The proposed Southern Spirit transmission line connecting Texas to Louisiana and Mississippi has generated a lot of headlines over the past week, with my favorite coming from the publication Electrek: “Hell froze over in Texas—the state will connect to the U.S. grid for the first time via a fed grant.” I laughed.
The article fails to mention a few important points surrounding the project—the same points missed by the many authors who have offered praise for what they incorrectly perceive as the first step in the abolition of Texas’ independent electric grid.
Southern Spirit is not a first-of-its-kind project. In fact, it is the fifth line of its kind currently connecting Texas to outside grids and the third connecting Texas to the east. The project, initiated and privately funded by Pattern Energy, spans 320 miles from Garland, Texas to Choctaw County, Miss., and gives Texas energy producers the opportunity to sell their power to other states. The project received federal approval in 2014 and is currently five years late on the intended completion date.
A major reason this decade-old project has been revived is its inclusion in the Transmission Facilitation Program, a product of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Department of Energy is spending $1.5 billion on a handful of transmission lines to connect wind and solar facilities to growing load centers. The Southern Spirit line is receiving $360 million of this funding, small potatoes compared to the $2.6 billion Pattern Energy plans to invest, but it’s the bailout this project required to prevent another decade of delay or failing to come to fruition at all.
The Transmission Facilitation Program is a multibillion-dollar Band-Aid attempting to address the fact that wind and solar are very diffuse resources, requiring large amounts of land, and are not very abundant near the population centers on both coasts. The best solution adherents can put together to address this siting issue is more transmission lines.
Of course, we have first-hand experience with this in Texas, with the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, a $7 billion project to build 3,600 miles of transmission to allow west Texas wind to power Central and East Texas cities. Now that the Texas grid is oversaturated with wind and solar, developers need more subsidies to connect to grids further east that can take their excess power.
Proponents of a post-ERCOT Texas make the same false promises for the Southern Spirit Line as they do with a true federalization of the Texas grid—lower prices, increased reliability, and lives saved.
These claims have fueled federal legislation like the Connect the Grid Act, authored by Congressman Greg Casar, D-Texas, which calls for a complete connection of Texas to surrounding national grids, ending energy sovereignty in Texas. Casar claims this connection would have saved lives during Winter Storm Uri, and had we been connected to surrounding grids, we could have imported power from our neighbors. But those neighbors were dealing with their own capacity deficits during the storm and would have had very little power to send to Texas.
While there is much work to be done on increasing reliability in the Texas grid, connecting to national grids and fully participating in the shuffling of wind and solar power around the country will not get us there. What will get us there is a reliability standard for the Texas grid that requires wind and solar generators to commit to providing the capacity Texans need, when Texans need it, and to require the power companies to pay the cost when fail to do so.
Whether it is the Southern Spirit line, or a fully nationalized Texas grid, there is only one true purpose for these projects: for wind and solar generators to export excess power from Texas to neighboring states.
Instead, our goal should be to have sufficient reliable and dispatchable power from natural gas, coal, and nuclear to meet its own needs. Building more power plants in Texas will be cheaper and more sustainable than asking other states to bail us out.