Jaemes Shanley Guest Opinion Column: The Public Regulation Commission Should Say NO To Blackstone Inc. Acquisition Of PNM; We Won’t Know What We’ve Got ‘Till It’s Gone! |

Jaemes Shanley is a retired business executive who resides in the Mark Twain neighborhood in Albuquerque’s mid heights. He is the President of the Mark Twain Neighborhood Association and the Vice President of the District 7 Neighborhood Coalition comprised of over 10 neighborhood associations. Mr. Shanley has been connected to Albuquerque since 1969 and a continuous resident since 2006 after extended periods residing and working in Australia, Tokyo, Japan, and Boston, MA.

Jaemes Shanley submitted the below guest opinion column to be published on www.PeteDinelli.com on the proposed Blackstone, Inc acquisition of the Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM). The acquisition must be approved by the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission who are currently holding hearing on the proposed acquisition. Mr. Shanley’s guest column is being published as a public service announcement to educate the public. Jaemes Shanley has given his consent to publish his article with no compensation.

The Public Regulation Commission Should Say NO To Blackstone, Inc. Acquisition Of PNM

We Won’t Know What We’ve Got ‘Till It’s Gone!

By Jaemes Shanley

On Thursday afternoon, February 5^th in the hearing room of the Public Regulation Commission at 4100 Osuna NE, a startlingly large number of New Mexicans of diverse age, gender, and ethnicity gathered to express their opinions about the proposed acquisition of Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), our largest utility and supplier of electricity to a majority of NM residents, by private equity firm Blackstone Inc.. The Commissioners appeared surprised by the numbers, which filled the room to overflowing, with many required to stand, and people lined up out of the room in the hallway. By the standard of City Council meetings I have recently attended, the event was relatively orderly, though not as quiet as Commissioners wished. Opinions expressed, by my estimate, were 20 or more to 1 against the acquisition.

After 3 hours of continuous comment and many still waiting to speak, Commissioners closed the session and have scheduled it to resume as a virtual meeting at 3pm on February 12^th

(https://www.prc.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026.02.12-Notice-of-Public-Comment-Hearing-25-00060.pdf ).

The following day, Friday, February 6^th, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) approved the proposed acquisition of Texas-New Mexico Power Company (TXNM), sole owner of PNM, based on their determination the acquisition is “in the public interest”. As a member of the “public” in New Mexico, I must confess to being unaccustomed to my “interest” being determined by an agency of the Texas state government.

PNM, which serves 550,000 NM customers, is the larger of two utility entities wholly owned by TXNM, the other being Texas New Mexico Power (TNMP) which serves 260,000 homes and businesses across Texas. TXNM annual revenue is approx. $2.2 billion, of which more than 62% is derived from New Mexico.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

The enticements being offered by Blackstone to TXNM shareholders, of which over 84% are institutional investors, are not trivial. Their offer price per share is at a 23% premium over the prevailing share trading price prior to the offer, a $1.4 billion “bonus”.

Rate paying PNM customers are also being offered some financial scraps in exchange for their future vassalage to a New York company whose assets under management exceed the GDP of all but the world’s 21 largest nations. The financial incentives being offered are:

$105 million in rate credits over the 4 years after acquisition. That translates to $3.98 per customer per month for 48 months. Truly life changing!
$10 million over 10 years for Good Neighbor Fund support to low-income customers. If 5% of PNM customers are low income that will translate into a whopping $3.03 per month in assistance for a decade most if not all of it likely to be consumed by future rate increases.
$35 million for economic development and workforce training; offered once in exchange for harvesting over $1.4 billion per year in revenues, until they start squeezing the PRC for even more.
$25 million for clean technology investments. Really!? At this stage of threat from climate change, Blackstone promises to invest, over an unspecified period, just 1.8% of one year’s gross PNM revenue?

The shareholders of TXNM, including managers with stock rights incentives, are undoubtedly thrilled by their financial windfall should this acquisition be approved. A $1.4 billion share price bonus is nothing to sneer at. Let us not be surprised nor outraged if they favor this deal.

The electricity rate payers of New Mexico, on the other hand, should the deal be approved, will mourn their further subjugation to the whims and arbitrary extraction of their money, without effective recourse, by an entity headquartered in New York in exchange for a few “crumbs” of short-term rates relief.

To those who will claim that a Blackstone owned and controlled PNM will still be subject to PRC oversight and approval of rate increases etc., please consider the position of the PRC when Blackstone is able to “engineer” the financials and infrastructure it fully and privately controls to threaten brownouts or blackouts, selectively or broadly, if it does not receive approval for rate increases it demands so it can deliver returns on invested capital to its real customers, the already uber-wealthy investors in its managed funds.

WHAT IS PRIVATE EQUITY AND WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MUCH MONEY TO SPEND?

In the simplest of terms, private equity is the vast ocean of capital that results when a nation transitions its focus from spending priorities with longer term horizons like manufacturing, infrastructure, R&D, and maintaining an upwardly mobile middle class, to prioritizing short term financial return. Among the byproducts of that transition are widening income inequality, growing pools of excess wealth needing to be invested, and an explosion of mergers and acquisitions no longer restrained by enforcement of antitrust law.

WHO IS BLACKSTONE INC.?

Blackstone, Inc., founded in 1985 by Stephen Schwarzman (current Chairman & CEO) and Peter Peterson, has leveraged the tools of capitalism and favorable tax law to transform $400,000 in seed capital into a market capitalization of $159 billion and a $1.3 trillion portfolio of Assets Under Management with 2025 revenue of $24.22 billion and net income of $5.55 billion.

Their portfolio is highly diversified reflecting no specialization or priority focus. It includes hotels, food, information, business services, specialty retail, medical devices, technology, communications, oil & gas, healthcare, and real estate. Review of their acquisitions reveals only one strategic consistency, the opportunity to extract good returns. An example is their acquisition after the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis of $5.5 billion worth of multi-family homes for rent and sale after prices recovered.

Blackstone has been a public company since 2007 and is therefore bound by fiduciary obligation to prioritize above anything else a positive return for its shareholders. Its fund and operations managers are compensated and incentivized with bonuses based solely on their delivery of returns to their investors at higher rates than bank or treasuries can offer. Customer satisfaction of their acquisitions is irrelevant to that mission.

PUBLIC UTILITIES / PRIVATE EQUITY

When businesses operate in a competitive environment, customers have leverage to demand service because they can take their business elsewhere. A public utility is a de facto monopoly. As customers of PNM, we do not have the option to unplug from their grid and plug in to another. That inescapable fact makes us vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in the wrong hands. Locating those hands in New York is no way to protect the rate paying citizens of New Mexico.

Blackstone has already declared that if successful in their bid, they will take TXNM private, further insulating it from the pernicious influence of public accountability.

The big question now before the 3 member Public Regulation Commission (NMPRC) that will approve or block the sale of PNM/TXNM to Blackstone, is whether or not they will sell our future energy autonomy, security and affordability to an out-of-state entity with intimidating financial power and influence, no commitment to a vision for New Mexico’s energy future, a troubling record of litigation over their management of multiple businesses, and vested interest in companies and industries (i.e.. AI data centers) which can benefit from biased application of rates for electric power.

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY AND NEW MEXICO

New Mexico is a state phenomenally endowed with potential to lead in the transition from carbon-based energy to solar, geo-thermal, and other energy technologies. Electricity will be the currency of that transformation, powering homes, businesses, cars, appliances, communication, data services and manufacturing industry. The capital needed to invest in realization of that potential does not require handing over the keys, control and ultimate benefits to an out-of-state shark pool of the ultra-wealthy.

There could be no wiser nor more appropriate allocation of at least partial support for such capital investments than from State of New Mexico reserves accumulated from oil and gas royalties. Frankly speaking, it is difficult to understand how the State and people of New Mexico would not optimally benefit from an outright acquisition of PNM and making it a Public Service Company in both name and deed. Its financials indicate a solid capacity to match the rate of return New Mexico now enjoys from its +/- $60 billion sovereign wealth fund.

There could be nothing more short-sighted and short-changing of New Mexico citizens than to hand over to a private equity company full ownership of our most promising treasure, a financially established and stable clean energy future fed by the abundant sunshine, wind, and geothermal energy gifted to us.

IF PNM WAS NOT A PRIZE, BLACKSTONE WOULD NOT BE TRYING TO BUY IT!

It is as imprudent to consider surrendering “ownership” of electric power generation and transmission in New Mexico to an out of state entity as it would be to similarly surrender rights and ownership of water and air.

Failure to prevent this out of state acquisition will only further fulfill the dystopian projections of economist Thomas Piketty in 2013, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century predicted that unregulated concentration of ownership and resulting inequality will produce a society of serfs. He asserted that unrestricted market forces had already advanced so far on that trajectory that only government intervention could avert it. Nothing in observable reality over the intervening years, discredits his predictions.

Joni Mitchell also warned us in 1970, with far greater economy of words.

There are now a lot more things threatening paradise than parking lots. We in New Mexico should not let Blackstone Inc. be one of them.

CALL TO ACTION

Members of the public are urged to send written comment about this acquisition to PRC Commissioners using PRCe360 at https://e360.prc.nm.gov/ or can mail letters or statements to each of the Commissioners (Chair Gabriel Aguilera, Greg Nibert, and Pat O’Connell) at P.O. Box 1269, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504.

Individuals who have not previously signed up to comment at the February 5th hearing who wish to comment at the February 12th hearing must sign up by contacting Patrick Rodriguez at public.comment@prc.nm.gov or (505) 490-7910 by 5pm the day before the hearing.

RESPECTFULLY,

Jaemes Shanley

___________________________

POSTSCRIPT

Links to all reference materials relied upon for this article are here:

https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/TXNM/institutional-ownership/

https://www.txnmenergy.com/about-us/at-a-glance.aspx

https://www.pnm.com/acquisition

https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/press-releases/article/corporate-one/press-releases/blackrock-reports-fourth-quarter-2025

https://www.investing.com/news/sec-filings/txnm-energy-inc-approves-new-executive-compensation-plans-93CH-3897979

https://www.sic.state.nm.us/about-the-sic/

https://www.aol.com/news/data-centers-powering-blackstones-1-184937049.html