Kilowise is built entirely on public data that Texas agencies and each electricity provider are required to publish. Nothing here is proprietary, and nothing is bought. This page lists every source, grouped by who publishes it, so you can check any figure against the original.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas
The PUCT regulates the retail electricity market in Texas. Most of what Kilowise shows comes from the commission or from data it requires providers to file.
- PowerToChoose.org, the PUCT's official plan comparison site. This is where the plan catalog comes from: the provider, plan name, contract length, rate type, cancellation fee, renewable percentage, the average price at 500, 1,000, and 2,000 kWh, and the link to each plan's own documents. The same site also provides the lookup that matches your zip code to your local delivery utility, and the provider logos.
- The monthly Retail Electric Provider Complaint Scorecard, which ranks providers by how many complaints they draw per customer. This is the provider rating shown on each plan's detail page.
- Each provider's Complaint History page on PowerToChoose, linked from every plan's detail page. It is the source for the month-by-month complaint breakdown by category.
- The PUCT's Alphabetical Directory of Retail Electric Providers, used to match a provider in the catalog to its licensed company name and any other names it trades under, so a complaint record is never shown against the wrong company.
- The Public Utility Regulatory Act and the PUCT's Substantive Rules, which require every plan to publish an Electricity Facts Label and set out exactly what it has to disclose.
The utilities that deliver your power
Your delivery charge is set by the regulated utility for your area, separately from the plan you pick. Four cover almost all of Texas: Oncor, CenterPoint Energy, AEP Texas, and Texas-New Mexico Power.
- Each utility's filed delivery tariff, which lists its current base rate and every add-on charge. This is the delivery portion of every cost estimate.
- The PUCT's monthly rate reports for each utility, and a residential-rate comparison Oncor publishes for the WIRES industry group, used to track when a delivery rate changed and by how much.
Electricity Facts Labels
Every Texas plan has to publish an Electricity Facts Label: a one-page disclosure of its energy charge, monthly fees, any bill credits, and the delivery charges passed through from your utility. Where Kilowise can read a plan's label closely enough, it works from that billing formula instead of the three tier prices alone. Each label is published by the provider and linked from that plan's page here and on PowerToChoose.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration
The EIA is the federal government's energy statistics agency. Three of its Texas electricity datasets back specific parts of the site:
- Average residential electricity use in Texas, about 1,096 kWh a month. This is the usage level plans are ranked at before you enter your own.
- Monthly Texas residential electricity sales, going back several years, which give the seasonal shape behind the quick usage estimate.
- Texas residential electricity prices back to 2001, used on the methodology page to show how often rates have actually risen over a one or two year stretch.
The U.S. Census Bureau
The Census Bureau's 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship file is the list of valid Texas zip codes the site recognizes.
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
Guidance from the Comptroller and the Texas Tax Code on sales tax and residential electricity are behind the methodology page's note on what taxes add to a real bill.
The methodology page explains how these sources are combined into a cost estimate, and where the estimate has limits.