Texas Utility Commission Delays Ruling on Challenges to Oncor’s $3.9 Billion Power Lines

The Public Utility Commission of Texas voted Thursday to take the longest time the law allows before ruling on requests to reopen its approval of two Oncor 765-kilovolt transmission lines across West and Central Texas. The commission passed one motion for each line by voice vote, with no discussion of the merits, at its morning open meeting.

Chairman Thomas Gleeson proposed the delay in a memo filed Wednesday. “I believe the Commission should extend time to act on the motions for rehearing to the maximum extent allowed by law,” he wrote. “This will allow the Commission to fully consider all the arguments raised in these motions.”

Under the Texas Administrative Procedure Act, an agency must act on a rehearing motion within 55 days of signing its order, and an extension cannot run past the 100th day. The commission signed both orders on August 28, which puts the outer limit in early December.

The lines

The two lines make up Import Path 1 of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, which the commission approved in 2025 to carry more power into the oil fields. The eastern line runs 242.56 miles from the Longshore switch in Howard County to the Dinosaur switch near Glen Rose, at an estimated cost of about $2.24 billion. The western line runs about 181.6 miles from the Drill Hole switch in Culberson County to Longshore, at about $1.70 billion. Oncor told the commission the record shows the lines are needed to resolve violations of North American Electric Reliability Corporation and Electric Reliability Council of Texas reliability criteria.

The challenge

On the eastern line, rehearing motions came from American Stewards of Liberty, intervenor Joanna Friebele, a group the filings call the Pemberton Parties, and the Middle Trinity Groundwater Conservation District. The district says its records show “hundreds, if not thousands of known water wells” in Bosque, Comanche and Erath counties that Oncor’s application did not account for. A well left under a tower, it argues, becomes “an open contamination pathway into the aquifer systems that can never be remediated without removing the transmission infrastructure itself.”

The district is not trying to stop the project. It “has never advocated for the Commission to deny the project or select any particular route,” its motion says. It wants the commission to restore a provision, written by the administrative law judges who heard the case, requiring Oncor to consult the district when it finds an abandoned or unplugged well in the construction zone.

Oncor answered that the movants “identify no legal or factual error” and that it can avoid wells “by spanning such wells, to the extent they exist.” The groundwater language, the company said, “could cause construction delays and additional costs.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that the statewide 765-kilovolt plan, of which these lines are a part, will cost Texas ratepayers “nearly $100 billion” over its lifetime.

Texas regulators approved the route, and Texas regulators will decide whether a Texas groundwater district gets a say over the wells beneath it.