The Proposal
What Governor Abbott has actually proposed for CPS Energy, what it would change, and what it would not.
What was announced
On August 5, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott came to San Antonio to promote legislation that would open municipally owned electric utilities — CPS Energy here, Austin Energy in Austin — to retail electricity competition. He described city-owned utilities as monopolies, characterized their rates as “taxation through electricity prices,” and said competition could reduce costs by 10 to 20 percent.Source: coverage
More than five million Texans are served by municipal utilities. Over 60 percent of them are CPS Energy and Austin Energy customers. Any restructuring of this kind would require an act of the Texas Legislature, which next convenes in 2027.
What would change
Under retail competition, you would pick a retail electricity provider that bills you for power. The provider does not generate your electricity and does not own the wires — it buys wholesale power on the ERCOT market and resells it to you.
CPS Energy today does three things at once: it generates and buys power, it delivers it over poles and wires it owns, and it bills you. It is also owned by the City of San Antonio, which is why its profits fund city services instead of shareholders.
What would not change
- Who fixes your power. In deregulated Texas, the local wires company still owns the poles, reads the meter, and restores service after a storm. Switching providers does not change who shows up.
- The delivery charge. Every provider in a given area passes through the identical regulated delivery charge. Nobody competes on it.
- The physics. The same grid, the same generators, the same weather. Competition changes who bills you, not what it costs to produce electricity.
Who actually makes Texas electricity
A retail electricity provider is a billing company. It buys wholesale power on the ERCOT market and resells it to you. Most of them do not own a single generator.
We checked this against the federal record rather than assuming it. Cross-referencing the 49 retail providers currently selling on Power to Choose against every plant operator in EIA Form 923 gives a clear result: 39 of the 49 own no generation at all. Ten trace back to a parent company that does — and those parents are the largest generators in the state.Source: EIA Form 923
Share of all Texas net generation, 2024. Source: EIA Form 923, Schedules 2/3/4/5, 2024 Final Revision — 566,502,688 MWh across 388 operators.
CPS Energy is a genuine power producer, not a reseller. At 22,266,364 MWh it is the third-largest single generating operator in Texas and by far the largest municipally owned one — Austin Energy, the next public utility down, generates about a tenth as much. San Antonio owns real generating assets, not just a billing relationship.Source: EIA Form 923
The honest version of the concern is this: under retail competition, the company that bills you is frequently a marketing operation layered on top of power generated by someone else, and its margin is the reason it exists. That is a structural change in who profits from a service you cannot opt out of buying.
The claim worth checking
The 10 to 20 percent savings figure is the heart of the pitch, and it is checkable. We built a tool that prices every currently advertised fixed-rate offer in each Texas market against the CPS Energy tariff using the same electricity use, and it reports what it finds — including when a competitive offer wins.
What it shows is that savings of that size are real but conditional: they are available to households that shop actively and keep shopping. Roughly a third of Houston offers cost more than CPS for the same usage, and the gap between the best and worst offer in a single market runs to hundreds of dollars a year.Source: method
The question this site is about
Even taking the savings at face value, the money CPS pays the City of San Antonio does not vanish when the utility is opened to competition. It is nearly 30 percent of the city’s General Fund.Source