Looking for a good electric company? While getting a great rate is more about picking the right plan for your usage, you still want your Retail Electricity Provider (REP) to be reputable. After navigating the hype, consider these two criteria when scanning ratings and reviews:
- The review site has equal or no financial interest in all the REPs.
- Complaint statistics are relative to customer volumes.
Of the dozens of sites selling electric plans and advice, most fail #1. Commission-based broker sites carry only a subset of REPs, and it’s no surprise their reviews tend to be more positive for the REPs they sell than those they don’t. (Who writes a glowing review of their electric company, anyway, unless they’re being paid or switching from a terrible provider?)
Better Business Bureau and Google reviews may be less biased. But comparing complaint data across 60+ REPs is tedious. Plus it’s hard to know if 5 negative reviews came from 10 customers or 10,000 customers.
The only source we know of that meets both tests is the Public Utility Commission of Texas’s monthly Industry Scorecard. It lists the relative number of informal complaints the PUC-T investigated per REP, per a process that reduces misdirected complaints. But even that’s not perfect. The Scorecard dings REPs whether or not they’re deemed at fault. And it lumps equal numbers of REPs into each of 5 star ratings regardless of whether they are all truly excellent, all terrible, or something in between.
To avoid promoting or penalizing REPs at false extremes, Texas Power Guide instead uses the Scorecard’s underlying “complaint ratio” data, without the star groupings. A “1x” score means a company gets as many complaints per customer as the industry average. “0.5x” means half as many, “2x” means twice as many, etc. We feel this is the best option to compare REPs, and we leave it to you to determine what limit is acceptable.
To see all the latest complaint ratios (and which companies are one and the same), continue to our Electricity Providers Family Tree article.