How Texas Under Rick Perry Built the Lines That Made It a Wind Giant

In 2005, the Texas Legislature, controlled by Republicans and working with a Republican governor named Rick Perry, passed a bill that did something unusual for a state that prizes markets and distrusts planners. It told the state's utility regulators to draw zones on the map where the wind was strongest, and then to plan and approve the high-voltage power lines needed to carry that wind power to the cities, before the wind farms that would use them had been built. The law was Senate Bill 20, and the zones were called Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, a name nobody outside the energy business has ever said aloud at a dinner party. The lines took years to plan and build and cost billions of dollars, paid for by electricity customers across most of the state. When they were finished, Texas had become by a wide margin the country's leading producer of wind power. A former oil-industry state had built the most ambitious renewable energy transmission project in the nation, and it did so by solving the problem that still stops clean energy across much of America: not making power, but moving it.

In short: In 2005 Texas passed a law that raised its renewable energy goals and, more importantly, ordered regulators to plan new transmission lines from the windy west to the population centers before developers built the wind farms. About $7 billion in lines, finished around 2014, unlocked a wind boom that made Texas the national leader. The lesson for every state is that clean energy rises or falls on transmission, and that building it requires the kind of planning conservatives and progressives both sometimes resist.

The problem was never the wind

West Texas and the Panhandle have some of the best wind resources in the United States: strong, steady and spread across huge stretches of open, thinly populated land. By the early 2000s developers had begun building wind farms there, helped by the federal production tax credit and by Texas's own renewable energy requirement, which had been created in 1999 under Governor George W. Bush as part of a law restructuring the state's electricity market.

The trouble was getting the power out. The best wind was hundreds of miles from Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, where most Texans live. The existing transmission lines in West Texas were small and already crowded. On windy days, grid operators had to tell wind farms to cut their output, a practice called curtailment, because there was no room on the wires to carry the power. Developers were building turbines that could not sell their electricity, and that discouraged further investment.

It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Utilities and transmission companies did not want to build expensive lines to places where there were not yet enough wind farms to use them. Wind developers did not want to build farms where there were not yet lines to carry the power. Neither would move first.

A conservative state chooses planning

Senate Bill 20 broke the deadlock by having the state move first. It did two big things.

First, it raised Texas's renewable energy goals: 5,880 megawatts of renewable capacity by 2015, and a target of 10,000 megawatts by 2025. Those numbers sounded ambitious at the time.

Second, and more important, it directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas to designate Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, areas with strong renewable resources and enough interest from developers, and to plan the transmission needed to serve them. The commission was told to approve the lines before the generation was fully in place, as long as developers showed financial commitment.

This was planning, plain and simple, in a state whose political culture often treats the word with suspicion. It was justified, in the language of the time, as a way to let the market work: the state would build the road, and private companies would compete to drive on it. That framing mattered. It let Republican legislators support the policy as pro-business infrastructure rather than as a government takeover of energy.

Drawing the zones and stringing the wire

The commission worked with the state's grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT, to study scenarios. In 2008 it designated five zones in West Texas and the Panhandle and chose a plan sized to carry a large amount of new wind capacity. The plan called for about 3,600 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

Building them took about five years. The lines had to be routed, which meant hearings, landowner negotiations and, in some cases, eminent domain. Ranchers and other landowners objected to towers crossing their property, and the routing fights were real. Transmission companies, some of them new entrants, built the lines and were paid through rates. By around the start of 2014, the project was essentially complete, at a total cost close to $7 billion.

Because Texas's main grid is almost entirely within the state and does not connect to the rest of the country in ways that would bring federal rate regulation, the state could decide on its own how to pay. It spread the cost across electricity customers in the ERCOT region. Estimates at the time put the cost to a typical household at a few dollars a month for a number of years.

What happened next

The results came quickly. Texas passed its 2025 target of 10,000 megawatts around 2010, fifteen years early. As the new lines came online, curtailment of wind power fell sharply. Developers built thousands of additional turbines in the zones, and wind went from a small share of Texas's electricity to one of its largest sources. Texas generates more wind power than any other state by a wide margin, and in recent years it has also become a leader in solar and battery storage, much of it connected through the same lines and the transmission planning that followed.

The lines also helped in ways nobody had particularly planned for. West Texas was experiencing an oil and gas boom in the Permian Basin, and the new transmission brought power to oilfield operations that needed it. Cheap wind power helped hold down wholesale electricity prices in the state during many hours of the year.

Perry, who served as governor from late 2000 until early 2015, later became U.S. secretary of energy in President Trump's first term. He was never known as an environmentalist, and he made no secret of his support for oil and gas. But he signed the bill that made Texas a wind superpower, and the state's wind leadership became something Texas officials of his party were glad to cite as proof that the state did energy of every kind.

Why Texas could do what other states could not

The CREZ story makes Texas look unusually decisive, and in this case it was. But it is worth being precise about why, because the reasons are structural rather than a matter of political will alone.

Most of the American power grid is divided into regions that cross state lines. A long transmission line in those regions often has to win approval from several state utility commissions, each of which may ask why its residents should pay for a line that mainly serves people somewhere else. Federal regulators set rules for how costs are shared among states, and disputes over those rules can last years. Local governments and landowners along the route can object at many stages.

Texas sidesteps much of that. ERCOT's grid covers most of the state and has only limited connections to its neighbours, and that isolation keeps it largely outside federal transmission rate regulation. One state commission, answering to one legislature, could decide where the lines went and who paid. The legislature could tell that commission to plan ahead. The costs could be spread across a single, very large customer base. Few other places in the country have all of those conditions at once.

That isolation has costs, too. During Winter Storm Uri, the limited connections to neighbouring grids meant Texas could import only a small amount of emergency power. A system that is easy to build inside is also one that has fewer places to turn in a crisis. Every grid design trades one risk for another.

What other states can borrow is not the isolation but the sequence. Texas decided where clean power should come from, planned the wires to get it out, and let private developers compete once the road was built. Regional grid operators elsewhere have begun adopting longer-range transmission planning, and federal regulators have pushed them in that direction, though those efforts have drawn legal and political challenges. The principle that Texas proved is that transmission should be planned for the generation you want, not only for the generation you already have.

There is a quieter point here as well. The landowners who hosted turbines in the CREZ zones, many of them ranchers in counties with shrinking populations, gained lease income and new tax revenue for their schools and roads. The lines that crossed their neighbours' land were contested, but the economic lift to much of rural West Texas was real, and it helped build local support for further projects.

The fair objections

The project had critics, and some of their points hold up. Landowners whose property was crossed by the lines often felt steamrolled. Some economists questioned whether ratepayers should cover the full cost of lines that mostly benefited wind developers. And wind's variability is a genuine engineering challenge that a grid operator has to manage with other resources.

The hardest moment came in February 2021, when Winter Storm Uri knocked out large amounts of generation across Texas and left millions of people without power in freezing temperatures, with deaths across the state. Some politicians quickly blamed frozen wind turbines. The investigations that followed, including the joint report by federal regulators and the regional reliability organization, found that natural gas supply and gas-fired plant failures accounted for the largest share of the outages, though wind, coal and nuclear plants also had problems. The lesson was about winterizing every kind of power plant and fuel supply, not about wind alone.

I'd put the broader argument this way: the CREZ project was a large public bet that worked, and its success came from the same kind of up-front planning that people across the political spectrum often say they dislike. Conservatives tend to distrust central planning; progressives have sometimes defended review processes and local veto points that make long transmission lines nearly impossible to build. Texas managed it partly because its grid is self-contained and its approval process is relatively fast. Other regions have spent a decade or more trying to approve comparable lines across state borders.

Since Uri, Texas has debated how to make its grid more resilient, with proposals ranging from more natural gas plants backed by state loans to more batteries, more transmission and better weatherization rules. Those debates are far from settled, and Texans of both parties disagree about the right mix. What the CREZ era established is that the state is capable of planning big, building fast and paying for infrastructure collectively when its leaders decide a problem matters. That capacity is worth more than any single technology.

The lesson for everyone else

Most of the clean energy that could be built in the United States is waiting in line, sometimes for years, to connect to the grid. Across much of the country, the queue for connecting new power projects is clogged, and the reason is largely transmission: there are not enough lines to carry new power where it needs to go. Interstate lines face a tangle of state approvals, federal review and local opposition.

Texas showed that a state can choose to build ahead of demand and that the payoff can be large. That should matter to progressives who want a cleaner grid. It means accepting that new lines will cross someone's land, that permitting has to be faster, and that the environmental review process, which progressives built for good reasons, cannot become a permanent veto over the infrastructure that the clean energy transition needs. It also means remembering that the people who live where the lines run, ranchers and rural landowners, deserve fair compensation and a real voice, not just a hearing notice.

There is also a political lesson. The CREZ lines were sold in Texas as infrastructure, as business, as a way to make the most of the state's natural advantages. They were not sold as climate policy. They became climate policy anyway, by producing enormous amounts of zero-carbon electricity. Progressives can learn from that: the goal is the power on the grid, not the label on the bill.

What you can do

Transmission decisions are made by state regulators and grid operators as well as by legislators, and ordinary people rarely show up.

• See where your state stands. The climate dashboard shows the U.S. power mix and clean power by state, along with the long-term carbon dioxide and temperature records.
• Check on polluters near you. The polluters lookup shows EPA-regulated facilities in a ZIP code, with their violations and penalties, a reminder of what clean power is replacing.
• Comment on federal energy rules. The public comment page lists federal rules open for comment, closing soonest first and grouped by issue, with advice on writing a comment that counts.
• Follow the policy fights. The climate policy topic page gathers coverage of transmission, permitting and clean energy policy across the states.

The wind in West Texas had been blowing for a very long time before 2005. What changed was that somebody built a way to bring it home.