Texas regulators approve two massive West Texas transmission lines amid outcry from landowners

The commission approved amendments to two Certificates of Convenience and Necessity filed by Oncor after hours of testimony, much of it from landowners who opposed the projects. Texas Senate members and some House members had called on regulators to hold off until the Legislature could reform the process, but the five-member panel moved forward anyway.

West Texas has long faced an energy bottleneck that has constrained the oil and gas operations driving the region's economy. The new lines are designed to ease that strain, connecting generation capacity to the industrial load centers that have been waiting on it.

For landowners in the path of those lines, the vote is a loss. Eminent domain concerns were almost certainly at the center of the outcry, and a unanimous commission approval over objections from the Legislature is not a small thing. People here in Lubbock and across the South Plains sit within the same regional grid. Large transmission decisions made in Austin and Odessa ripple outward to communities that had no seat at the table.

The commission approved the lines even as state lawmakers were still debating whether they should have that authority at all.