About PowerToFail

The short version: Texas electricity providers post their rates on a state-run website called PowerToChoose. We pull that data, archive it, and flag the conditional-rate plans whose headline numbers don't match real bills. Then we keep the records — because PowerToChoose doesn't.

Why this exists

PowerToChoose does one thing adequately: it shows you today's rates. That's where its usefulness ends.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas built a shopping tool for the moment you're shopping. If you enrolled in a plan six months ago and want to know whether your rate has changed, PowerToChoose can't help you. If you want to know whether a provider has a pattern of advertising teaser rates that quietly expire — or whether that "6.2¢/kWh" plan was briefly competitive and then wasn't — PowerToChoose has no answer. It deletes what it no longer needs to show you.

It's a snapshot, not a record.

PowerToFail keeps the record.

We archive rate data from the PowerToChoose API at least four times a day, building a historical database of what providers actually offered, when they offered it, and at what price. We currently track 800+ active plans across the four major Texas service territories. No provider can scrub their history here the way they can on the official site. The plan that looked great in January and quietly became expensive in March is still here, with timestamps.

Where the data comes from

The PowerToChoose API is public. The PUCT makes provider rate data available through it, and we query it four times a day to capture plan listings across the major Texas service territories — Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, and Texas-New Mexico Power (TNMP). Each snapshot records the advertised rate at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh usage tiers, plan term, cancellation fee, and other fields providers are required to report.

Electricity Facts Labels (EFLs) are the fine print. Every electricity plan sold in Texas must come with a standardized disclosure document that breaks down exactly how your rate is calculated. It's the document that reveals whether that "6.2¢/kWh" rate only applies if you use exactly 1,000 kWh per month, and costs 11¢ at every other usage level. We parse EFLs to expose the conditions providers would rather you didn't notice. EFL parsing is imperfect — PDFs are not a data format — and some edge cases get missed. When that happens, we flag it.

What you'll find here

Every plan in our archive shows rate history charted across the standard 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh usage tiers, along with term length, cancellation fees, and provider. Plans flagged as conditional-rate are labeled and explained — you can see exactly which condition triggers the advertised rate, what the rate is at normal usage levels, and how long the plan has been listed. The archive goes back to April 8, 2026 — this site is new, and the database grows every day. Providers cannot edit or remove their historical listings.

What's a conditional-rate plan?

Conditional-rate plans are structured so that the advertised headline rate — the one that gets them ranked favorably on PowerToChoose — only applies under specific conditions most customers will never consistently meet. These structures are fully legal and fully disclosed in the provider's Electricity Facts Label, but the headline number may not reflect what you'll actually pay. Common structures:

• Usage-band pricing. The low rate is only valid at or very near 500, 1,000, or 2,000 kWh — the three tiers PowerToChoose uses to rank plans. Use 999 kWh or 1,001 kWh and the effective rate jumps.
• Bill credits. A fixed monthly credit that disappears if you use less than a set threshold — so the "low rate" assumes you're always a heavy user.
• Smart thermostat requirements. A credit or rate discount that requires third-party hardware or program enrollment buried in the EFL.
• Free nights and weekends. Time-of-use plans with cheap overnight rates and expensive daytime rates — so your "free nights" deal costs you every afternoon your AC runs.

Limitations

We're an archive, not a shopping guide. Rates change. Plans disappear. Before you sign anything, verify the current offer directly with the provider and on PowerToChoose.

We have no affiliation with any electricity provider, retailer, broker, or affiliate program. No ads. No referral fees. No tracking. See the full disclaimer for the legal version.

Note from the Editor

A few things about the person running this.

He lives in Cypress, Texas, which means he pays a CenterPoint bill every month and has working opinions about it. His day job is network maintenance engineering for a telecom — he is paid, specifically, to make sure planned work on important infrastructure bothers customers as little as possible. He has also spent the better part of fifteen years building and maintaining the IT side of datacenter deployments. This matters in exactly one way: he has a working, load-bearing understanding of what it looks like when infrastructure is operating as designed. Texas retail electricity shopping, he eventually concluded, is not that.

The specific moment was a contract-renewal email from Abundance Energy. He went to PowerToChoose, as instructed by decades of consumer wisdom, to see whether he was still getting a reasonable deal or whether it was time to switch providers. Several hours later he was deeper into a pile of PDFs than any reasonable person should be on a weeknight, reading footnotes about bill credits that apply only between specific usage thresholds, and wondering whether anyone running the site had ever genuinely tried to shop on it.

It is possible that they had. That is one of the possibilities.

After an entire evening he was no closer to a confident decision than when he started, the advertised "cheapest" plan on PowerToChoose's front page was almost certainly a conditional-rate plan with a threshold tucked into page three of the EFL, and the tool the State of Texas has provided to help millions of people buy electricity turned out to be, in the politest available framing, not quite fit for purpose.

So he built this.

PowerToFail is free and will stay that way. It takes no money from providers, referral programs, or anyone else. It will keep running as long as people find it useful. Corrections and polite disagreements are welcome at fail@powertofail.org; the legal language lives on the disclaimer page.

— The Editor

Curious about specific terms? The FAQ answers the questions readers ask most often.