Lois Kolkhorst: The Senator Who Wrote the Brake

Who is Lois Kolkhorst, and why does she have a Bitcoin page?

Because she wrote the only Texas bill the Bitcoin mining industry has ever had to organize against. Kolkhorst is a Brenham native – Texas Christian University, a collegiate golfer, president of the Washington County Chamber of Commerce – who served seven terms in the House from 2001 and won Senate District 18 in a December 2014 special election.^[2][1] Texas Monthly put her on its Best Legislators list in 2007 and its Worst in 2017, for the bathroom bill; the magazine called her one of the smartest members of the chamber both times.^[22] She chairs Health and Human Services and sits on Business and Commerce, the committee that owns the grid and through which every Texas mining and reserve bill has passed.^[1][3] The chairman of that committee, who wrote the reserve, is on Charles Schwertner and Bitcoin; this is the member of it who wrote the brake.

What did Kolkhorst do with gold before she touched Bitcoin?

She put Texas in the vault business. In 2015 Kolkhorst was the Senate sponsor of Representative Giovanni Capriglione's HB 483, the Texas Bullion Depository – the first state-run precious-metals depository in America.^[4] Her case was a storage bill: the University of Texas endowment held 5,610 gold bars in a Manhattan vault, paying New York for the privilege.^[5] “New York will hate this,” she said. “To me, that and the fact that it will save Texas money makes it a golden idea.”^[5] Abbott signed it June 19, 2015.^[4] The point matters for what follows: the senator the industry would later cast as anti-Bitcoin is a hard-money legislator by record, one who wants the state to own the asset and keep it at home. Her quarrel was never with the coin. The depository's author, and his own reserve record, is on Giovanni Capriglione and Bitcoin; the two hard monies are compared on Texas gold vs. Bitcoin.

What was SB 1751, and where did it come from?

From the committee's own interim hearing. In 2022, between sessions, Business and Commerce took up its charge on blockchain and the electricity market and heard testimony that new mining load could reach 37 gigawatts, with no requirement that large flexible loads register with ERCOT at all.^[8] Kolkhorst filed the answer on March 7, 2023, in three parts.^[6] Register: any facility expecting more than 10 megawatts within two years registers with the Public Utility Commission within one business day of its power agreement, with five years of demand projections.^[7] Cap: registered mines may join ERCOT's paid demand-response programs – the ones that compensate large loads for powering down when the grid is stressed – only while all such mines together are under 10% of program load.^[7] End the abatements: no taxing unit may grant a Chapter 312 property-tax abatement on a mining facility.^[7] The statute-by-statute context is on the Texas Bitcoin law timeline; the mines it was aimed at are on the Texas mining map.

How did Kolkhorst argue for it?

As a subsidy question, in her own committee, on March 28, 2023. “We're trying to produce all this new power. We're going to have a lot of this new power taken up by virtual currency mining. And then we're going to pay them to go off the grid at different times, which I believe is a part of their business model.”^[10] The abatement ban, she said, follows from growth that is “already projected” without help; the bill “rightsizes” and “it's not a punitive bill.”^[10][11][12] The witness list was the whole Texas argument in one room: the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and Concerned Citizens of Navarro County for; Riot Platforms and US Bitcoin Corp against; the Texas Blockchain Council, ERCOT, and the electric cooperatives registered “on.”^[9] Riot's Pierre Rochard answered the abatement clause with Rockdale: miners are the town's largest employer and the largest taxpayer to its school district.^[10] The cooperatives asked for something harder than her cap – a rule that mines shed before any residential customer in an emergency.^[10] The committee sent it out 11–0 on April 4; the Senate passed it 30–1 on April 12.^[6][13][16]

Why did SB 1751 die?

Because the House was the industry's chamber and the bill was never called. Between the committee vote and the floor vote, the opposition organized: Parker Lewis and Will Cole published an open letter to Kolkhorst on April 7 calling the bill “misinformed, discriminatory, anti-competitive, harmful to grid stability, bad for consumers and a strategic setback for Texas,” and the Texas Blockchain Council launched “Don't Mess With Texas Innovation.”^[15][14] Lee Bratcher's line was the one the industry kept: the senator was “well-intentioned, has the best interest of her constituents at heart, but is just being fed bad information.”^[14] Marathon's chief executive said out loud what everyone knew – the House was “much more aligned with the positive aspects and the benefits of bitcoin mining.”^[16] The bill reached House State Affairs on April 24 and sat; the session ended May 29 with no hearing.^[6][17] Eleven days later the governor signed the two bills the industry could live with: SenatorJohnson's SB 1929, registration above 75 megawatts, and Capriglione's HB 591, the flared-gas exemption.^[18] The people who beat her are on Lee Bratcher and Bitcoin and Parker Lewis and Bitcoin; the bill sits with the session's other casualties on the bills that died.

The honest counterweight: the number, the neighbors, and the half that passed

On this site the counterweight usually runs against the subject. Here it runs the other way, because the record after the bill died is not kind to the case against it. Five months after sine die, Riot reported $31.7 million in power and demand-response credits for August 2023 alone – more than all of 2022 – for curtailing Rockdale through the heat wave.^[19] The industry read the number as the grid working; the senator's side read it as the subsidy she had named in March, at scale. Both readings are on the record and the sentence “part of their business model” fits either.^[10] Then the neighbors: by 2025, residents of Granbury living beside a 300-megawatt mine were lobbying the Legislature to resurrect SB 1751, and went home with nothing.^[21] And the half that passed: the registration requirement she wrote for 10 megawatts became law at 75 under Johnson's name in 2023, and in 2025 the large-load law authored by King and Schwertner – interconnection standards and emergency curtailment for every load above 75 megawatts – put the register-and-curtail architecture of her bill at the center of state policy, with her name nowhere on it.^[18][20] Her own 2025 session was SB 17 and SB 25; she filed nothing on mining.^[23]

The fair reading, from a site that is bullish on the industry she tried to constrain: the cap was the wrong instrument and the registry was the right one, and the Legislature sorted them correctly. A 10% ceiling on the most flexible load in ERCOT would have thrown away the grid's cheapest emergency reserve to make a point about who gets paid; the open letter was right about that, and so were the cooperatives, who wanted the mines shed first, not shut out. But the registry, the projections, and the curtailment authority she asked for in 2023 are exactly what the state reached for when the data centers arrived, and the abatement question she raised is now being asked about loads ten times the size of any mine. The senator who wrote the brake lost the vote that mattered and set the terms of the one that followed.

Where does the Kolkhorst record stand today?

As of September 2026: SB 1751 is dead, SB 1929 and SB 6 are law, and the large-load question has outgrown Bitcoin. Kolkhorst advanced from the March 3, 2026 Republican primary and faces Democrat Erica Gillum for Senate District 18 on November 3.^[24] The 90th Legislature convenes January 12, 2027 with AI data centers, not miners, as the load the grid is arguing about, and with the one senator who tried to cap a load in 2023 still seated on Business and Commerce.^[1] The state that declined her cap now owns the coin: the reserve her committee later passed is on the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve reference, and the lieutenant governor who shares her position – bullish on the asset, tough on the load – is on Dan Patrick and Bitcoin. This page is the senator who wrote it down first.