Electricity providers in Houston, TX

How it works

What you're actually choosing in Houston

Here's the part that trips up most Houston shoppers: choosing a retail provider has nothing to do with the poles, wires, or meter outside your home. CenterPoint Energy owns and maintains all of that, delivers your electricity, and restores it after a storm — and it does that for every home in its territory no matter whose name is on the bill. Switching from one provider to another doesn't change your wires, your reliability, or how fast the lights come back after a hurricane.

What you're actually choosing is the company that buys wholesale power on your behalf, sets the energy rate you pay, and sends your bill. In Houston's CenterPoint territory there are well over 100 of them — household names, discount brands, and green specialists — all competing on price and plan design. That's genuinely good for you: competition tends to push rates down. But it also means the market is crowded with look-alike plans engineered to look cheapest on the comparison screen.

The wires

Houston is served by CenterPoint Energy

Whoever you pick as your retail provider, CenterPoint still owns and maintains the poles, wires, and meter — and restores your power after an outage. Its delivery charges are set by the PUCT and passed through by every provider without markup, so they're identical no matter whose name is on your bill.

The hard part

The plan-type maze

Walk through Power to Choose for a Houston ZIP and you'll see dozens of plans clustered within a cent or two of each other — until you read the fine print. Many lean on bill credits (a chunk of money back only if you land between, say, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh), tiered rates (a low number that applies to one usage band and jumps outside it), or minimum-usage fees. The advertised 'as low as' rate is rarely the rate a real Houston home with a big summer AC load actually pays. That's the gap Base is built to close: one flat energy rate at any usage, CenterPoint's delivery passed through without markup, and a flat monthly membership — so the number you see is the number you get.

Researching a specific provider?

Honest reviews of the big Texas providers

We dug into who owns each major provider, how its plans are structured, what it charges, and what customers actually say — balanced, sourced, and updated. Start with whoever you're weighing in Houston.

Local context

Choosing power in Houston

Houston is the 4th-largest city in the U.S. and the anchor of a 6.8-million-person metro, which is exactly why so many providers fight for its business — it's one of the largest deregulated electricity markets on earth. CenterPoint Energy delivers power across Harris County and the Gulf Coast, while you stay free to pick (and switch) your retail provider whenever you like.

The other thing that shapes how Houstonians think about their provider is the grid itself. After Hurricane Beryl and the May 2024 derecho left millions without power for days in the summer heat, a lot of homeowners started asking a second question beyond 'who's cheapest?' — namely, 'how do I stay powered when the grid goes down?' That's a separate product question (a home battery backs up your own home; it doesn't change CenterPoint's restoration), but it's part of why Houston shoppers increasingly look past the headline rate.