Three Decisions This Month Will Redraw Power Lines Across Texas
The Public Utility Commission of Texas has an August cluster of transmission-line route decisions — three 765-kV projects, dozens of counties, thousands of filings. The chosen route decides which landowners get an easement negotiation letter. Most of them find out late.
When a utility wants to build a major transmission line in Texas, it can't just pick a path. It files an application to amend its Certificate of Convenience and Necessity — a CCN — at the Public Utility Commission, and that application lays out a whole family of alternative routes, often dozens of them, stitched together from shared segments. Landowners intervene, hearings run at the State Office of Administrative Hearings, and then, months later, the Commission issues a route order: one route wins. Every parcel on it is now in the path of an easement negotiation. Every parcel on the losing alternatives goes back to being ordinary land.
That final order is the moment everything becomes real — and it's the moment most affected owners are least prepared for. Notice went out back when the application was filed, often a year or more earlier, to owners across all the alternatives. Since then the docket has piled up thousands of pages. Unless you've been reading them, the first you'll hear of the outcome is a letter from a right-of-way agent.
Three orders, one month
A route family spanning 19 counties, from the Permian's edge toward North Texas. This is one of the most heavily contested route dockets on the books: our tracker counts 5,779 filings and over 1,200 named parties in this docket alone.
Crossing 12 West Texas counties, with 577 filings tracked. The proposal-for-decision stage is done and the exceptions window closed on August 6 — the Commission can act at any open meeting now.
A route family spanning 14 counties across Southwest Texas toward the San Antonio region — 2,643 filings and 619 named parties tracked so far.
To be precise about where things stand: no final route order has issued in any of these dockets as of publication. Everything above describes proposed routes and decision deadlines. That's exactly why this month matters — the set of possible outcomes collapses to one, three times, within weeks.
Why we watch
We run a tracker over the PUC's filing system. Across the transmission projects we follow — 15 projects and 12 active dockets — it has captured more than 16,000 docket filings to date. We've mapped every proposed route in these three dockets against county parcel rolls. When the orders land, we'll know whose land is on the chosen route the same day.
County-level summaries will appear here on the blog, free. The parcel-level view — which tracts, which owners, which side of the fence line — is for subscribers on the live map.