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When Rudy D. Garza stepped into the interim CEO role at CPS Energy in late 2021, the largest municipally owned natural gas and electricity provider in the country was feeling a bit dimmed. Fuel costs from Winter Storm Uri had created some significant financial challenges for a utility that hadn’t raised base rates in nearly a decade and was under pressure from rating agencies to prove it could steady its business.
“In every difficult moment, I ask myself, ‘What does this organization need me to be right now?’” explains Garza, who was officially appointed CEO in September 2022. In this moment, CPS Energy needed a steady hand, a clear narrative, and a way forward. And they found it in their CEO.
CPS Energy went to their San Antonio-area community with numbers and basic math, explaining how revenue was generated, how it was allocated, and how disciplined investments would protect power reliability for San Antonio residents. Garza and his team were able to secure the first base rate increase, 3.85 percent, in eight years, and paired it with a long-term fuel cost recovery mechanism that spread validated storm-related costs over twenty-five years. That would soften the impact on monthly bills to customers while shoring up cash flow.
These moves, coupled with targeted resilience investments, helped stabilize CPS Energy’s credit outlook with Moody’s and other rating agencies, which cited “numerous steps” taken to prepare the system for future extreme weather while maintaining a focus on affordability.
Looking Toward 2050
One of Garza’s earliest priorities as interim CEO was to convene his leadership team and Board of Trustees to define a focused five-year strategy, Vision 2027, which would keep CPS Energy from drifting into scope creep and pet projects that didn’t align with a broader effort.
Vision 2027 is structured around a handful of core objectives: operational evolution, financial stability, customer experience, team culture, and community partnership and growth, each with clear goals and initiatives.
On the operations side, Garza is driving a transformation of both the grid and the generation fleet. CPS Energy is investing in smart infrastructure across its system, retiring older, less efficient plants and acquiring newer assets around Texas, while continuing to grow its renewable portfolio.
Under his leadership, the utility has increased its power generation capacity by more than 3,300 megawatts through natural gas acquisitions in South Texas and the Houston area, deals he has publicly described as creating more than half a billion dollars in positive net present value through the life of the assets, while improving reliability.
Even as he tightens the five-year playbook, Garza is asking a twenty-five-year question: Will San Antonio have enough reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean energy to support one of the fastest-growing cities in the country?
They’re trying to answer that question through CPS Energy’s Horizon 2050 framework, a long-range roadmap that explores multiple possible futures, from today’s structure to a more competitive market to a more all-encompassing resource strategy that leans into emerging technologies.
A One-Team, Community-First Leader
Garza’s leadership style is deeply rooted in how he grew up: born to teenage parents, raised in a multigenerational household in Corpus Christi, and encouraged by a refinery-worker grandfather who taught him that engineers were ultimately the decision-makers. He chose to study electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin—the hardest major he could find—then added an MBA after an early mentor warned him never to let lack of education cap his opportunities as a young Hispanic professional.
This CEO has a key distinction in that when you talk to him, you can almost immediately forget the billions of dollars under his direction. There is something personable about Garza that is impossible to manufacture. It’s easy to understand how he has connected with San Antonio residents, because it’s easy to believe what he says.
Over more than twenty-five years in the utility and public sectors, Garza has deliberately taken lateral moves (regulatory affairs, operations, customer leadership) to broaden his experience. That breadth now informs his one-team mindset, a core value at CPS Energy that frames the CEO as the least important person in a 3,600-plus employee enterprise where everyone’s contribution is essential.
Garza encourages leaders to risk an occasional failure in pursuit of a great solution.
“Around here, we don’t hammer people when something goes wrong. We do root-cause work so we can learn and get better,” Garza explains. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, and you don’t leave people feeling good by jumping on them for every bad thing that happens.”
The CEO serves on national utility boards to learn from peers and on local civic bodies such as the greater: SATX Regional Economic Partnership executive committee and the Brooks Development Authority Board, where he now serves as vice chair. In 2025, he and his wife Emily cochaired the United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County Community Campaign, helping raise roughly $46.8 million for local nonprofits.
“As a leader of a publicly owned utility, my customers are my owners,” Garza says. “I take that incredibly seriously. I know it drives my team crazy, and they joke that half the community has my phone number. And I tell you what, they use it.”
