Power to Choose Texas: How to Use the Official Electricity Shopping Site

Power to Choose is operated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, or PUCT. Consumers enter a ZIP code, review the electricity offers available at that address, and then leave the site to enroll directly with the retail electricity provider.

Power to Choose does not sell electricity and does not recommend one provider over another. Retail electricity providers can list offers on the site without paying for placement.

The official website is powertochoose.org. Because commercial electricity sites sometimes use similar names, check the web address if you are trying to reach the state's own resource.

Fixed Rate Electric Plans is a commercial site. It is a registered Texas electricity broker, it is not affiliated with PUCT or Power to Choose, and it may be paid by a retailer when a customer enrolls.

Power to Choose begins with a ZIP code, because whether you can choose a retail provider at all depends on where the property is located.

Some ZIP codes cross more than one delivery-utility territory. When that happens, the site asks which utility serves the address before showing plans.

Areas served by municipal utilities and by many electric cooperatives do not take part in retail electricity choice, and a search there returns no competitive-market plan list. Austin, San Antonio and El Paso are the largest examples.

Power to Choose does not open with every possible plan displayed.

The Pricing and Billing control defaults to "Plans without a minimum usage fee/credit and plans without tiered pricing", and the Plan Type box has Fixed Rate ticked.

Those defaults matter because bill credits, minimum-usage thresholds and tiered pricing can make an advertised average price change sharply depending on how much electricity a household uses. The commission's own note beside that setting warns that for those plans the average price per kWh may vary significantly from the price a customer is actually billed, and tells shoppers to read the fact sheets carefully.

If you change the Pricing and Billing setting to show all plans, those additional plan structures become visible. That does not make them bad plans. It means they need more careful comparison than a single advertised cents-per-kWh figure allows.

Power to Choose displays plan pricing at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh a month, which are the three levels every plan is required to publish. It opens at 1,000 kWh.

The selected usage level matters, because a plan that looks inexpensive at 1,000 kWh can look very different at 500 or 2,000 kWh.

Use a level reasonably close to your own household's electricity use, and read all three published prices before deciding.

Every plan listing links to its Electricity Facts Label, or EFL, which the site labels as the Fact Sheet. The EFL is where the plan's actual pricing structure is disclosed.

It states the average prices at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh, the retail energy charge, the applicable delivery-utility charges, any recurring base or monthly charge, the contract length, the early termination fee, the renewable content and other material terms.

The average price in the EFL already reflects the delivery charges used in that calculation. Delivery is not added afterwards as a second, undisclosed electricity rate. What sits outside the average price is taxes, gross receipts tax reimbursement, one-off charges, and in some cities an underground facilities charge the utility is authorized to add.

Each listing also links the plan's Terms of Service and its Your Rights as a Customer document. Read the EFL before enrolling. It is the clearest place to see how the plan's price is actually built.

Power to Choose also publishes a Company Rating based on complaint activity. The rating compares retailers on complaints per thousand customers over a rolling six-month period, ranked against other retailers rather than against a fixed standard.

Complaints are counted whether or not the provider was ultimately found to be at fault. That makes the rating useful context rather than a final judgment about a retailer, and PUCT publishes a fuller complaint scorecard alongside it.

Fixed Rate Electric Plans does not currently provide an equivalent complaint-rating system, and nothing here replaces the commission's own record.

When all plan types are displayed, some offers show a much lower average price at one usage level than at the other two.

That usually happens because a bill credit or another threshold only applies when monthly usage falls inside a particular range.

The site identifies plans that carry these structures, and the EFL explains the terms. Where a plan carries a minimum usage fee or credit, the amount is already inside the average prices shown rather than added to them.

So the important question is not whether the credit is hidden. It is whether your household will qualify for it consistently, month after month.

Fixed Rate Electric Plans deliberately shows a narrower part of the Texas market. It lists fixed-rate plans and does not list variable-rate, indexed, prepaid, time-of-use or bill-credit plans. They are not shown on this site.

Plans that carry a minimum-usage charge are listed and labeled rather than hidden, and there is a separate list of the plans that carry none.

Plans are ranked by projected first-year cost at the usage level you select, using the retailer's published cost estimate.

A narrower list can make comparison faster for somebody who already knows they want a straightforward fixed-rate plan. It also means this site does not show the whole of the Texas market.

It is the better place to start when you want the broadest state-run list of available retail offers.

It is also where to go for variable, indexed, prepaid and time-of-use plans; for bill-credit and other threshold-priced plans; for the commission's retailer complaint ratings and scorecard; for Spanish-language shopping information; and for plan types and service areas that Fixed Rate Electric Plans does not cover.

And it is a useful way to check the information shown on any commercial comparison site, including this one.

If you already know you want a fixed-rate plan, and you do not want bill-credit, variable, prepaid or time-of-use products mixed into the results, a narrower comparison can save time.

Fixed Rate Electric Plans shows that subset and ranks the available plans by projected first-year cost.