Texas Bills Explained

2025 Texas sessionsRegular and both called sessions have ended. This index covers House and Senate bills, not resolutions. Statuses come from official reports.

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2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB1584

Covered electric utilities must keep a list of priority facilities in their retail service areas, including each facility's name, type and address.

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Official caption: Relating to the creation of a list of priority facilities by electric utilities.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): Hull, Metcalf, Lalani, Leo Wilson. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.

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Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.

Bill highlights

Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.

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What does it do?

Covered electric utilities must keep a list of priority facilities in their retail service areas, including each facility’s name, type and address. The list covers nursing facilities, assisted-living facilities, end-stage renal disease facilities and facilities providing hospice services, plus facilities where electricity is crucial for public safety. The law gives examples: hospitals, police and fire stations, critical water or wastewater facilities, and confinement facilities operated by or under contract with any division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Final law; cross-referenced Utilities Code 38.072(b).

A utility must provide a website mechanism for a facility to request inclusion, and may add the applicant only if it qualifies. A facility can separately ask whether it is on the list; the utility must answer within 14 days after receiving that request. That is a deadline for the status response, not a promise to restore power within 14 days.

When the governor declares a natural disaster or other emergency affecting the utility’s service area, the utility must provide the list to the Texas Division of Emergency Management. The submitted list is confidential and exempt from public disclosure under the Public Information Act. The Public Utility Commission may establish additional processes to protect consumer information. The public website request mechanism is not a requirement to publish the facility list. Final law, Section 1.

The new list does not guarantee uninterrupted electricity or a particular restoration order. Existing law separately addresses restoration priorities for certain medical facilities and permits utility discretion based on needs and geography. “Electric utility” is a defined legal category, not every electricity seller: the general definition excludes municipal corporations, electric cooperatives and retail electric providers, among others. HB1584 does not expressly extend its new list obligation to those excluded categories. Utilities Code 31.002(6); existing restoration provisions.

The law took effect September 1, 2025. Official history.

What changed along the way?

The introduced bill would have required the Public Utility Commission to adopt eligibility criteria and sent lists to applicable local emergency-management agencies. The House committee substitute instead put public-safety examples directly in the statute, added state prison and contracted confinement facilities, specified the retail service area, measured the response deadline from the utility’s receipt of a request, sent lists to the state emergency-management division, and made those submitted lists confidential. The House-passed and Senate committee texts retained that substitute. Text-version index.

The amendment index lists one amendment: Charles Schwertner’s Senate amendment F1, adopted May 21. It required each entry to contain the facility’s name, type and address and allowed additional commission processes to protect consumer information. Both changes survived in the enrolled law. The House concurred on May 28; there was no conference committee. Full amendment.

For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.

Official bill versions

Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.

Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?

Emergency managers and facilities serving vulnerable people may benefit from better identification of sites needing attention during a disaster. Facilities gain an application channel and a timely way to check whether they are listed. Covered utilities must maintain the data, handle requests and transmit lists during declared emergencies. Confidentiality protects sensitive facility information but limits public access to the submitted list.

The May 21, 2025 fiscal note for the Senate-passed bill anticipates no significant state fiscal impact, assuming costs can be absorbed with existing resources. It also identifies an unquantified local-government impact, describing list-maintenance duties for “local utilities.” That fiscal description should not be read as changing the statute’s definition of electric utility. The note supplies no dollar estimate, no quantified two-year or five-year projection, and no estimate of individual customers’ bills.

Review boundary: Both final sections, all five bill versions, the sole amendment and its recorded disposition, all five fiscal-note postings, and the incorporated facility list and utility definition were checked. No claim is made that a particular facility is listed, that all utilities have complied, or that inclusion ensures restoration ahead of every other customer.

Official sources

Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.