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 argument came in written arguments filed after the hearing ended in Docket 59818, Southwestern Public Service Company’s request for state permission to build the Tecovas to State Line line across Randall, Deaf Smith, Castro, Parmer and Bailey counties. Charles Allison and Eddie Schaap, represented by the Braun & Gresham law firm, wrote that “SPS’s own evidence shows that the need for the proposed transmission line is driven by load growth in southeastern New Mexico, not by any demand by the Texas ratepayers who would bear its cost and land-use burden.” Because the power ends up at New Mexico load centers, they argued, “the application should be denied for want of demonstrated need to Texas.”
Southwestern Public Service, a unit of Xcel Energy, disputes that. In its own brief the company said the project “is needed to address reliability and congestion issues identified by the Southwest Power Pool,” and that fixing voltage problems “benefits Texas customers by enhancing system reliability, reducing the wider risk of voltage collapse and service interruptions, improving the efficient transfer of power across the grid.” The company asked for one route but added that it “does not object to the selection of any filed route.”
The stakes are large and the geography is unfamiliar. Unlike the 765,000-volt lines the Public Utility Commission has been weighing in West and Central Texas, this one is not in the ERCOT grid at all. Southwestern Public Service serves the Panhandle and eastern New Mexico through the Southwest Power Pool, the regional grid operator for the Great Plains, and the company told the judges that “the ERCOT independent system operator has no authority over SPS’s transmission projects.” The line would carry 765,000 volts, the highest-capacity design built anywhere in the country, across roughly 89 to 118 miles depending on which of 80 filed routes is chosen. Total cost runs from $909.5 million to $1.08 billion, and the company expects it in service in May 2031.
Among the landowners taking part is Nelda Jean Finley, described in her brief as “a 98-year-old landowner who owns two agricultural properties within the Project study area.” One is a 480-acre irrigated farm in Parmer County her family has worked for three generations. One disputed segment “would run down the middle of the Parmer County Property, bisecting the farm and interfering with two of its three center-pivot irrigation systems,” her lawyers wrote, and would make crop dusting “realistically impossible.” Her brief also notes she signed a solar and wind lease on the same 480 acres in July paying $1,000 an acre a year for solar, which the line would negate.
Not every landowner wants the line moved. Happy West Cattle Company and Scivally Ranch, which run 6,760 acres as a single cattle and farming operation, back the same route the company and commission staff prefer, because it avoids a segment that would fragment about 1,450 of their acres and pass near a 7,000-head feedyard. Their brief warned that state law “require[s] the Commission to balance the routing criteria applicable to the Project as a whole—not merely shift impacts from one landowner to another.”
Commission staff recommended the same route, calling it “an acceptable route and a reasonable compromise when compared to all the proposed routes,” at a cost one-third of one percent above the cheapest option. The Office of Public Utility Counsel, the state office that represents residential and small-business customers, took no position on any route but argued that farm impacts deserve extra weight “because residential and small commercial ratepayers are not the source of these requested transmission improvements.” Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, which buys from the company, said plainly that its participation “is not about whether the Proposed Project should be built” but about holding costs to the estimates.
Reply briefs are due Sept. 21. The administrative law judges will then issue a recommendation, and the three-member commission will decide whether the line gets built and where it runs.