Coverage of what Texas growth runs on -- the ERCOT grid and new generation, transmission lines, data centers and the demand they bring, and the water supply, reservoirs and groundwater a growing state depends on.
Corpus Christi voters on Nov. 3 approved a charter amendment that ends the city's practice of exempting its biggest industrial water users from drought surcharges, according to the Nueces County elections office's unofficial count.
Treated oilfield wastewater can be spread across Texas farmland under rules the state’s environmental regulators adopted Nov. 4 — and on the question a neighbor is most likely to ask, how close it may come to a drinking water well, the rule gives two answers that do not match.
Texas regulators cleared ExxonMobil on Sept. 15 to bury 53 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the rock beneath a farming community southwest of Beaumont, over neighbors’ objections that the nearest house sits less than a mile from a well.
The 6,000 people who get their drinking water from Greenbelt Lake have been boiling it since Sept. 8, the reservoir behind the tap is down to 4.7 percent of the water it was built to hold, and the company that has offered to fix the problem is a data center operator with wells of its own.
A coalition of data center developers wants the Texas grid operator to change the rule that decides who gets shut off first when electricity runs short, and it is arguing that the state's largest new power customers will build outside the grid entirely if the answer stays no.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into a proposed artificial intelligence data center in Taylor, examining whether the land was deeded more than 25 years ago to be held for public parkland.
Two Panhandle landowners told state regulators on Sept. 14 that a power line projected to cost as much as $1.08 billion should not be built across Texas farmland at all, because the electricity demand driving it sits across the state line in New Mexico.
The Public Utility Commission votes Sept. 18 on the rule that decides how data centers and other enormous new electricity users get onto the Texas grid.
Every day, Texas oil and gas wells bring roughly 26 million barrels of salt water to the surface — more than a billion gallons.
About one out of every ten acres of Texas cropland that depends on rain rather than irrigation has been given up on this year.
Texas asked the House Committee on Energy Resources to check the homework it set itself.
Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian voted against ExxonMobil’s Rose Carbon Capture and Storage permit, which the Railroad Commission of Texas approved on a 2-1 vote, the agency said in a Sept. 15 news release.
The Texas General Land Office is inviting energy companies to propose geothermal projects, small modular nuclear reactors and natural gas plants on state-owned land, Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, M.D., announced in a Sept. 15 news release.
The four-member state board that has to sign off before most Texas bonds reach the market meets Sept. 17 to vote on a water borrowing authorized at up to $2.2 billion.