Last month the Public Utility Commission of Texas held public hearings on plans to build giant 765 kilovolt transmission lines. The controversial plan drew complaints from influential voices, including Senate Business and Commerce Chairman Charles Schwertner, who asked commissioners to deny the pending applications for the lines in a letter. Cyrus Reed sat through the roughly 15 hours of testimony, and we recorded with him the morning Schwertner’s thoughts came out.

On this week’s Energy Capital Podcast, Joshua Rhodes talks with Reed, legislative and conservation director of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, about what it means to run an environmental group in a state with no renewable mandate, and about nearly everything happening on the Texas grid this summer.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and guest background

00:46 – What it means to be an environmental group in Texas

02:50 – How property rights and an energy-only market built out renewables

06:54 – The Lone Star Chapter's platform for the 90th Legislature

08:48 – County authority, HB 40, and codes instead of bans

10:46 – How load growth, 765 kV, and data centers got tangled together

15:43 – ERCOT versus SPP, and who carries the risk

17:11 – Schwertner's letter and what the PUCT could actually do

20:47 – How a CCN works, and the 180-day clock

23:07 – A bigger grid and more oil and gas extraction

25:37 – What a fairer routing process would look like

29:18 – Batch Zero, the large load queue, and the disclosure problem

33:19 – Mitigation fees and community benefit agreements

36:02 – Behind-the-meter gas and the minor source permit threshold

38:33 – The Green Tea Coalition, unlikely allies, and the 2027 platform

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