![]() The EFL, along with the Terms of Service and Your Rights as a Customer document, make up your contract for electricity. What is an EFL?ĮFLs are standard disclosures required by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) for every electricity plan offered by a Retail Electricity Provider (REP) in Texas. And, the added tools on the site can help you make sense of the math. When you understand an Electricity Facts Label you’ll know exactly what to expect from your electricity plan. Confusing rates, lengthy legal documents, and perplexing fees can lead to your electricity bill being higher than you expected. Hunting for the right electricity plan can be an intimidating proposition. If you don’t recognize the lowest cost providers, check the table below and you might be surprised.Knowing how to read an Electricity Facts Label (EFL) is the key to finding the right electricity plan for your home or business. Click the green button to plug your monthly usage data into our RateGrinder tool and find your cheapest options. (TDUs remain regulated monopolies, so you can’t pick your TDU or avoid the charges they lump into your monthly bill.)įor shoppers, more brands and plans represents more potential savings opportunities. who builds and maintains the power lines that keep electricity flowing to your house. They are completely independent from your Transmission and Distribution Utility - e.g. Retailers only set their pricing (see above) and manage your billing. Regardless of pricing or reviews, know that your choice of electricity retailer has no effect on your service reliability. ![]() We include the Complaint Ratios from the Texas PUC’s latest Complaint Scorecard below, so you can draw your own conclusions. And sometimes its the bias of review sites that carry plans from one sub-brand but not another. Other times it’s a higher price or credit sensitivity of their customers. Sometimes this reflects smaller customer service budgets for value brands. Online reviews often indicate large satisfaction differences between commonly-owned brands. If you love or hate a particular retailer, you might expect or want to hold their peers in the same regard. Look closely at the websites and EFL documents of the sibling companies in the table, and you’ll see the similarities. ![]() Under the hood, subsidiaries may be separately managed for a while, but eventually the forces of corporate efficiency tend to meld them together. Sometimes they create the new brand from scratch, and other times they just acquire an existing smaller company. But not all customers are willing to pay extra just for familiarity, so retailers also offer them cheaper plans under a lesser brand without jeopardizing the big brands’ premiums. When big brands spend a lot on TV and radio ads, name recognition allows them to charge some consumers more for commodity electricity. The main reason is “marketing segmentation”, so different brands can target different customer groups. Why might they juggle multiple competing brands instead of merging them into one? Per the table below, some large corporations manage as many as 8 different retail brands. Many lesser known Retail Electricity Providers (“REP”s) in Texas are actually corporate siblings of larger, more advertised “competitors”. your current provider? What if both were actually the same company? Would you switch to an electric company you’d never heard of? ![]()
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