reliant Archives - Texas Power Guide

November 1, 2018July 6, 2023

Reliant “Texas Bonus 24” Plan Review

Reliant Secure 24 plan $600 bonus teaser — How much does a “$600 bonus” cost? A lot more than $600…

We regularly receive flyers for Reliant’s “Texas Bonus 24” electric plan with all the warning signs: “Get a low price”, $600 bonus”, and of course “Limited time offer”. They’ll even offer to discount your current provider’s cancellation fee so you can “take advantage of this deal”.

Curiously, there’s no mention of electricity pricing. You have to call them to learn those details, using the promo code from your flyer.

Once you do you’ll see that this plan is no deal. At 10.2 ¢/kWh (…as of November 2018, see below for updates), the “energy charge” is 4.9 ¢/kWh more than the lowest cost competitor. For the average Houston home, that means paying an extra $1372 to get a $600 rebate, which is a “bonus” for nobody except Reliant. Those with higher usage can expect to overpay even more. And if you sign up and then realize you’ve made a mistake, you’ll incur a whopping $295 cancellation fee.

Don’t fall for high rates masked by cash-back gimmicks. All electricity is the same, and many competitors — and even other Reliant plans — offer much better rates. To start saving today, skip the runaround and click below to find your best rate.

Find Your Best Plan »

October 2020 update:
Another month, another ludicrous “Texas Bonus 24” offer. The latest (via promo code MC9UBK) costs 9.1326 ¢/kWh plus ~4.5 ¢/kWh for Centerpoint delivery. With competitive rates at ~4.9 ¢/kWh plus delivery, you should run — not walk — away from this offer.

July 2023 update:
With promo code MH1BA5, the plan costs 11.9972 ¢/kWh (energy-only) plus Centerpoint delivery. That equates to ~15.9 ¢/kWh for 2000 kWh/mo usage, vs. ~10.5 ¢/kWh for more competitive alternatives.

Did you receive an even newer version? Send it to us and we’ll help check it out.

* Notes: Calculations above are based on the plan EFLs posted on Reliant.com and competitor sites as of 11/1/2018, and assume the 2016 average Texas monthly residential load profile from EIA scaled linearly to each target monthly usage. Cost projections exclude taxes and non-recurring fees.

February 1, 2018May 7, 2018

Reliant “Speak & Save 24” Plan Review

smart programmable thermostat — Want a smart thermostat and speaker for your home? Buy them yourself and save.

Another day, another commercial touting a new electricity plan gimmick. This time it’s Reliant’s “Speak & Save 24” plan, which includes a Nest Thermostat E and a Google Home smart speaker. Both of these devices are great, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Let’s compare how much you’ll pay for this Reliant plan versus low-cost competitors for three different-sized homes:

2-Year Electricity Costs (DFW/Oncor area) *
	Avg monthly usage (kWh)
	500	1000	2000
Reliant “Speak & Save 24 plan”	$1,320	$2,554	$5,026
Low-cost competitor 24-month plan	$1,016	$1,836	$3,786
Difference	$304	$718	$1,240

Any way we look at it, “Speak & Save 24” is overpriced. Dallas customers who wait “up to 8 weeks for delivery” and pay an extra $304 to $1,240 (or more) for electricity get two devices that retail for only $298. Houstonians get dinged for another ~$140. And breaking the 24-month contract costs $295.

Not to slight the devices themselves. If you don’t have a programmable thermostat, you should buy one ASAP for the obvious energy and cost savings. Air-conditioners and electric heaters are notorious power hogs, so the less you can run them each day, the better. The Nest and Google Assistant — using Home or your smartphone — make it easy with simple, voice-based controls. And to Reliant’s credit, they’re the first retailer to offer Assistant-based account management, whether or not you sign up for this plan.

Just don’t let fancy gadgets blind you to budget-busting electric rates. In this case, there are much cheaper options from other retailers and even Reliant itself. To find the best plan for your home, click below and let our RateGrinder tool do the hard work for you.

Try RateGrinder »

* Notes: Calculations are based on the plan EFLs posted on Reliant.com and competitor sites as of 1/31/2018, and assume the 2016 average Texas monthly residential load profile from EIA scaled linearly to each target monthly usage. Cost projections exclude taxes and non-recurring fees.

Prior to January, Reliant offered a 12-month version of this plan with the Nest E and Google Home Mini. The current offering is 24 months and includes the standard Google Home.

January 31, 2018October 27, 2020

Reliant “Secure 24” Plan Review

Today we received a mail offer for Reliant’s “Secure 24” electric plan with all the warning signs: “Get a low price”, $600 bonus”, and of course “Limited time offer”. They’ll even cover your current provider’s cancellation fee (up to $300) so you can “take advantage of this deal”. No mention of actual electricity pricing, though, so we followed the link to check it out.

The key number is the “energy charge”. At 7.6 ¢/kWh, it’s nearly double some low-cost competitors. Including the TDU delivery charges, you’ll pay upwards of 12.5 ¢/kW. This is not a competitive rate. But there’s the $600 bonus to consider, so let’s do the math for 3 average electricity usage cases:

2-Year Electricity Costs (Houston/Centerpoint area) *
	Avg monthly usage (kWh)
	500	1000	2000
Reliant “Secure 24” plan	$1,596	$3,056	$5,964
Low-cost competitor 24-month plan	$768	$2,238	$4,262
Difference	$828	$818	$1,722

Clearly this plan is overpriced for nearly any household, but especially for those with higher electricity usage. Even after the $600 “bonus” it costs $218 to $1122 more than competitors. If you sign up and then decide you’ve made a mistake, you’ll incur a $295 cancellation fee.

Those in the DFW/Oncor service area with very low usage may be able to break even, depending on your shopping skills. But likely not once you consider 12-month or shorter alternatives, which tend to be cheaper. Also this offer “is nontransferable to another person, household, or address”, so Reliant’s Marketing department might only offer it to residences with higher consumption.

In any case, don’t fall for Secure 24’s high rates masked by cash-back gimmicks. Electricity is just electricity, and many competitors — and even other Reliant plans — offer much better deals. Skip the runaround and click below to let Texas Power Guide’s RateGrinder calculator help you find your best plan quickly and easily.

Try RateGrinder »

April 2018 update:
Another month, another “Secure 24” offer. The latest flyer ditches the URL to encourage you to call for details, but you can still find them here with the promo code. Since January, rates for Secure 24 and the best competitor plans have both risen by about 1 ¢/kWh, so our guidance hasn’t changed.

September 2018 update (Now with airline miles!):
In the latest iteration, Reliant adds another layer of obfuscation by rebating you with Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards miles instead of real money. The math, however, is similar. At 12.7 ¢/kWh for a Dallas customer using 1000 kWh/month, this plan costs $768 more than competitors. The 27,000 airline points are worth ~$405, so you’d be overpaying by $363 (…or more if you live in Houston or use more electricity). And rates are still falling from their June peak, so now is not a good time to lock into a long-term 24-month contract.

November 2018 update:
Reliant changed the name of this plan to ‘Texas Bonus 24’, but it’s still the same overpriced plan as always. For details, see here.

Did you receive an even newer version of this offer? Send it to us and we’ll gladly help check it out.

May 11, 2017July 27, 2020

Indexed and Time-of-Use Plans Roundup

New for Nov 2019! Texas Power Guide now has a more powerful spreadsheet calculator to compare Time-of-Use electric plans. Download it here for Excel, then paste in your full electricity usage history from SmartMeterTexas.com to see how you’d fare with Griddy, Free Nights, and others.

Electricity plans like Reliant Truly Free Weekends, TXU Free Nights, and Griddy all charge based on when you use electricity, but beyond that they’re very different. We do the math to see which are gimmicks and which deliver the goods.

Risk vs. Reward

When shopping for electricity, most consumers choose plans with a “Fixed” rate over the contract term. Such plans offer predictable bills and relatively simple math. In theory, however, they do not offer the lowest cost.

To offer you a fixed rate for a period of time, retailers must first estimate how much they’ll pay for your electricity. The wholesale price of electricity depends on many variables. These include the price of natural gas, weather changes like heat waves, hurricanes, and wind, and consumers’ daily patterns of electricity use. As a result, electricity pricing can vary a lot: from -260% to over +11,000% of the ~2.6 ¢/kWh average just last year. Facing these uncertainties, retailers add safety margin to their cost estimates so they don’t undercharge customers and go bankrupt. The longer the contract, the more uncertainty and risk, so the more they have to add to your rate.

To offer lower rates, some retailers create plans that shift some or all of their pricing risks to you. “Indexed” plans base their pricing on underlying market indices like the monthly price of natural gas. “Time-Of-Use” (TOU) plans generally increase their pricing during late afternoon peak use periods. And some plans do both with rates based on the real-time wholesale price of electricity, which changes every 5 minutes. To the extent they transfer pricing variation risk to the consumer, these plans have the potential to offer lower prices. (They’re also more difficult for consumers to quantify, but Texas Power Guide is here to help with that.)

Plan Comparison

To see how they stack up, we pitted 9 indexed and/or Time-of-Use plans from PowerToChoose.org and elsewhere against each other. We ran the numbers using the past twelve months of pricing data matched with the actual usage of two Houston-area homes. Home #1 is a 1-story, 2-occupant house with an average consumption of ~1130 kWh/month — about the Texas state average. Home #2 is a 2-story, 4-occupant house with a pool and average consumption of ~2100 kWh/month. Neither home participated in an indexed or TOU plan during the sampling period, so their owners weren’t shifting their normal consumption behavior. We’ll discuss the practicality of doing so in the results.

For comparison, we also included the current best 12-month Fixed rate plan per our RateGrinder tool. While the best plan from one year ago would make a better comparison, those details weren’t available. Energy prices are slightly higher in 2017 than 2016, which unduly benefits Indexed/TOU plans computed using last year’s pricing.

We did not include plans that PowerToChoose.org categorizes as “Variable”. Unlike Indexed plans tied to a public index, retailers can often change pricing on Variable plans at their sole discretion. Finding details of price histories can also be challenging. As a result, Variable plans don’t meet our threshold for either predictability or transparency.

Per TPG’s philosophy, all our data and calculations are posted here [Note: Newer version available, see top of article.] If you export your home’s usage data from SmartMeterTexas.com, you can paste it into our file to see your own results. We also include historical data on wholesale electricity and natural gas prices to lend insight into the frequency and severity of [usually weather-related] price spikes.

The table below summarizes our results. Time-of-Use plans are in blue. Plans indexed to the monthly price of natural gas are in purple. Plans indexed to real-time (15-minute) electricity pricing are in green.

Results: Indexed and Time-of-Use Plans Comparison
	Home #1 (~14 MWh/yr)		Home #2 (~25 MWh/yr)
Retailer / Plan	$/year	¢/kWh	$/year	¢/kWh
[Best 12-month Fixed rate plan]	$1,002	7.4	$1,881	7.4
Griddy Zero	$1,116	8.2	$1,890	7.4
Volt EP Signature Index Plan	$1,113	8.2	$2,016	7.9
Champion Energy Free Time-12	$1,173	8.6	$2,135	8.4
Direct Energy Free Power Weekends 12	$1,287	9.5	$2,323	9.2
Reliant Solar Sell Back	$1,363	10.0	$2,501	9.9
Reliant PowerTracker	$1,411	10.4	$2,535	10.0
TXU Energy MarketEdge	$1,499	11.0	$2,698	10.6
Reliant Truly Free Weekends 24	$1,519	11.2	$2,789	11.0
TXU Free Nights 24 (9 p.m.) TXU Free Nights & Solar Days 18	$1,861	13.7	$3,368	13.3

Observations

For the average Texas home (~ Home #1), the best 12-month fixed rate undercut the Indexed/TOU options by $114 – $859/yr.

For those with higher usage and a stomach for short-term risk, however, Griddy Energy may be worth a look. New to Texas in April, Griddy’s prepaid daily plan offers the real-time wholesale rate (plus TDU charges) for $9.99/month and 2.9%+30¢/payment. The fees overshadow the wholesale benefit at low or average usages. But above ~2000 kWh/month usage Griddy starts to compete with the better 12-month fixed rates. Griddy also offers the most potential for consumers to shift their consumption for more savings — including occasional negative pricing — with a phone app for real-time pricing, forecasts, and alerts. If you’re willing to assume the risk of pricing disruptions (see first chart, above) in exchange for a lower long-term bill and/or less frequent shopping, Griddy may work for you. That said, Griddy is brand new and TPG hasn’t directly sampled their service, so stay tuned for more. If you have, let us know your experience in the comments.

Beyond that, there’s currently little else in the Houston market worth considering:

Volt EP‘s Signature Index Plan is the other product indexed to the wholesale price of electricity, but on a monthly postpaid basis. With a different fee structure, it is cheaper than Griddy only for lower-than-average usages. Unfortunately, that’s the space where fixed-rate plans outcompete both.

Three “Free Weekends” options from Champion, Direct Energy, and Reliant are nominally Time-of-Use plans, but not in the traditional sense of passing through higher afternoon pricing. Instead, they’re largely marketing tactics to lure customers into higher average rates obscured by trickier math. As such, they are frequently panned on the Internet. Only an extremely weekend-focused consumer might come out ahead of the better fixed-rate options.

The three plans indexed to the NYMEX Natural Gas Futures index also performed poorly, due to their unremarkable pricing.

Finally, TXU‘s identically-priced Free Nights 24 (9 p.m.) and Free Nights & Solar Days 18 plans cripple their usage-shifting potential with a staggering 13+ ¢/kWh average cost, ranking worst in our survey.

Bottom line

For those seeking the lowest cost, a shorter-term fixed-rate product such as those found with our RateGrinder tool is still the best bet. But for risk-tolerant consumers with higher usage or a desire to capture savings by shifting their consumption, Griddy may be a worth a look.

Try RateGrinder »

Article updated 8/6/17 to include TXU’s Free Nights & Solar Days 18 plan, which as of that date has identical pricing terms as the Free Nights 24 (9 p.m.) plan.

Article updated 8/7/18 to remove 3-month fixed rate plan comparison data, since the analysis did not capture the total cost of successive 3-month options at seasonally varying pricing.