Texas built a competitive retail electricity market: consumers choose among roughly a hundred providers, and generators build power plants at their own risk with no guaranteed return. Transmission, the high-voltage lines that move power from where it is made to where it is used, runs on a different model. One utility builds each line and recovers every cost from ratepayers, plus a return, on time and on budget or not, and faces no competition.

ERCOT’s latest reserve-margin forecast goes negative in 2029 and 2030. To close that gap, ERCOT and the PUC have directed utilities to build a high-voltage backbone from West Texas to the I-35 corridor, which Smitherman puts at $33 billion, rising toward $40 to $50 billion by completion. Under the monopoly model, that cost lands on ratepayers.

On this week’s Energy Capital Podcast, Joshua Rhodes talks with Barry Smitherman, the only person to have chaired both the Public Utility Commission and the Railroad Commission of Texas and now chairman of Texans for Affordable Transmission, about bidding transmission out to non-incumbents under cost and timeline caps. He sat on both commissions during the CREZ buildout, Texas’s early-2000s program that moved West Texas wind to market, and saw competitive transmission work firsthand.

00:00 - Introduction & Texas Energy Landscape

05:31 - Permian Basin Load Growth and the 765 KV Lines

12:11 - Data Center Demand: Real vs. Speculative

14:09 - Texas Energy Fund and the Energy-Only Market

21:28 - How Texas Transmission Gets Built Today

23:13 - The Case for Competitive Transmission

31:46 - The Eastern Backbone and Cost Accountability

33:54 - Private Lines and Large Load Options

43:04 - Repealing SB 1938: The Path Inside ERCOT

44:34 - Getting Transmission Right: Future Tech and Landowners

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