Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa says she will freeze electricity rates within one hour of taking office, but nobody has shown the law that lets her do it.
Quick Take
- Hinojosa pledges to suspend the gas and diesel tax and freeze electricity rates her first hour in office
- Texas electricity prices climbed roughly 40 percent in five years, driven partly by data center demand
- Legal scholars doubt high costs qualify as a “disaster” under the Texas Disaster Act
- Retail providers, not the governor, set most residential power prices in Texas’s competitive market
What Hinojosa Actually Promised
Hinojosa made the pledge in writing, quoted by The Texas Tribune: within an hour of taking the oath, she would declare a high-cost emergency and issue an executive order suspending the gas and diesel tax while freezing electricity rates. It’s a bold, specific promise. Voters love specifics. But specifics also invite scrutiny, and this one is already getting plenty.
Why Texans Are Angry About Their Power Bills
The anger isn’t invented. Texas electricity prices rose about 40 percent over five years, according to KPRC’s reporting, which also described Hinojosa’s plan to shift more costs onto big power users like data centers. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas fielded 225 new large-load applications in 2023 alone, with tracked requests topping 233 gigawatts, much of it from data centers, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence operations.
Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa says she will declare a "high-cost emergency" and freeze residential electricity rates within an hour of taking office.
The plan clashes with Texas' competitive energy market, where over 100 retail providers compete for consumers under a…
— Conservative Tara (@TaralovesTrump) November 10, 2026
Making data centers pay more for grid upgrades is not a crazy idea on its face. Somebody has to cover the cost of plugging in thousands of new server farms, and it shouldn’t automatically be grandma’s thermostat budget. The real question is whether shifting that cost actually frees up enough money to freeze what everyone else pays. Nobody has published that math yet.
The Legal Hole in the Plan
Fox News reported that Hinojosa’s team has not identified a statute authorizing a unilateral rate freeze. Legal scholar Zachary Loris told the outlet that courts and policymakers would likely be skeptical that high electricity costs count as the kind of disaster the Texas Disaster Act was written to cover. Energy economist Nick Loris echoed the doubt, warning that the Act may not stretch that far.
Loris raised a second worry beyond legality. If power suppliers can’t recover the costs they actually incur, he said, that leaves them worse off and “more vulnerable” to failing at their basic job: keeping the lights on. That’s not a partisan talking point. That’s basic supply-and-demand logic that applies whether a Democrat or Republican signs the order.
Who Really Sets Your Electric Bill
Here’s the part that gets lost in the headlines. Texas runs a deregulated, competitive retail electricity market. Retail providers, not state regulators, set most residential prices. A University of Houston energy expert told KPRC that the governor has regulatory tools to influence pricing structures but cannot simply mandate lower bills by decree. That gap between promise and power is the whole ballgame here.
Lessons From New Jersey and Winter Storm Uri
New Jersey already tried something similar. Reason reported that the state’s rate freeze covered only part of residents’ bills, and one customer said her electricity bill “nearly doubled” even after the freeze took effect. Freezing the sticker price doesn’t erase the supply and transmission costs utilities still have to pay somebody, somehow.
Texas has its own cautionary tale. During Winter Storm Uri in 2021, wholesale prices hit the state’s legal maximum of $9,000 per megawatt-hour for roughly four days, and some customers on variable plans faced bills as high as $5,000 for less than a week of power. University of Houston economist Ed Hirs has argued Texas leans on high prices precisely to pull more generation online when the grid is stressed. Suppressing that price signal, critics say, risks the opposite of relief: shortages when demand spikes hardest.
What Happens Next
Hinojosa takes office facing a Republican-controlled Senate with a veto-proof majority, which makes any legislative fix to cost allocation or market rules a heavy lift. Without an actual executive order, a named statute, or a public cost model showing the freeze pencils out, this remains a campaign promise facing a legal and market reality that doesn’t bend easily to good intentions, however popular they may be with frustrated ratepayers.
Sources:
foxnews.com, texastribune.org, fourweekmba.com, ksat.com, houstonchronicle.com, click2houston.com
