The chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas has called his fellow commissioners and the state’s grid operator into a special open meeting this Friday, Aug. 14, to talk through the policy questions hanging over the Permian Basin power-line buildout — while promising that no final decision on the Howard-Solstice line, the biggest piece of that buildout, will be made in the room. Chairman Thomas Gleeson laid out the plan in a three-page memorandum filed Aug. 6 in Docket 59336 and obtained by The Texas Dispatch on Sunday.
Gleeson wrote that he requested the meeting “because I want to discuss policy issues with my fellow Commissioners and ERCOT related to the development and implementation of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, including the three 765-kilovolt (kV) import paths required under that plan.” Those lines carry 765,000 volts — the highest-capacity design built anywhere in the country, and among the first of that size in Texas. Gleeson filed the same notice in all five pending 765,000-volt line cases and in the commission’s project implementing Senate Bill 6, the new large-load power law, and he drew a clear boundary around the discussion: “The purpose of this meeting is not to discuss facts or circumstances specific to any individual transmission line proceeding. No final decisions will be made regarding any individual transmission line at this open meeting.”
The memo also spells out a step landowners have been pressing for. Before the commission can decide any of the cases, Gleeson wrote, the judges’ recommendation must properly be before the commissioners at a future open meeting, and “the parties in each case have an opportunity to present oral argument” — an assurance that lands with a request for oral argument already pending in the Howard-Solstice docket.
For Howard-Solstice, the calendar is now crowded. The roughly 370-mile line, proposed by AEP Texas and San Antonio’s city-owned utility CPS Energy, would cross 14 counties between the Solstice station in Pecos County, near Fort Stockton, and the Howard Road station in Bexar County, southwest of San Antonio. State law gives the five-member commission until Aug. 31 to approve or reject it. The state administrative law judges who heard the case in May recommended Route 4 — one of 77 options in the application, according to CPS Energy’s project page — and on Aug. 5, about 20 parties, including ranchers, landowner groups and the two utilities themselves, filed formal objections to that recommendation, called exceptions. The parties’ final written replies are due Wednesday, Aug. 12, and the commission’s next regular open meeting follows on Aug. 20, per the commission’s posted calendar. A cost study by the consulting firm Energy Ventures Analysis for the Texas Public Policy Foundation — a think tank that argues the buildout should be reconsidered — put Howard-Solstice’s price at about $1.4 billion of a roughly $13.8 billion Permian package.
The Friday meeting reaches beyond power lines. Gleeson wrote that he also wants to hear from ERCOT — the nonprofit that runs the electric grid for most of Texas — on the status of Batch Zero, the grid operator’s first group study of giant new customers waiting to connect, and on “their plan for auditing all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process” under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Aug. 3 directive. That audit has already frozen the classification notices data-center developers were waiting on, as The Texas Dispatch reported.
The politics around the buildout have sharpened all month. Two lawmakers, Sen. Kevin Sparks of Midland and Rep. Brad Buckley of Salado, both Republicans, asked the commission in July to pause the project until the Legislature returns in 2027. Sen. Charles Schwertner, the Georgetown Republican who chairs the Senate committee overseeing utilities, has called on the commission to deny the 765,000-volt applications outright, drawing responses from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows. On the other side of the case, CPS Energy and AEP Texas point out that ERCOT’s board endorsed the Permian project as critical to reliability in July 2024, while the Hill Country Preservation Coalition, a landowner group fighting the route, wants the line moved away from the region’s rivers and the Edwards Aquifer’s recharge zones, arguing on its website that the power “will not be available to our local electrical substations.”
The sequence is now set: final replies Wednesday, the commissioners’ policy discussion Friday, and — at a later meeting, with oral argument heard — a decision state law requires by Aug. 31.