The Public Utility Commission of Texas has called a special meeting for Aug. 21 devoted entirely to two of the giant power lines proposed to carry electricity out of the Permian Basin, and has moved it out of its own hearing room to a hotel ballroom across town. It is the second special meeting the commission has called on the 765,000-volt buildout in a week.
The agenda for the Aug. 21 meeting lists only two contested cases — disputes between named parties in which the commissioners sit as judges. Both are applications by Oncor Electric Delivery for state permission to build, the approval a utility must have before it can condemn land and put up towers. One is the Longshore Switch–Drill Hole Switch line, Docket 59029. The other is the Dinosaur Switch–Longshore Switch line, Docket 59315. Each is listed for “discussion and possible action,” the phrase the commission uses when its five members may vote but are not required to.
For landowners in the path, Aug. 21 is the closest thing to a decision date either case has had. The agenda shows Docket 59029 crossing 10 West Texas counties and Docket 59315 crossing 22 more across West and Central Texas. Two of them, Glasscock and Howard, appear on both lists, so the two applications together reach 30 Texas counties.
The Dinosaur–Longshore line would run 235 to 270 miles depending on the route chosen, from a new switching station — the yard of breakers where high-voltage lines meet — about three miles north of Glen Rose in Somervell County to an existing one about 4.5 miles west of Forsan in Howard County, according to Oncor’s project page. Oncor says it would run on self-supporting steel lattice towers, that it expects a commission decision in August 2026, and that the line is planned for completion in 2028. The Longshore–Drill Hole line, filed in December, would run about 160 miles and is planned for 2029, per Oncor’s page for that project.
The commission chose the 765,000-volt design — the highest transmission voltage in use anywhere in the United States, and one Texas has never built — in April 2025 for the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, the grid expansion the Legislature ordered in House Bill 5066 in 2023.
The commission normally meets in the Commissioners’ Hearing Room on the seventh floor of the William B. Travis Building, where its regular Aug. 20 open meeting will be held the day before. The Aug. 21 session instead convenes at 9:30 a.m. in the Zlotnik Family Ballroom of the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center at 1900 University Ave. When the commission last took up the lines, on Aug. 14, more than 20 landowners came to the hearing room to speak against them and the commissioners took no action on any individual case.
Both dockets carry a pending request to stop the clock. American Stewards of Liberty, a property-rights group that has opposed the buildout, filed a motion to abate — a request to pause the case — in each on Aug. 11, according to the commission’s filing index. The index lists the motions but not what they argue, and the filings themselves cannot be retrieved. In the Dinosaur–Longshore case, a landowner taking part in the proceeding, Garland Richards, filed a motion Aug. 12 asking for oral argument at the commission’s Aug. 28 open meeting. The commission has now set a meeting a week ahead of that date.
The pressure has come from Texas elected officials too. Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, has asked the commission to deny every pending 765-kV application, a call Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick backed. House Speaker Dustin Burrows set a House State Affairs Committee hearing for August 19 to hear testimony and discuss the buildout. ERCOT, the agency that runs the grid for most of the state, told a Senate committee July 29 that without the new lines the Permian could face rolling blackouts as soon as next summer.
One case is missing from both agendas: Howard–Solstice, Docket 59336. It is the furthest along of the five — the administrative law judges who heard it have already recommended a route — and it is the one the Dispatch has reported faces an Aug. 31 decision deadline under state law. After Aug. 21 the commission has one scheduled meeting left before that date. None of the other three applications appears either.
The commission’s next regularly scheduled open meeting is Aug. 28. What it does with the two Oncor lines Aug. 21 — vote, pause, or set argument for later — will be the first hard signal of how it means to handle the other three.