DALLAS — Despite repeated conservation appeals and a grid emergency, market analysts say Texas residents will probably not pay significantly more for September electricity usage.
Texas ratepayers are somewhat shielded from the financial impacts of tight grid conditions. Instead, their electricity providers typically bear that burden, Energy Ogre CEO Jesson Bradshaw says.
"People have this expectation that if we've seen higher (wholesale) prices and their utilities or retailers took a loss on that, they're going to recover that from people," said Bradshaw, whose company tracks electricity prices. "That's not necessarily the case."
Bradshaw said utilities will probably eat losses incurred during recent periods of peak demand, when generators sold electricity to retail providers at the highest possible price. Texas caps the wholesale cost of electricity at $5,000 per megawatt-hour.
After Winter Storm Uri, Texas barred electric companies from passing on wholesale prices to consumers through wholesale price contracts. Some Texans owed one such provider, Griddy, thousands of dollars for costs incurred during the grid's near-collapse.
Most Texas residents now pay for what they use, regardless of electricity's market price.
Still, September electricity bills won't be cheap, since Texans are using more power than ever before. But those invoices shouldn't contain surprises, Bradshaw said.
"You're probably using about what you were using in July and August," Bradshaw said. "(September bills) are unlikely to be materially different."
He noted that some customers in southern Texas and Houston may notice a higher transmission fee beginning in September, unrelated to tight grid conditions this summer.
The electricity market remains more stable than it was in early 2022, when Russia's war on Ukraine drove up the natural gas prices. That cost has since come down.
The state's grid manager, ERCOT, has so far asked residents to conserve power 11 times this summer. Amid unrelenting heat, Texans set electricity demand records at least 10 times in August.