflict irreversible environmental damage and a loss in land values in the Big Bend and Hill Country regions.
Both projects should be slowed or halted. Click here to access our earlier podcast on the Trump administration’s proposed $46.5 billion Big Bend wall, a project that aims to address a problem that simply does not exist across the vast Chihuahuan Desert. Click here to read our newsletter on the same subject.
Our latest podcast episode focuses on the $1.4-2.1 billion, 370-mile-long Howard-Solstice Transmission Line that CPS Energy and AEP Texas propose to build and CPS Energy proposes to operate from Bexar County through the Hill Country and points southwest to Fort Stockton and the Permian Basin oilfield, part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ 15-year, $33 billion Permian Basin Reliability Plan.
Imagine reading that CPS Energy had struck a deal to start delivering electricity to Shreveport, LA. Not much difference in distance, except the plan to go west will require AEP Texas and CPS Energy to navigate some of the state’s most pristine and sensitive river basins and canyon country.
Opponents give CPS Energy credit for working to minimize the impact on the region with route modifications, but there is simply no way to get from the Howard Road substation in southwest Bexar County out to West Texas without placing a newly-carved 200-foot wide path and adjacent service roads for trucks, bulldozers and other heavy equipment through private property.
The line, with its 180-foot towers – the same approximate height as the One Riverwalk Tower in downtown San Antonio – would forever alter viewsheds for all the neighboring landowners who would see the value of their properties plummet. There is no way to route the line without building it over the sensitive Edward Aquifer Recharge Zone in multiple counties, threatening the $400 million investment San Antonio taxpayers have invested in recent decades to protect recharge zone lands from being developed.
Here’s the challenge: The Permian Basin is the nation’s leading oil and gas field. Yet power generation in the region is wholly inadequate to serve the industry. Water is even more scarce. So ERCOT wants utilities based elsewhere in the state to start delivering resources to the oilfields with little regard to the collateral damage current plans would cause.
Datacenter builders see Texas as Ground Zero for the sector’s unprecedented building spree planned for the next few years. Cheap land in West Texas and the possibility of new power lines serving the region have placed West Texas on the expansion map. What’s next? A SAWS water pipeline to the region?
How many of our thousands of newsletter readers even know that CPS Energy, San Antonio’s municipal energy utility, plans to start selling and delivering electricity to new customers in far West Texas? Is that within the utility’s charter and mission? Are you a current ratepayer, and if you are, have you had the opportunity to attend a public hearing or otherwise learn about the project and its short and long-term impact on the CPS Energy budget and rates it charges households and businesses in its traditional service area?
Hill Country landowners, conservative groups and environmental organizations are opposed to the project. Preserve the Hill Country has signed up 48,000 opponents in filings to the Public Utility Commission, the state agency that needs to grant final approval to the project and its proposed route, which has been changed multiple times. Other than the opponents concentrated in the Hill Country and West Texas, I can’t seem to find anyone, even among people who follow events closely in San Antonio, who knows very much about this project.
An article published in March by the Texas Tribune suggested that opposition might stop the project. I have my doubts.
CPS Energy CEO Rudy Garza also appeared on the podcast earlier this year, and we covered a lot of ground, including a brief conversation about the project and the surge of Artificial Intelligence-related datacenters flooding into the state and the San Antonio metro area. I didn’t have a full appreciation of the project at the time.
I do now, and have more questions than answers. One question for ERCOT: How come long-term plans do not include connecting to other multi-state grids? All sides agree there is a pressing need to strengthen our grid and meet rising energy demand in the country’s fastest growing state where extreme weather events that threaten grid capacity are becoming more common.
Another question: Did ERCOT consider recruiting El Paso, which is 100 miles closer to the Permian Basin, to be the host of a new transmission line serving the Permian Basin? Regulators might argue that relying on the closer city might require construction of a new plant. There certainly is abundant natural gas in the region to fuel such a plant.
El Paso is not part of ERCOT. El Paso Electric operates a separate energy grid in West Texas and New Mexico, as part of the Western Interconnection, a regional, multi-state grid that was built to sustain sub-freezing temperatures common in Western state winters. It seems like a power line running along Interstate 10 West from Fort Stockton would be a much simpler engineering challenge.
There very well could be barriers I'm unaware of to considering alternatives. That’s the problem: A purposeful, community-driven information and education program has never been contemplated, much less vigorously pursued. So we are in the dark on one of the most consequential projects ever anticipated by CPS Energy. My regular readers know two things about my approach to energy generation: One, I am pro-growth and pro-development and I know we have to generate energy to grow the economy and create jobs. Two, I have long admired CPS Energy, the country’s largest municipal energy provider, and I know how much better it serves ratepayers than any for-profit merchant utility could do.
That said, this project does not meet the standards any of us expect from our leaders. It ought to be slowed or stopped.
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol…Read More
