A Texas Power Plan Can Cost 9.8 Cents. Or 22.2.

One plan in the file costs 9.4 cents per kilowatt hour if you use 1,000 kWh in a month.

Use 500?

22.7 cents.

Use 2,000?

15.2 cents.

Same plan. Same electricity. Same wires. That one is the most extreme in the file, and it is not alone: across the 57 plans with this shape the median runs 22.2 cents at 500, 9.8 at 1,000 and 15.1 at 2,000.

I downloaded all 1,053 plans listed on Power to Choose, the comparison site the Public Utility Commission of Texas runs. Fifty-seven of them have this pattern: cheaper at exactly 1,000 kWh than at either 500 or 2,000.

The reason is usually simple. A bill credit applies at or above 1,000 kWh, so the price at that one level looks remarkable. Fall below the qualifying usage and it goes.

But households do not use exactly 1,000 kWh every month. The average Texas home uses 1,117, and it runs about 700 in March and 1,700 in August.

That is where it gets expensive.

Why 1,000 kWh can fool you

Median prices for each group:

At 1,000 kWh these look like bargains, about 26 percent below the rest of the market.

At 500 kWh they cost about 60 percent more than the rest of the market.

At 2,000 kWh they are more expensive too.

In monthly money, at the median: $98 at 1,000 kWh where everything else is $132. Then $111 at 500 kWh where everything else is $69. And $302 at 2,000 kWh where everything else is $258.

Thirty-four dollars a month cheaper at one number, and forty-odd dollars a month more expensive on either side of it.

The state already flags them

Power to Choose's own data file marks plans that carry minimum usage fees or credits.

Seventy-three plans carry that flag.

All 57 of the unusual plans are among them. Not most. All.

So nothing is hidden. The Commission has identified these plans and marks them in the data it publishes. The difficulty is structural: three benchmark prices let one plan look very different depending on which number a shopper anchors on, and 57 plans are priced to look best at the middle one.

Measured against the whole market, the flagged group sits 17 percent below average at 1,000 kWh and 45 percent above average at 500.

The further you are from 1,000, the less the headline tells you

If you order every plan in Oncor territory by its published 1,000 kWh price, then ask which plans would actually be cheapest at other usage levels, the two orders come apart:

Exactly right at the one number, and half wrong at 500 and 2,000.

Across a full year, with usage moving the way a Texas house actually moves, the plan that looks cheapest on the 1,000 kWh price comes eighth. Choosing it costs about $52 a year more than the genuinely cheapest plan.

Shopping badly costs far more

That $52 is not the real money, and it would be misleading to leave it as the headline.

Even after removing all 57 unusual plans, the most expensive tenth of Oncor plans costs 43 percent more than the cheapest tenth. At average Texas usage that is roughly $600 a year.

So the bigger problem is not the comparison tool. It is that choosing the wrong plan is expensive, and choosing no plan at all is probably worse. A household that signed up once and let a fixed term lapse usually rolls onto a variable rate, and variable plans contain both the cheapest deals on the board and by far the most expensive. Their worst tenth reaches 18.5 cents, three quarters above their own best tenth. A household that rolls off a fixed term can land on substantially more expensive variable pricing without doing anything.

How many Texas households sit there is not in this data. It is probably the largest number in this whole story and nobody publishes it.

What would help

Nothing new would have to be collected. The full rate structure for every plan is already filed on its Electricity Facts Label.

Compare plans on a yearly bill using a published Texas usage pattern, or let a household type in what it actually uses and price every plan against that.

Either removes the single point that 57 plans are built around.

Until then, the practical version is unglamorous:

Look at all three prices, not the best-looking one. Then pull twelve months of your own bills, so you know which column is yours.

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Method and sources.

All plan data is from powertochoose.org, the comparison site operated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas, via its own CSV export, retrieved 11 September 2026. The export returns every listed plan statewide regardless of the zip code requested: 1,847 rows, reducing to 1,053 unique plans once the English and Spanish listings of the same plan are collapsed. Each plan carries an advertised average price at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh a month, and those three points are the entire price representation in the published data.

The 57 are plans whose 1,000 kWh price is at least a tenth of a cent below both their 500 and 2,000 kWh prices. The 73 are plans where the Commission's MinUsageFeesCredits field is true. Sixteen flagged plans are not price-kinked this way; no price-kinked plan is unflagged.

The usage-level table uses only those three published price points, interpolating between them, and assumes nothing else. That construction understates the kink rather than exaggerating it: a credit that applies at 1,000 kWh disappears the moment usage falls below the threshold, while a straight line between the 500 and 1,000 points phases it out gradually. So the five-of-ten result and the $52 are floors, and a plan's real cost at 700 kWh is higher than this method shows.

The annual figure uses an illustrative Texas residential load shape scaled to the 13,400 kWh a year that EIA reports for the state's competitive-area residential average; that shape is my construction and the usage-level table is not. Average usage of 1,117 kWh a month is EIA-861 for 2024, Texas competitive territories, residential.

I did not verify how the website orders or displays plans. The results page is built in the browser and a direct request returns only a shell, so every statement here about ordering is conditional: it describes what happens if plans are ordered by their published 1,000 kWh price. Nothing here claims the site sorts that way by default.

Company names are in the published file and are deliberately not reproduced. The structural finding does not need them, and these are plan designs the Commission permits.

What this does not show. It measures what is offered, not what customers pay, so it cannot say how many households sit on a poor plan or a lapsed one. Offers are current and are not compared here to any earlier year's bills. The Commission publishes all three price points and links every plan's Electricity Facts Label, so nothing is concealed.

All analysis by Tafel Power from public sources.