The two utilities seeking permission to build a 370-mile power line from San Antonio to the Permian Basin asked the judges hearing the case on Monday to reject a landowner coalition's bid to consider new evidence after the hearing ended.
A Hill Country landowner group is asking the judges weighing a 370-mile power line to consider new evidence before they recommend where it should run — a recommendation expected within weeks.
Texas regulators have imposed the first hard operating requirement on the data centers crowding onto the state grid, and the industry is weighing whether to fight it in court.
Governor Greg Abbott's deadline for regulators to spell out how they will keep data-center costs off Texans' electric bills arrives Friday, but the state's push to rein in the industry is running into a problem it cannot regulate away: the calendar.
Texans for Responsible Infrastructure Investment announced that three local economic development organizations — the Copperas Cove Economic Development Corporation, Forward Wichita Falls and the Sherman Economic Development Corporation — have joined the statewide coalition advocating for major electric transmission investments, according to a July 14 news release.
Texas utility regulators have two days to answer the governor.
As the Public Utility Commission of Texas approaches a cluster of routing decisions on the state's first 765-kilovolt transmission lines, the fight increasingly turns on a single question: whether the demand forecast for West Texas — driven largely by oil-and-gas electrification in the Permian Basin and, increasingly, by data centers — justifies stringing ultra-high-voltage lines across ranchland.
The numbers sound almost implausible: more than 400 gigawatts of prospective new electricity users are asking to connect to the Texas grid — roughly four times the state's all-time current demand — and the vast majority are data centers.
Texas has overtaken California to become the nation's top producer of utility-scale solar power, capping a 25-year climb from a single darkened array in Austin to nearly one-fifth of all U.S. utility-scale solar generation, according to a July 8 analysis from Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy organization.
Texas' effort to control who pays for the power that data centers demand reaches two hard markers this month.