Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa says she will freeze residential electricity rates within an hour of taking office, a move that energy policy experts warn clashes with state law and could trigger immediate legal challenges.
“On Day One as governor, I’ll freeze residential electricity rates and make corporations finally pay their fair share,” Hinojosa said in an interview with a local energy data group. She repeated the pledge to the Texas Tribune: “Within an hour of taking the oath of office, I will declare a high-cost emergency in the state of Texas and issue an emergency executive order to … freeze electricity rates.”
Hinojosa won her gubernatorial race on Nov. 3 and is set to be sworn in on Jan. 19, 2027.
Her plan depends on invoking the Texas Disaster Act to declare a “high-cost emergency,” a legal maneuver that Nick Loris, president of the conservative-aligned C3 Solutions energy coalition, says is likely to draw fire from energy providers the moment it’s signed.
“The Texas Disaster Act lets the governor declare disasters and suspend the regulatory laws and statutes that are in existence. But I think there is a high degree of skepticism, both from courts but also from state policymakers, that this warrants such a claim — and that it is such a disaster,” Loris told Fox News Digital.
“I would imagine if there were legal challenges, it would come from those affected parties,” he added.
A Free Market Built by Law
Texas runs one of the most deregulated electricity markets in the country, a system built on 1999’s Senate Bill 7. That law opened most of the state to retail choice, letting residents pick from competing retail electric providers starting in 2002. The Legislature wrote into the statute that electricity “is not a monopoly warranting regulation of rates” and that prices “should be determined by customer choices and the normal forces of competition.”
Today Texans can choose among more than 100 retail electric providers, picking short-term or long-term contracts and different fuel sources. Loris compared it to picking cereal off a grocery shelf: a market with real options, driven by price competition rather than a government-set rate.
A statewide freeze, he argues, would strip that system of its core mechanism.
“If the electricity suppliers are not covering the costs that they incur, that’s going to leave them worse off and make it more vulnerable for them to adequately provide that power,” Loris said. “Price signals really kind of act like a traffic light. They tell people when to speed up, when to slow down, or when to come to a full stop.”
Hinojosa’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how she would respond if a rate freeze led to supply shortages.
