Texas officials say progressives backing the Green New Deal should look to their state’s success to learn about the importance of transmission in ramping up the use of renewables.
Texas has been successful where the rest of the country hasn’t in building a vast network of transmission power lines to deliver its massive wind energy resources to consumers across the state.
Texas was the nation’s top wind producer last year, with enough wind capacity to supply more than 6 million homes, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
“Transmission has been a big part of the success story in Texas,” said David Spence, a University of Texas law professor who focuses on energy regulation. “It’s a shame we can’t exploit other places across the country that are blessed with great wind resources because of a lack of transmission.”
The purpose of the Green New Deal is to ramp up federal funding for wind and solar so the nation can reach 100 percent renewable or clean electricity by 2030, but that can’t happen without improving transmission lines.
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The lines are critical to transporting electricity from places, typically rural areas, that have an abundance of wind or solar to consumers in population centers that don’t generate significant renewable electricity.
Major long-distance transmission projects require 10 or more years to be approved and developed because the permitting process involves multiple states and is subject to delay due to local opposition from people living near the planned power lines, a problem known as “not in my backyard-ism,” or NIMBYism.
Unlike with natural gas pipelines, which have also been plagued by NIMBYism mostly for environmental reasons, the federal government has little power to approve transmission lines, with the authority mostly delegated to states.
Texas, by contrast, has excelled with transmission because it prioritized power lines long ago.
In 2005, the Legislature approved a bill signed by then-Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who now leads the Trump administration’s Energy Department, to bring wind power from West Texas and the Panhandle to urban areas of the state, such as Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.
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While climate change was not as predominant then in political discourse, Texas lawmakers from both parties recognized that renewable energy could help with smog pollution. Lawmakers also sought to diversify the state’s energy mix, as the shale boom was only in its infancy and gas prices were high.
“At the time, it wasn’t about renewables as a way to fight climate change,” Spence said. “It was about being an energy leader. And people recognized Texas had a lot of good wind.”
The 2005 legislation called for the creation of “Competitive Renewable Energy Zones” focused on the delivery of wind power, much of which had been stranded in producing parts of the state, discouraging investors from building new wind farms. The legislation ordered the development of $6.9 billion worth of new transmission lines, which were built by 10 companies and completed in 2013.
The lines cover 3,600 miles and have a capacity of 18,500 megawatts.
“Everyone knew we had a great wind resource out there, but our existing transmission lines were congested whenever the wind was blowing good,” said Jess Totten, who served 23 years on the staff of the Texas Public Utility Commission, a regulatory agency that approved the various transmission lines. “We had an impasse until the point where the state stepped forward and said, ‘It will be our policy to facilitate the development of these renewable resources.’”
The federal government has not had a similar initiative, Totten noted.
Texas has avoided some of the problems with transmission experienced nationally, mostly because energy works differently in the state.
Texas is the only state in the Lower 48 with its own power grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and that independence has eased the growth of renewables. Because the grid is contained within the state, only the Texas Public Utility Commission is responsible for approval of transmission, simplifying the regulatory process.
ERCOT, which operates 90 percent of the state’s power load for 25 million customers, says wind provided a record 19 percent of energy consumed last year on its grid, thanks to the enhanced transmission.
“The fact our grid is sealed off from the rest of the country allows us to evade some of the rules that trip up cross-state long-distance transmission lines,” Spence said. “It’s not that you snap your fingers and get approval. But historically, it’s been easier to site transmission here than elsewhere.”
Transmission is also easier to pay for in Texas because of a provision in state law allowing the cost of building power lines to be spread out among users across the entire line, who all would benefit from the cheaper power prices resulting from more wind energy because they are connected to the same grid.
In the rest of the country, the cost of building the line can only be applied to areas that benefit from it, meaning the portions of the line where the energy is produced and where it is consumed. With multistate transmission, the places in the middle of the line’s path don’t necessarily benefit from it, making it harder to get their approval to build.
“With a transmission line you tend to have winners at the two ends — customers and generators — but people in the middle tend to just have a transmission line,” said Warren Lasher, ERCOT’s senior director of systems planning. “In Texas, it’s not hard to prove the project will benefit all Texans.”
Yet despite its inherent advantages, Texas regulators faced challenges.
Some landowners were reluctant to see a transmission line go through their property. But other landowners, many of them farmers and ranchers, welcomed the increased demand of developers looking to build wind farms on their land because of the new availability of transmission and the compensation they would get from it.
“In some cases, it pitted neighbors against neighbors, counties against counties, towns and cities against towns and cities,” said Donna Nelson, a former commissioner of the Texas Public Utility Commission. “Because Texas prides itself as a private property-owner state, it was difficult. The reason it was successful is we listened to everybody,” added Nelson, who was an energy adviser to Perry before he appointed her to the utility commission in 2008.
The transmission lines have also allowed Texas to get utility-scale solar energy onto its grid, which had been more expensive and less plentiful than wind. Because solar is produced during the day when the sun is out, while the wind blows strongest at night, the two renewable energy sources can be transported through the same transmission line.
“The lesson is energy infrastructure can be good, and can be useful in different ways,” Lasher said.
