AUSTIN — The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered campaign announced its policy priorities for the 2025 89th Texas Legislative Session. The campaign focuses on making energy more reliable and affordable, as well as improving Texans’ energy IQ across the state. Life:Powered has worked on several successful reforms such as making the electric grid more reliable, combatting energy discrimination and harmful ESG policies, and protecting consumers from burdensome and authoritarian federal regulations.
“Reliable and affordable energy is a foundational building block of a free, secure, and prosperous state,” said Life:Powered’s Policy Director Brent Bennett. “Texas is an energy leader in the world because policymakers prioritize the development of and access to the dependable energy communities need to power their lives. We should continue to focus on making productive reforms to the grid, reducing regulatory burdens, and lowering costs for Texans.”
The Life:Powered campaign’s full legislative action agenda for the 89th regular session includes:
Make the Energy Grid More Reliable: Texas should require all electric generators, not just new ones, to guarantee a certain amount of power to the grid during periods of high demand and to pay for reliability costs when they are unable to provide firm power, instead of socializing those costs to ratepayers as is done now.
Reform Proxy Voting and Investment Standards in Texas Pensions: State pensions that utilize environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices place the financial future of state employees, teachers, and first responders in jeopardy. Texas should prohibit state and local pensions and endowments, as well as their contracted investment managers, from basing investment decisions on ESG criteria and ensure that their fiduciary duty is not muddied by political activism.
Make Texas a World Leader in Nuclear Energy: Nuclear is the safest and cleanest form of electricity production ever devised. Yet, the regulatory environment and subsidies for unreliable wind and solar make it virtually impossible to finance and build new nuclear power plants in Texas and across the country. Texas should work to remove regulatory barriers to nuclear, especially by advocating for changes to federal regulations and finding creative ways to circumvent the barriers those regulations have put up.
Reduce Transmission Costs for Texas Ratepayers: Transmission costs paid by Texas consumers continue to skyrocket, more than doubling over the past decade. The 88th Texas Legislature took the first steps toward requiring new electric generation projects to pay for interconnection costs beyond a certain allowance. Still, more needs to be done to ensure transmission policy in Texas is directed toward investments that serve ratepayers and not toward subsidizing the expansion of unreliable and unneeded new generation.
Reform Municipal Electric Utilities in Texas: Every Texan deserves to have a choice of electricity providers. The Legislature should reform municipal utility governance and expand deregulated electricity markets statewide so that citizens can utilize the free market to gain better service, reliability, and affordability.