On May 19, 2025 that TXNM Energy, the parent company of Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), announced it had entered into an agreement where Blackstone Infrastructure would acquire TXNM Energy. PNM is the largest electricity provider in New Mexico serving nearly 550,000 customers.
PNM issued a press release on the sale that said in part:
“The acquisition agreement keeps PNM headquartered in New Mexico and retains local management and employees, while providing financial strength for long-term investment to support New Mexico’s transition to carbon-free electricity and to serve growing electricity demand. … Under the terms of the agreement, Blackstone Infrastructure will acquire TXNM Energy for $61.25 per share upon closing, reflecting a total enterprise value of $11.5 billion, including net debt (excluding securitization debt) and preferred stock. TXNM Energy’s stock would no longer be publicly traded.”
The key terms of the Blackstone offer to purchase PNM are:
- PURCHASE PRICE: $61.25 per share in cash (all-cash).
- ENTERPRISE VALUE:$11.5 billion (including net debt, excluding securitization debt, and preferred stock).
- PREMIUM:23% above TXNM’s unaffected 30-day VWAP as of early March 2025.
- STRUCTURE: Troy Parent Co LLC (Blackstone Infrastructure affiliate) acquires TXNM; PNM stays headquartered in New Mexico with local management.
- INTERIM EQUITY: Blackstone bought $400 million of newly issued TXNM shares at $50/share in 2025. The PRC later ruled it illegal (no prior approval) and ordered a full reversal at shareholder expense, with penalties.
- TIMELINE: Originally H2 2026; extended to termination date May 31, 2027. Shareholder approval obtained August 2025.
- REGULATORY STATUS: Approved by PUCT, FERC, FCC, HSR. New Mexico PRC and NRC still outstanding. PRC process paused pending stock-sale compliance.
- COMMITMENTS: Keep corporate headquarters and local management in New Meico; honor unions; minimum 10-year hold; claimed $175 million customer/community benefits (including large rate credit); ring-fencing and continued PRC rate authority.
- TERMINATION FEES: Blackstone-side termination fee reduced from $350M to $175M in the July 2026 extension.
GUEST OPINION COLUMN
This is a second and follow-up guest opinion column to the August 26 article posted (see link in postscript) provided by long time reader of www.PeteDinelli.com. The reader was born and raised in New Mexico, was self-employed in the private sector, is now fully retired, and has decades of experience with New Mexico Government and politics including lobbying. The article was provided with the understanding that the author’s identity would not be disclosed and identity would remain strictly confidential to preserve privacy.
An Open Warning To New Mexico On What You Will Not Be Able To Take Back Once PNM Is Sold To Blackstone; A Public Challenge To Deb Haaland and Gregg Hull To Take A Firm Position Before November 3, 2026 Election.
If Troy Parent Co and Blackstone is allowed to close on TXNM Energy, New Mexico will still have a flag, a Public Regulation Commission, and a governor. It will not have the owner of its largest electric utility. That is the part no later statute, no later protest, and no later inauguration can quietly restore.
This is not a routine change of shareholders. It is one of the most consequential issues now sitting in front of New Mexicans and the two people asking to be governor — and it has been treated as if it were a technical filing in Santa Fe rather than a decision about who will control the grid, and how affordable that grid will be, for a generation.
The bid is $61.25 a share in cash. The enterprise value is about $11.5 billion. Texas has approved a settlement. Federal agencies have cleared their pieces. Shareholders have already voted yes. The remaining gate is New Mexico. The companies have already had to unwind a $400 million stock purchase the PRC found was completed without the prior approval state law requires, and they have already pushed the closing clock to May 31, 2027. Capital moved first. The statute caught up later. That is not a footnote. It is a preview.
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s published position is not naïve. It is lame because it answers the wrong question. She is right that the PRC must do its job and that New Mexico needs private capital for reliability and the 2045 carbon-free mandate. She then treats those two truths as if they settle the ownership fight. They do not. “Let the Commission decide” is what a governor says when she does not want to say who should own the company. “We need private capital” is treated as if Blackstone were the only private capital on offer. Citizen shareholders, New Mexico institutions, and permanent-fund financing are also private capital — they simply keep the residual owner in New Mexico. Regulation after closing is damage control, not a strategy. New Mexicans are entitled to know whether the most powerful official still in the building has been influenced by the buyer while telling the state to stand back and let the process run.
THE SHORTFALLS AFTER CLOSING
You will not choose the owner again. After the merger, no New Mexico shareholder list matters. Citizens, tribes, pensions, and local institutions cannot buy the stock their rates helped build. The owner is a fund complex whose duty runs to limited partners worldwide.
You will not keep the upside your bills create. PNM’s value is not invented on Park Avenue. Monopoly territory, rate base, the Energy Transition Act, and transmission and generation New Mexicans will pay for over decades create it. Blackstone is paying a premium because it expects that future. If the bet is good, the appreciation leaves the state. If it is bad, the pressure to recover fund returns does not leave with it. Affordability and control are not separate problems. They are the same problem seen from two sides of the meter.
You will not control the clock. A promised ten-year hold is not permanence. Funds have harvest dates, successor vehicles, recapitalizations, and secondary sales. New Mexico will not vote on the next buyer. The PRC may review a later transfer. Review is not a choice.
You will face a parent that is also one of the hungriest new customers in the American power system. Blackstone already holds a 19.9 percent stake in Indiana’s NIPSCO. It owns QTS, among the world’s largest data-center platforms. It is putting billions into gas-generation joint ventures built to feed AI load. In Georgia, a QTS campus used roughly 30 million gallons of water through connections the local utility failed to bill properly. In Virginia, QTS abandoned a massive campus after years of community revolt. A parent that earns returns from data centers and from plants built for those centers will see a regulated utility as two things at once: a stable asset and a gate to electrons. Memos can forbid the worst self-dealing. They cannot forbid the incentive.
You will inherit a record, not a theory. UN housing experts accused Blackstone of aggravating a global rent crisis. Denmark passed a law people still call the Blackstone law. A Blackstone-owned plant-cleaning company was fined after the Labor Department found more than a hundred children in hazardous overnight jobs. None of that proves PNM rates will jump next year. All of it proves the parent is built to take returns from essential assets, and that communities have repeatedly discovered the limits of their leverage after closing.
DAVID AND GOLIATH WITH THE ROLES REVERSED
Call it David and Goliath — with the roles reversed. Goliath is Blackstone: $1.35 trillion under management as of June 30, 2026, and about $962 billion in fee-earning assets. David is PNM: an $11.5 billion grid that only looks big until you stand it next to the giant. That purchase is 0.85 percent of what Blackstone already runs — 85 cents of every $100 in the empire. Blackstone is 117 times the deal. New Mexico cannot live without the lights. Blackstone can live without New Mexico. In the old story, the small one wins. In this one, the small one is the prize. Blackstone’s infrastructure arm alone is on the order of $90 billion, with portfolio companies — where it owns 20 percent or more — carrying about $218 billion in enterprise value at acquisition. The firm sits above a web of funds, blockers, and special-purpose vehicles of which Troy Parent Co is the only one. New Mexico’s permanent funds total about $75 billion. A vast empire of that size, with its many subsidiaries and affiliates, will be a financial giant Santa Fe will have little to no practical influence over once the shares leave public hands. That is not an insult to New Mexico. It is arithmetic.
THE IGNORED CHOICE
The choice is not Blackstone or a state-run utility. Pure state ownership would politicize rates and capital budgets. Pure Wall Street ownership exports the residual control and the residual profit. Electricity distribution is a business. It should earn a reasonable return. That return should accrue first to New Mexicans who put capital at risk—citizens, tribes, local institutions—with permanent funds supplying patient financing that can out-earn their conservative ~7 percent targets. A conservative 8 percent on a New Mexico-held equity stake of $5–6 billion would keep about $400–480 million a year of value in-state. That path treats the grid as both a public necessity and a commercial enterprise.
THE CHALLENGE TO THE CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR
Democrate Nominee for Governor Deb Haaland has said New Mexicans want a utility that puts ratepayers ahead of shareholders and that she is not convinced a private-equity merger is the best path. That is skepticism. It is not yet a plan.
Republican Nominee for Governor Gregg Hull has not put a detailed public position on this transaction before the state. November 3 will not wait for a 2027 closing.
The next governor will either live inside the ownership structure locked in before the oath, or spend scarce capital trying to unwind what a predecessor allowed.
Before Election Day, both candidates should answer — in public, in writing, without hedging:
Do you support or oppose the Blackstone / Troy Parent Co acquisition of TXNM and PNM as now structured?
If you oppose it, will you actively champion a New Mexico alternative — citizen shareholders and local institutions, with the State as financier through the permanent funds, not as the operating owner?
If the PRC approves the sale, what specific tools will your administration use to protect affordability and keep residual control from drifting further out of state?
Have you, your campaign, your running mate, or any political committee supporting you received campaign contributions, gifts, paid travel, plane rides, fundraising events, bundled donations, or any other thing of value from Blackstone Inc., Troy Parent Co, Blackstone Infrastructure, any Blackstone fund or portfolio company, any Blackstone affiliate or shareholder, or any lawyer, lobbyist, consultant, or intermediary acting for them? If yes, disclose the dates, amounts, and nature of each. If not, say so in writing.
Will you accept a New Mexico grid whose residual owner is a $1.35 trillion global platform that also builds the data centers competing for the same electrons or will you fight, before closing, for citizen shareholders and New Mexico financing?
New Mexicans are entitled to know whether anyone asking for the authority to shape this sale has already taken money or favors from the buyer’s orbit. Silence on that question is an answer.
Keep the lights on. Keep the ownership in New Mexico.
Links to related blog articles are here: