Texas Electricity Companies

You are paying way too much. I hate to say it, but Reliant is a nasty company to deal with. They like to screw you around if you try to leave them, so you might as well ante up and get with a better provider.
Current open market prices are running right at 10.2 cents per kWh. You have to remember that these are variable rates, so if natural gas (the benchmark), shoots back up after say a major storm like Hurricane Rita that knocks out the Henry Hub, you could be paying up to 30 cents per kWh. Just don’t get into a contract with variable rates. There are several companies that have these variable rates without terms. Go to Powertochoose.com to find out.
Back when deregulation started, the lawmakers bench-marked natural gas because in Texas it’s the primary source of generation, and is the most abundant fuel in Texas. It’s actually considered a green energy in the State for that reason. These lawmakers assumed it would always be cheap, and no one saw it going to $13 per metric ton, when the laws were being drafted it was $3.50 per metric ton. No one expected $4 gasoline either–but we were all paying it in the summer of 2008. With it all being on the market, it was being played on hard, and people were becoming millionaires overnight, and then the big players like Chesapeake Energy come in trying to pump natural gas by all means necessary, spending money like there was no tomorrow. This all had a huge effect on the market to drive prices up. All companies could not get enough natural gas (I forgot to mention that both major hurricanes drove down storage, so supplies were not percieved to be there–Thank you George W). So the big electric companies start talking building coal plants, which became a huge issue with the environmentalist, led by then Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. In her heart, she was doing the right thing, but what she did not know along with so many others is that her movement was keeping prices high because the public was so against these nasty coal plants, that these market players kept betting on natural gas, and kept the prices high because they had their ‘monopoly’ in place without too much fear of any other competing energy source (I too hate coal, but diversification is sometimes beneficial in a competitive market).
So the environmentalist are a big reason why so many are paying so much in Texas right now. They did not know what they were doing, most thought windmills were the answer, but now even those (T Boone Pickens) plans are falling apart right now because they cannot compete at 10 cents per kWh (prices need to be closer to 15 cents per kWh), so guess what, natural gas is still the main source, with the idea of no diversification of any other fuels except with light exception of some lignite plants and a couple of nuclear plants. So as usual, we want to keep all our eggs in one basket for the next market event…

holy $%^& power is expensive there.
i live in vancouver, canada and i pay 5.9 cents /kWh……….
thats insane.