Electricity

Timberwood is in the deregulated part of the Texas electricity market, which means the wires and the bill come from two different companies.

Two companies

CenterPoint Energy is the transmission and distribution utility. They own the poles, the wires and the meter, they restore power after a storm, and they cannot be chosen or changed. In their own words, "We deliver but do not sell electricity."¹ They deliver "on behalf of 85 retail electric providers" across a 5,000 square mile area.² Outages go to CenterPoint no matter who bills you.

The retail electric provider is whoever sells the electricity, and that one is a free choice among dozens of companies. Switching does not involve any physical work, any interruption, or anyone visiting the house. The same CenterPoint wires deliver it either way.

How the pricing works

Every plan comes with an Electricity Facts Label, and state rules make it quote the average price at exactly three usage levels for a house: 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh a month.³ A plan that looks cheap at 2,000 kWh can be expensive at 800. The advertised number is close to meaningless without knowing actual usage.

Watch for a minimum usage fee. The commission's own guidance says the levels where a plan "might incur a fee are less than 500 or 1,000 kWh", and different companies give that fee different names, so it has to be read off the label.⁴

The state runs a comparison site, powertochoose.org, "the official and unbiased electric choice website of the Public Utility Commission of Texas".⁵ It is a list, not a recommendation: the site "is available to all electric providers to list their offers for free".⁵ It does not rank plans by what your house would actually pay.

The usable approach: pull twelve months of actual kWh from past bills, then compare plans against that usage rather than against the advertised figure.

Worth knowing

• A contract that ends without action rolls over. The commission's guidance: renew or pick a new provider before the contract ends "in order to prevent being automatically switched to a month-to-month, variable rate plan".⁴ That holdover rate is typically well above anything on offer, and the renewal notice is the moment to act.
• Early termination fees are common on fixed plans, and moving cancels them. State rules say there "must be no early termination fee assessed to the customer as a result of the customer's relocation" as long as you give a forwarding address and, if asked, evidence you left.³
• A contract covers one address. Move, and "the customer is under no obligation to continue the contract at another location".³

Outages

Report to CenterPoint, not to the retailer: 713-207-2222, which is also the number for a downed line.¹ A gas leak is a different number, 888-876-5786.¹ CenterPoint also runs an outage tracker whose data refreshes "every five minutes".⁶ See storms and outages.

Still open

Which retailers neighbors here have actually used, what they paid, and who handled a billing dispute well. Also whether anyone has had a deposit waived, and on what basis, which providers do not publish.

See also

• Storms and outages
• Internet