On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Greg Abbott announced a plan to open parts of the Texas electricity market to retail competition in cities served by municipally owned utilities — most prominently San Antonio, where CPS Energy provides electric and gas service.

Abbott called those municipal utilities "energy monopolies." He said their structure keeps customers from shopping for lower rates. He also attacked what he called a "tax through electricity prices" — the practice of a city-owned utility sending some of its revenue back to the city to pay for public services.

It's a tidy affordability message. There's one problem with it.

CPS Energy already has the cheapest rates in Texas

That's not a talking point from the utility's defenders. It's the utility's response to Abbott, and it's a checkable claim:

"CPS Energy consistently maintains the lowest combined electric and gas residential rates in Texas and high reliability, including compared to investor-owned utilities."

San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones made the same point on KSAT's Q&A:

"San Antonio and Castroville that are both municipally owned utilities actually have the cheapest utility cost when it comes to electricity and gas. So this idea that we're sort of being frivolous and not managing this well is not correct."

So the governor's plan to lower electricity costs starts by dismantling the model that produces the lowest electricity costs in the state.

CPS Energy put the reason plainly: "Our returns benefit the community, with the investment going to our customers rather than private investors." A municipal utility has no shareholders to pay. That's the whole difference — and it's exactly what Abbott's proposal would open up.

Who's been paying for the governor's campaign

Now the part that makes the timing worth examining.

Campaign finance disclosures compiled by Transparency USA, a nonpartisan organization that tracks state-level campaign finance, show entities tied to electricity companies have given to Abbott's campaign in recent reporting periods:

That's $130,000 from the six unambiguous entries, plus Oncor's state PAC — listed in the database at $100,000/$200,000 — bringing the sampled total to at least $230,000.

And KSAT was explicit that this is not the complete picture: the list "is not comprehensive and reflects a sample of donations from electricity-related interests."

The Public Utility Commission of Texas lists roughly 140 certified retail electric providers already operating in the deregulated parts of the state. Those are the companies that would be free to move into San Antonio if Abbott's plan became law. It's unclear how many would, but the opportunity is the point.

Abbott's Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, does not accept donations from corporate PACs at all — including electricity and utility companies. Her campaign confirmed it when KSAT asked.

The timing question nobody will answer

Any restructuring of the municipal utility model would need the Texas Legislature, which doesn't convene again for months. Abbott is running for re-election this year. Energy affordability has become one of the biggest political issues in the state.

KSAT noted that Abbott's office has not publicly explained why the rollout came this week.

That's a small sentence doing a lot of work. A governor announced a major restructuring of how a million people buy electricity, months before the body that would have to pass it even meets, in the middle of his own re-election campaign, and declined to say why now.

We have seen this movie

Abbott's energy positioning has a pattern. Just weeks ago we wrote about how he spent years selling Texas to data centers as the "epicenter of AI development" — handing them the biggest tax break in the country — and then, in an election year, started asking for credit for slowing them down.

The donor pattern repeats too. In July, Texas made delta-8 THC a felony seven years after Abbott signed the law legalizing it — four weeks after the state's biggest beer distributor gave him $500,000.

And it isn't only Texas. In Michigan, John James took nearly $50,000 from DTE and Consumers Energy while both companies were asking regulators to raise rates.

What San Antonio stands to lose

Strip out the language about monopolies and choice, and Abbott's proposal does two concrete things to San Antonio.

It exposes ratepayers who currently have the lowest combined rates in Texas to retail providers who answer to investors. And it goes after the revenue transfer that KSAT reports has long been a significant source of funding for the San Antonio city budget — meaning if that money stops, the city either cuts services or finds the money somewhere else. Abbott calls the transfer a hidden tax. He has not said what replaces it.

There's a version of this debate worth having. Municipal utilities aren't automatically well run, and local control has real costs. But the case for breaking one up gets harder when the utility in question is the cheapest in the state — and considerably harder when the governor making the case has taken at least $230,000 from the industry that would take its place.

Source

"Gov. Abbott's campaign reports donations from utility companies amid push to open San Antonio CPS Energy market", KSAT, August 7, 2026. Donation figures compiled by Transparency USA.