Now more than ever, Texas must confront the challenge before us. Our state is growing at a historic pace, and it remains the beating heart of America’s economic, energy, and technological future.
That growth requires infrastructure.
Infrastructure growth requires more energy. More pipelines. More localized natural gas generation. More dispatchable power. More infrastructure that strengthens the reliability of our grid.
But only if that infrastructure is built the Texas way.
After nearly sixteen hours of testimony before the Texas Senate Committee on Business and Commerce this past week, where lawmakers heard from landowners, industry leaders, regulators, and Texans who will live with the consequences of these decisions, I was left with one unmistakable conclusion.
Texas needs more infrastructure to strengthen grid reliability, but the 765-kV transmission line proposal is not the cure. It is the consequence. It is the bill coming due after years of energy policies that prioritized bending the knee to climate catastrophism and “all-of-the-above” energy sycophancy while ignoring the clear and obvious shortcomings of that approach.
After Winter Storm Uri, the consequences of overreliance on intermittent energy production should be clear to every Texan. I said it then, and it bears repeating today. We invested so much in renewable energy that we let the pilot light go out on reliable power. In response, all we’ve done is further the proliferation of intermittent power generation across our great state.
Texas needs to ask itself why the Permian Basin, one of the richest natural gas regions on Earth, now requires billions of dollars in new transmission infrastructure simply to sustain its growth and maintain reliable power. The answer is clear. Years of federal subsidies, regulatory pressure, and political mandates have distorted our electricity market.
Under the banner of an “energy transition,” Washington pushed policies designed to accelerate renewable generation, not because wind and solar alone can provide the reliability required to power a growing industrial and technological economy, but because the climate cult convinced policymakers there was no other solution. The tax credits and subsidies they imposed deliberately tilted the playing field against Texas natural gas and coal, undermining their competitiveness.
But let’s now discuss the greatest sin.
Instead of the beating heart of North America’s fossil fuel industry refuting the false notion that carbon dioxide emissions were to be embraced, not feared, Texas instead welcomed climate alarmism in the name of reaping the benefits of federal subsidy. Texas actively chose, through both state policy and advocacy, to proliferate the expansion of our federal debt in the name of greed at the expense of grid reliability.
That sin has distorted our energy market and brought us here.
It should not be possible that one of the most fossil fuel-rich regions on the planet is facing a growing need to import, rather than export, electricity because the proliferation of tax credit- backed renewable power has made local, dispatchable fossil fuel generation less economically viable.
What makes my skin crawl most is that these transmission lines are doubling down on that problem.
Rather than correcting market distortions and ensuring that the region producing our nation’s energy can power itself, Texas is considering a multi-billion-dollar transmission project to accommodate the shortcomings of intermittent, unreliable energy investments, and the harm they’ve done to our natural gas and coal industries.
Enough is enough. Ratepayers should not be asked to further subsidize this problematic plan, born from our grid’s growing reliance on renewable energy, to build the infrastructure required to compensate for its limitations.
For months, I have been one of the strongest advocates in Texas for defending data centers because I believe our state’s progrowth, pro-business principles require us to solve the challenges growth creates—not simply hit pause on economic opportunity. That is what Texas has always done. We don’t fear growth. We build the infrastructure necessary to support it, and we should build it the Texas way—or not at all.
I have consistently argued that new demand should be met by encouraging more localized, dispatchable natural gas generation, not by socializing costs or asking Texans to subsidize workarounds for a broken market.
That is why I oppose these transmission lines.
These transmission lines aren’t a free-market solution. They’re a government correction for a government-created distortion. Instead of restoring competitive conditions so reliable generation can once again be built where it’s needed, we’re proposing another multi-billion- dollar intervention to prop up the consequences of the last one.
Texas doesn’t need another expensive workaround. It needs the courage to fix the policies that created the problem in the first place.
Wayne Christian serves on the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates the oil and natural gas industry. This piece originally ran on TexasScoreCard.com.
.png)
