Lower Colorado River Authority

Based on Wikipedia: Lower Colorado River Authority

In 1932, a half-finished dam sat abandoned in the Texas Hill Country. The money had run out. The company behind it—part of Samuel Insull's sprawling utility empire—had collapsed in one of the most spectacular corporate bankruptcies of the Great Depression. Concrete pylons jutted from the Colorado River like broken teeth, a monument to ambition that couldn't survive economic catastrophe.

Two years later, the Texas Legislature did something unusual. It created a public authority to finish the job.

That decision—born from crisis and necessity—gave rise to the Lower Colorado River Authority, or LCRA, an organization that now manages a 600-mile stretch of river, operates power plants capable of lighting millions of homes, and quietly shapes daily life for a vast swath of Central Texas.

What Exactly Is It?

The LCRA occupies a peculiar space in American governance. It's not quite a government agency—it receives no state funding and cannot levy taxes. But it's not a private company either. It's what's called a public utility, a nonprofit organization created by legislative act to serve the public interest.

Think of it as a government-authorized enterprise that must fund itself through its own operations. Nearly all its revenue comes from generating and transmitting electricity. A sliver comes from selling water. That's it. No tax dollars. No appropriations from Austin.

This matters more than you might think. It means the LCRA operates with a different set of incentives than a typical government agency. If it mismanages its resources, it can't simply ask the legislature for more money. And unlike a private utility, it's not trying to maximize shareholder returns. Its mission, as stated, is to enhance the lives of Texans through water stewardship, energy, and community service.

Whether it lives up to that mission is a question Central Texans have been debating for decades.

Six Dams, Six Lakes

The crown jewels of the LCRA are its dams—six of them, strung along the Colorado River like beads on a necklace, creating what Texans call the Highland Lakes.

Start at the top with Buchanan Dam, the one that nearly bankrupted Insull's company. When the LCRA finally completed it in 1938, it created Lake Buchanan, a reservoir stretching 31 miles and holding enough water to cover a small city to a depth of several hundred feet. From there, the river cascades through Inks Dam and Inks Lake, then Wirtz Dam and Lake LBJ (named, like so much in this part of Texas, for Lyndon Baines Johnson).

Further downstream come Max Starcke Dam and Lake Marble Falls, followed by the most impressive structure of all: Mansfield Dam. Rising 266 feet above the riverbed, it holds back Lake Travis, the largest of the Highland Lakes and a destination that draws boaters, swimmers, and cliff-jumpers from across the state.

Finally, Tom Miller Dam creates Lake Austin, practically within the city limits of the state capital.

Together, these dams serve three purposes. They generate hydroelectric power—clean, renewable energy that requires no fuel. They store water for more than a million people. And they tame a river that, left to its own devices, would periodically flood the Hill Country with devastating force.

The Limits of Hydropower

Here's something most people don't realize about hydroelectric dams: the LCRA can't just run them whenever it wants more electricity.

Water, after all, is precious in Texas. Every gallon that flows through a turbine is a gallon that might be needed for drinking, for irrigation, for keeping the river ecosystems alive. So the LCRA operates under a state-approved Water Management Plan that essentially treats electricity as a byproduct. The dams generate power only when water is being released for other reasons—or when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT, orders them to fire up during emergencies.

This represents a fundamental constraint. Hydropower is clean and cheap, but in a state where water rights spark legal battles and droughts can empty reservoirs, it can never be the primary source of electricity. The LCRA learned this lesson decades ago and adapted accordingly.

The Coal Problem

Drive about an hour east of Austin, into the flat farmland of Fayette County, and you'll find the Fayette Power Project: three massive coal-fired units capable of generating 1,625 megawatts of electricity. To put that number in perspective, a single megawatt can power roughly 200 homes on a hot summer afternoon when air conditioners are running full blast. Fayette could handle a city of 325,000 households.

The coal comes from Wyoming's Powder River Basin, traveling by train across more than a thousand miles of prairie before arriving in Texas. It's some of the lowest-sulfur coal in the country, which means somewhat less pollution—but burning coal is still burning coal, with all the carbon emissions and environmental concerns that entails.

Austin Energy co-owns two of the three units, which complicates the politics considerably. Austin has pledged to reduce its carbon footprint, yet it remains tied to one of the largest coal plants in the state. Disentangling from Fayette has proven difficult, expensive, and contentious.

Lake Fayette serves as the cooling pond for the project—a reminder that power plants need enormous amounts of water just as surely as they need fuel. In a drought-prone state, this creates another layer of vulnerability.

Natural Gas and the Modern Grid

The LCRA's more recent investments have focused heavily on natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal (though it still produces significant carbon emissions) and can ramp up quickly to meet fluctuating demand.

The Sim Gideon Power Plant in Bastrop County houses three natural-gas units producing 608 megawatts. Nearby, the Lost Pines Power Park adds another 511 megawatts from a combined-cycle plant—meaning it captures waste heat from its gas turbines and uses it to generate additional electricity through steam turbines, squeezing more power from every cubic foot of fuel.

The newest addition is the Thomas C. Ferguson Power Plant, which began operating in 2014 on the shores of Lake LBJ. Named for a longtime LCRA board chairman, Ferguson replaced an older, less efficient plant that stood on the same site. The numbers are telling: the new plant produces 30 to 40 percent fewer emissions per unit of power, burns 35 percent less fuel per megawatt-hour, and uses about one-third the water of a conventional steam plant.

That's the trajectory of modern power generation in miniature. Each new plant is cleaner and more efficient than what came before. But the cumulative effect of decades of fossil fuel burning has created a climate problem that no amount of incremental improvement can solve.

Storing Gas Underground

Here's a fascinating bit of infrastructure that most people never think about: the LCRA owns an underground gas storage facility near Rockne, Texas. It can hold up to 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Why would you store gas underground? Because prices fluctuate. When gas is cheap—typically in spring and fall, when neither heating nor cooling demand is high—the LCRA can buy large quantities and inject them into the reservoir. When prices spike during a heat wave or cold snap, it can draw on its stored supplies rather than paying premium rates on the spot market.

This kind of strategic thinking separates a well-run utility from a poorly run one. It's invisible to consumers, but it affects every electric bill.

Wind from the West

In 1995, the LCRA did something pioneering. It became the first electric utility in Texas to offer wind-generated electricity to its customers, purchasing power from the Texas Wind Power Project—the first commercial wind farm in the state.

This seems almost quaint now. Texas has since become the wind-power capital of the United States, with thousands of turbines spinning across the western plains and the Gulf Coast. But someone had to go first, to prove the economics could work, to show skeptics that this wasn't just environmental wishful thinking.

Today, the LCRA buys wind power from two major sources: 51 megawatts from the Indian Mesa Wind Energy Center in West Texas and 200 megawatts from the Papalote Creek II Wind Farm near the Gulf Coast. These numbers sound impressive until you remember that the Fayette coal plant alone produces 1,625 megawatts. Wind is growing, but it hasn't replaced fossil fuels yet.

The challenge with wind, of course, is that it blows when it blows. You can't schedule the wind to arrive precisely when everyone turns on their air conditioners at 4 p.m. on an August afternoon. This is why utilities need a diverse portfolio—some sources that can ramp up on demand, others that generate power whenever nature permits.

The Transmission Web

Generating electricity is only half the challenge. You also have to move it from power plants to homes and businesses, often across vast distances.

The LCRA owns more than 5,100 miles of transmission lines and 380 substations, managed through a subsidiary called LCRA Transmission Services Corporation. These high-voltage lines are the highways of the electrical grid, carrying power at enormous voltages (to minimize energy losses) before transformers step it down for local distribution.

The LCRA's customers aren't individual homeowners. Instead, it sells wholesale electricity to municipal utilities and electric cooperatives, which then distribute power to their own customers. This is an important distinction. When your lights flicker in Austin, you might blame Austin Energy—but the electricity flowing through those wires may have been generated by the LCRA and transmitted across its infrastructure.

This interconnected system creates both resilience and vulnerability. If one power plant fails, others can pick up the slack. But if transmission lines go down—as happened catastrophically during Winter Storm Uri in 2021—the entire grid can buckle.

More Than Power: Water and Land

Electricity dominates the LCRA's budget, but water management may be its most consequential responsibility.

The authority controls rights to more than 2.1 million acre-feet of water annually. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot—roughly 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two average Texas households for a year.

Managing this water means making difficult choices. Farmers downstream need irrigation. Cities need drinking water. The river itself needs minimum flows to sustain fish and wildlife. And everyone wants the Highland Lakes full for recreation and property values. In drought years, there's simply not enough water to satisfy everyone. The LCRA's decisions about who gets cut back—and by how much—can make or break agricultural operations and spark bitter political fights.

Parks and Public Access

The LCRA owns more than 40 public parks, recreation areas, and river access sites. McKinney Roughs Nature Park, a short drive from Austin, offers hiking trails, zip-lining, and environmental education programs. Matagorda Bay Nature Park, far downstream near the Gulf Coast, focuses on coastal ecosystems.

These parks serve a dual purpose. They get people outdoors, which is good for public health and builds political support for conservation. But they also generate modest revenue and give the LCRA a public face beyond anonymous power lines and industrial facilities.

The LBJ Connection

You cannot understand the LCRA without understanding Lyndon Baines Johnson.

In the 1930s, Johnson was a young congressman representing the Texas Hill Country—poor, rural, and largely without electricity. He recognized that the LCRA's new dams could transform the region, bringing electric lights, refrigerators, and running water to communities that had never known such conveniences.

Johnson worked tirelessly to connect rural electric cooperatives to the LCRA's hydroelectric power. He badgered bureaucrats, courted voters, and made rural electrification a cornerstone of his political identity. When he later became Senate Majority Leader, Vice President, and finally President, he never forgot those early battles to bring power to the Hill Country.

Lake LBJ, formed by Wirtz Dam, is named in his honor. So, in a sense, is the entire model of public power serving rural communities that the LCRA pioneered.

Environmental Tensions

Operating a utility in the 21st century means navigating constant environmental tradeoffs.

The LCRA runs an environmental laboratory and monitors water quality throughout the lower Colorado River basin. It regulates septic systems and on-site sewage facilities to prevent contamination of waterways. It offers conservation programs to help water users reduce waste.

But it also burns coal and natural gas, contributing to the carbon emissions that are warming the planet and intensifying the very droughts that strain its water supplies. It operates dams that alter river ecosystems, blocking fish migration and changing sediment flows. And it must balance the demands of cities, farmers, industries, and environmentalists who all want different things from the same limited resource.

There are no easy answers here. Every megawatt of renewable energy the LCRA adds is good for the climate. But Texas's explosive population growth keeps pushing demand higher, and the state's political leadership has shown limited interest in aggressive decarbonization. The LCRA, created by that same legislature, can only move as fast as its political environment permits.

Community Investment

Beyond power and water, the LCRA runs what it calls the Community Development Partnership Program. Since 1995, this initiative has distributed nearly $42 million in matching grants to 1,491 community projects.

These are generally small-bore improvements: playground equipment, volunteer fire department gear, community center renovations. They won't transform the region's economy. But they build goodwill, give local officials something tangible to celebrate, and remind everyone that the LCRA sees itself as more than just a faceless utility.

The Bigger Picture

The Lower Colorado River Authority represents a distinctly American approach to managing natural resources: not quite public, not quite private, accountable to the legislature but self-funded, serving the public interest while operating like a business.

It has weathered droughts, floods, financial crises, and the radical transformation of the energy industry. It has made mistakes—every organization spanning nine decades has—but it has also electrified remote communities, created beloved public spaces, and kept water flowing to a million people in one of the fastest-growing regions of the country.

The challenges ahead are formidable. Climate change is making droughts more severe and floods more intense. The Texas grid, as Winter Storm Uri demonstrated, remains vulnerable to extreme weather. Population growth shows no signs of slowing, putting ever-greater pressure on limited water supplies. And the transition away from fossil fuels, while technologically possible, remains politically contentious.

What began with a bankrupt dam and a bold legislative experiment continues today, shaped by decisions made over nearly a century but facing a future that will demand even bolder thinking.