Find a cheap
electricity plan,headache-free
electricity plan,
View plans in your zip code
FAQs
How much does this website cost to use?
Awesome Power is free to use and always will be. In the future, we may accept donations to cover server costs.
How is this different than Power To Choose?
Power To Choose tells an incomplete story of plan pricing. Plans are ranked in order of their cost at exactly 1000 kWh; however, these results says nothing about the rest of the range of the plan. If you use just 1 kWh over (or under) 1000 kWh, you may pay twice as much as expected!
Awesome Power solves this by using a weighted average to calculate plan costs. We take the average of a plan's cost across a range of kWh, so that misleading price jumps will be accounted for in the final pricing estimate.
Can we see the calculations used in the results?
Yep! Awesome Power is open source; check out the codebase here.
Below are the distributions for each of the low, mid, and high usage profiles.
Basically, for each plan, we calculate the plan’s cost at every kWh from 1 to 5000, then multiply that cost by the weight (the number on the y-axis). We then sum up all of those weighted costs to get an expected cost for that usage profile.
Why don’t the results include plan XYZ?
The most challenging and time-consuming part of maintaining Awesome Power is collecting the complete pricing profile for every plan. Every night, we retrieve a list of all of the plans on Power To Choose. However, this list only tells us each plan’s cost at 500, 1000, and 2000 kWh. In order for Awesome Power to work, we need to know the cost at every kWh, which you can only determine from the Electricity Facts Label (EFL) for that plan. The EFL does not have a standard format, so we try to figure out the different rates and charges by collecting all of the numbers visible on the EFL, and applying the numbers to one of the known cost functions for that provider. This process is entirely automated.
We get the pricing profile for most of the plans this way, but many EFLs are tough to interpret, and we have no choice but to leave that plan off of the results.
What happened to the old Awesome Power website?
In 2017, the creators of Awesome Power worked hard to improve consumer access to energy usage data by attending several meetings with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, and helping to determine the requirements for the state’s data access site, Smart Meter Texas.
Finally, on December 7, 2019, SMT 2.0 was unveiled.
Unfortunately, this meant that Awesome Power’s integration with Smart Meter Texas was broken. So, we simplified Awesome Power to only require a zip code to find the cheapest plans.
If there's anything else that hasn't been answered in these FAQs, shoot me an email at michael@awesomepowertexas.com, and I'll try to get back to you.