State officials and energy companies have advanced plans to build high-voltage transmission lines across roughly 4,000 miles of private lands in Texas. Advocates say new lines are needed to strengthen the electric grid and meet surging demand from population growth and data centers. Margaret Byfield argues the approach will damage property rights, increase electricity bills, and double down on unreliable energy sources rather than deliver meaningful winter reliability for Texans.
As executive director of American Stewards of Liberty, Byfield has spent more than three decades defending private property rights. The proposed 765-kilovolt transmission infrastructure plan has her full attention. “They are 130 to 160 feet high,” Byfield says about the towers that will carry the lines across Texas. “The right of way that they take is around 200 feet.” She describes state plans that “create a corridor right through the middle of property,” and “next to homes.” Although landowners may technically retain their property rights, she says the property where transmission towers are planted “becomes land that you can’t utilize.”
Officials say the lines are needed to move energy from East Texas to the Permian Basin. Given the area’s abundance of energy sources, Byfield asks a common-sense question; “Why are we transporting energy from the east side of the state to the west side of the state when what we really should be doing is building local dispatchable power plants there in the Permian Basin?” She quotes one of her allies in the fight: “It’s like hauling water to the sea.”
According to Byfield, the plan is not to improve grid reliability, but to make sense of state investments in windmills and solar panels that may not be needed at all. The plan as she describes it is “to connect the overbuilt wind and solar that’s been built in the west and move that east,” she says. She points to Winter Storm Uri as evidence that the state has misallocated resources. “The majority of that money has gone into building more solar and wind,” she says. “Those energy sources don’t help us” during winter storms. Demand during winter months has risen by 20% since Uri, she says, yet “we haven’t done anything to really make the grid durable for the winter months.”
She also raises cost concern. About 40% of household energy bills “are paying for the transmission lines,” she says. The new project is estimated by the state to cost $33 billion, though she cites other projections that put the number as high as $80 billion over time. “That is going to skyrocket Texans’ electricity bills,” she says. “Our bills are not going to go down because of this.”
The plan includes use of eminent domain, where the state can take control of private properties. Byfield describes how dairies with thousands of cows will have to operate in transmission line corridors that will split their operations in half. “Nobody really can pay them for having to completely rebuild their facilities,” she says. Counties that recently installed emergency communications towers may have to relocate them. “They just say, ‘Sorry, we’re condemning your land,’” she says of transmission companies.
In addition, some proposed routes cross porous river systems prone to flooding. “You’re taking away the vegetation that holds that soil together,” she says, warning such clearing could worsen future disasters. Habitat fragmentation may also trigger additional endangered species listings. “When you’re putting these corridors in, you’re actually fragmenting habitat,” she says. If species are later listed under government regulations as endangered, “it’s not going to be the transmission line that has to deal with that problem, it’s going to be the landowner.”
While new data centers are adding pressure to the grid, she questions whether massive systems to move electricity across such a vast state is reasonable given cheaper and less disruptive alternatives. Citing recent national policy discussions, she says large facilities should “build their own dispatchable power sources” locally so the data companies are not pulling power from hundreds of miles away “and driving up our prices.”
“If the state focused on local dispatchable power statewide, that makes a lot of sense,” she says. Regional generation tied into a resilient grid would provide winter reliability without carving up 4,000 miles of private Texas lands. She describes this as “a solution that actually helps us in the winter time,” with the benefit of eliminating the panic that sets in every year when temperatures drop.
