Tip for Consumers: Check the complaint data first

Looking to switch electric service? Lots of folks already know the www.powertochoose.com website is a good place to start when you’re comparing prices. What’s less known is that the website also includes useful data about customer complaint rates.

Here’s how it works. Every six months a new report card gets posted on the website that ranks retail electric providers using a dot system. One dot is good, signifying “lowest complaint rate.” Five dots is bad, signifying “highest complaint rate.” REPs receive dots based on a ratio of complaints filed against them versus the number of customers they serve. Hence a small REP with many complaints should get a worse ranking (more dots) than a large REP with the same number of complaints.

At the powertochoose.com website you can find both the most current complaint scorecard, plus many older ones. The website also includes raw data so consumers can get a sense for the specific sorts of complaints filed against individual REPs. For instance, one REP may get plenty of slamming complaints, while another might be tops for billing problems.

These are great tools, especially given that some of the same companies appear to get listed month after month as having the worst complaint records. This might suggest that consumers might think twice before signing up with such companies — even if those companies offer relatively low-cost rate plans.

And remember it’s always a good idea to compare both prices and the complaint data before deciding on a retail electric provider. Also read the fine print. Plenty of REPs charge extra fees that might not be immediately apparent otherwise.

-- R.A. Dyer

PUC data: electric prices still too high under dereg

Prices go up and prices go down, but under the state's flawed deregulation law, one fact of life appears to have remained constant: Texans pay too much.

Consider that customers in TXU's service territory pay more today than they would have paid in March of 2000, which was prior to deregulation, but when the price of natural gas was slightly higher. Even customers on the least expensive rate plan in North Texas still pay more today than they would have paid before deregulation, according to publicly available data.

Check out the math yourself. According to data from the Public Utility Commission, TXU customers in March 2000 paid 7.326 cents per kw/h. That's for household use of 1,000 kw/h each month. A quick look at the www.powertochoose.com website indicates that the lowest available price in the same service territory on Sept. 4, 2009 is 8.9 cents per kw/h. The average of offered rates on the same day is 10.9 cents.

These numbers show that the lowest rate available today is still 21.5 percent HIGHER than the last regulated rate at a time when natural gas prices were similar. (Natural gas is used to fuel many power plants and is linked to electricity costs.) More shocking still: the average of offers under deregulation in what was TXU's service territory is 48.8 percent HIGHER than it was under regulation. Either way, the deregulated prices don't measure up.

But perhaps that is not so surprising, given that electricity rates in Texas remained below the national average for many years prior to the Texas deregulation law, but have remained consistently above the national average after deregulation.

-- R.A. Dyer

SWEPCO seeks big rate increase

Tens of thousands of consumers living in north and east Texas would end up paying 20 percent more for electricity under a proposed rate hike by AEP Southwestern Electric Power Company.

The company (which is more commonly known as SWEPCO) filed its request before the Texas Public Utility Commission on August 28. PUC approval would mean that even customers using as little as 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month would see electric bills go up by $16 beginning in the spring.

The hike would generate an extra $82 million per year for SWEPCO — including an extra $31.6 million for ongoing power plant construction — according to the filing. Also included is an additional $43.31 million for the company to serve its retail customers and an additional $6.9 million resulting from the termination of two merger related credits.

Oncor Electric, the north Texas transmission and distribution utility, also recently pushed to substantially hike its customers’ rates. But after municipalities and others mounted a defense at the PUC, regulators cut the requested hike by more than half.

SWEPCO serves about 180,000 customers in the eastern and northern regions of the state. It also serves Louisiana and Arkansas.

-- R.A. Dyer

New reports show Texans pay more for electricity, but less satisfied with service

Consumers in Houston and Dallas continue paying some of the highest electric bills in the nation, according to a new survey by an online comparison shopping firm.

The company, Whitefence.com, reports on its website that Houstonians paid average electric bills of $215.68 in July 2009. That’s higher than what residential electric customers paid in every other American city surveyed that month by the company. Dallas, the only other Texas city listed, had the third highest bills.

And neither are the high bills simply a function of the hot Texas summers, according to the survey data. For instance, residents in sweltering hot Las Vegas and Phoenix still paid much less for electricity than residents in Houston and Dallas. Residents in Houston and Dallas also paid more for electricity than did residents in all the other surveyed cities during the relatively cool months of February and March.

“These survey results confirm what Texans in deregulated areas of the state have known for a long time — that they continue paying too much for power,” said Geoffrey Gay, general counsel for a coalition of municipal electric consumers. Gay noted that Texans paid electric rates below the national average before electric deregulation, but since deregulation have consistently paid above the national average.

A separate report from J.D. Power and Associates also shows that Texans are less satisfied with their residential electric services than they were just one year ago. “Driving this overall decline is decreased satisfaction with pricing,” J. D. Power said in the report, which was released Aug. 20th.

The well known marketing firm collected for its analysis customer data as it relates to pricing, billing, communications and customer service. It found that customer satisfaction had dropped “notably” since 2008.

-- R.A. Dyer