Landowners fill Uvalde Center to hear about power line project

By Joe Fohn

Anvil Herald Reporter

An estimated 240 South Texas landowners and other interested parties packed the Uvalde County Event Center on August 5 to hear details of a project to build what’s planned to be Texas’ highest voltage transmission line to date.

The “Howard-Solstice Project,” a 760 kilovolt line between Fort Stockton and San Antonio, is sponsored jointly by CPS Energy of San Antonio and AEP Texas, a unit of Ohio-based American Energy Company. 

The 370-mile transmission ine, which passes through 14 Texas counties, is named for the eastern and western anchor substations of the 370-mile powerline project. Its east terminal is the yet-to-be-built Howard Road substation in South San Antonio.

Numerous potential routes are under consideration for the project, which would become part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. 

At least eight of those candidate routes pass through Medina County (see map, page 3). It would facilitate the sharing of electricity across nearly 100,000 square miles of West and South Texas and the Hill Country. Potential routes lie generally from San Antonio northwest to West Texas along Interstate 10, and southwest down I-35 South and then west and northwest to Fort Stockton.

The Uvalde meeting was one of four information sessions held last week in Atascosa, Uvalde, Del Rio and Fort Stockton to bring experts from the two utilities in contact with the public and interested landowners who could be affected by one of the potential routes. 

It offered displays showing the proposed routes, the powerline structures, and important aspects of the regulatory, easement acquisition, environmental and construction phases of the project. 

For Medina County, one potential route enters from the county’s northwest corner and goes southeastward, splitting to pass north and south of Hondo. Another goes generally west-to-east across the county, south of U.S. Highway 90. 

An official permit application is expected to be filed by February 2026 and would take six to eight months to review. However, CPS and AEP Texas representatives at the meeting stressed that only one of the many potential routes will be chosen in the end. 

That selection will be made by the Texas Public Utility Commission after a lengthy series of landowner negotiations, public hearings and official reviews. 

PUC’s decision is expected around August 2026, and if it is approved, construction would begin about August 2028.

“It’s not something that we want to rush,” said Adam Marin, CPS director of substation and transmission engineering. 

The 760-kilovolt powerline will be the first of that size, with easily the largest voltage transmission line in the state. By comparison, ERCOT’s highest-voltage existing powerline carries 345 kilovolts. 

Lee Roy Perez, CPS vice president of transmission and distribution engineering, said, “We’re building a new voltage grid.” That grid will move power around the state more efficiently from wind, solar and other generation sources.