Power outages: who to call, and why it is not your retailer
The most common wasted phone call in Texas electricity is to the company on your bill. They are not the ones who can restore your power.
Two companies, two jobs
Your retail electric provider sells you energy and bills you. Your delivery utility owns the poles, wires and meter, and restores service when something breaks. Outages belong entirely to the second one.
That is why calling your retailer about an outage usually ends in being redirected. They have no crews, no line equipment and no visibility into the fault — the same is true of every retailer, so switching does not change who answers.
Report outages to your delivery utility, which is Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas Central, AEP Texas North or Texas-New Mexico Power depending on your address. Their contact details are on your bill, and their outage maps are public.
What switching does not change
Not your restoration priority, not your response time, and not who shows up. Every customer in a delivery territory is served by the same utility on the same terms regardless of which retailer bills them, and a retailer cannot buy you faster service.
It also does not change your equipment. Switching providers involves no visit, no meter change and no interruption, so there is no way for it to affect reliability in either direction.
If a salesperson suggests otherwise, that is a reason to end the conversation rather than to sign.
Where reliability actually varies
By geography and by network, not by retailer. Coastal territories face hurricane risk, West Texas faces long distances and severe weather, and dense urban networks with underground cable behave differently from rural overhead lines.
Those differences are real, and none of them is something you choose when you pick a plan. What you choose is the price of the energy — which is exactly why this site compares plans on cost and says nothing about reliability it cannot substantiate.
The same utility decides your plan choice
The company you call in an outage is also the one that sets which retail plans reach your address.
See fixed-rate plans at your address
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