What Power to Choose Won't Show You About Solar+Battery Costs in Houston
If you are a homeowner and have ever tried to compare electricity plans in Houston, someone has probably pointed you to powertochoose.org. It's the real thing, not a lookalike: the Public Utility Commission of Texas built it back in 2002, when the state deregulated retail electricity, specifically so Texans could compare plans in one place instead of hunting through dozens of provider websites. It's a genuinely useful tool for what it does. What it can't do is tell you anything about what a solar subscription with a whole-home battery backup would cost you, because that's not the kind of thing it was built to compare in the first place.
What Power to Choose Actually Shows You
Enter your ZIP code on Power to Choose and you'll get a list of plans from the retail electricity providers (REPs) licensed to sell in your area, sorted by price. That price comes from a rule with real teeth behind it: Texas Administrative Code Rule 16 TAC §25.475 requires every plan's Electricity Facts Label to disclose the average price at exactly three usage levels, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kilowatt-hours a month, and Power to Choose displays plans using those same three snapshots.
That rule exists to protect consumers, but it also created a well-known loophole. Some providers design plans with a bill credit that only kicks in at a narrow usage window, often right around 1,000 kWh. Miss that window by a little in either direction, and the credit disappears and the effective rate jumps. Energy researchers and consumer sites have documented specific real plans (one frequently cited example structured around a rate near 9.9 cents per kWh) where that headline number is only true at exactly the benchmark usage level Power to Choose happens to display. The tool isn't lying to you. It's just showing you a snapshot that providers have learned how to design around.
Why a Solar Subscription Doesn't Fit Into the Comparison At All
Here's the part that matters more for anyone actually looking into solar. Power to Choose lists electricity resale plans, full stop. Every plan on it assumes the same basic structure: a REP buys wholesale power and resells it to you, CenterPoint delivers it over the wires, and your job is to pick whose resale rate looks best. Even the "green energy" plans on the site, which do exist and are a popular filter, are just REPs sourcing their wholesale power from renewable generation. You're still buying grid electricity generated somewhere else. None of that has anything to do with putting panels on your own roof.
A rooftop solar and battery subscription isn't a resale plan, it's a completely different structure: equipment on your house, generating power at your address, paired with a monthly rate for the electricity that setup produces. There's no field on Power to Choose for "panels included," no way to filter for "battery backup," and no mechanism for showing a rate that's bundled with hardware rather than sourced entirely from the grid. It's not that solar subscriptions are hidden from the tool. They're a different category of product that the tool was never built to display, the same way a car-buying comparison site isn't going to show you lease-to-own furniture.
So How Do You Actually Compare the Real Cost?
Since there's no single site that puts a REP plan and a solar subscription side by side, the comparison has to be built manually, and the fix for the "1,000 kWh" trap above is the same fix that makes any solar comparison honest: use your actual usage, not a benchmark number.
Start with your last 12 months of electricity usage in kWh, not dollars, since that's the number that's consistent regardless of which rate structure you're comparing against. Apply that real usage to a REP plan's actual rate structure (not just the headline number at 1,000 kWh) to get a true monthly cost. Then compare that to a solar subscription's flat monthly rate for the same usage level. With TerraOne, that flat rate already includes CenterPoint's delivery charge, so there's no separate line item to add on top, and no teaser window to fall outside of. Your rate is built around your actual home and consumption, not a promotional window designed to expire.
This is also where the two products stop being comparable in a different way. A REP plan is month-to-month exposure to whatever the wholesale market and CenterPoint's delivery charges are doing. Your subscription is priced for your home and usage, without teaser windows. You're not just comparing two prices, you're comparing a variable-rate product to a fixed one, which is worth knowing going in.
What This Means for Estimating Solar Cost in Houston
If you take one thing from this: don't try to use Power to Choose, or any REP-focused comparison tool, to estimate what a solar subscription would cost your home. It's the wrong tool for that specific question, not because it's flawed, but because it's answering a different question entirely. The right way to get a real number is a usage-based estimate built for your actual home, not a rate snapshot built for comparing REP plans against each other.
If you're ready to see what that number actually looks like for your home, we'll walk through it using your real usage, not a 1,000 kWh benchmark. See if your home qualifies for a personalized savings analysis.
