San Antonio's power is not for sale.
Governor Abbott wants to open CPS Energy to retail electricity competition, promising 10 to 20 percent savings. Before San Antonio gives up a utility it owns, the claim deserves to be checked against real numbers — so we built the tool to check it.
What San Antonio actually stands to lose
CPS Energy is owned by the city. Its payment to the General Fund is the single largest source of money the city has — larger than property tax.
What people actually paid
Not what was advertised — what was billed. These are federal filings: every provider's total revenue divided by the electricity it sold, across every residential customer in Texas. Cheap rates do exist in Houston, and our tool will show you them. This is what the market delivered to everybody else.
Deregulated households paid 4.23¢ more per kWh than CPS customers — 34% more, about $571 a year on typical usage. That is not an advertised rate. It is total revenue divided by electricity sold, from every provider's 2024 federal filing.
Source: EIA Form 861A year, on what was actually billed
The 4.23¢/kWh gap between what deregulated households really paid and what CPS customers really paid, on a typical year of use. Federal filings, 2024 — not a quoted rate.
SourceBuy from the two priciest retailers
Reliant and TXU together serve most of deregulated Texas, and their customers paid 17.38¢ and 18.70¢ per kWh — against 12.43¢ for CPS. The biggest sellers are among the most expensive.
SourceWhat deregulation has already cost Texans
A Wall Street Journal analysis of federal energy data found households in deregulated Texas paid $28 billion more between 2004 and 2019 than they would have at the rates charged by the state’s own traditional utilities.
Source: WSJ, 2021Retail providers own no power plants
Of the 49 retailers selling electricity in Texas, 39 generate none of it — they resell someone else's power at a markup. CPS Energy is the state's third-largest generator.
Source: EIA Form 923Do not take our word for it
Advertised rates are a different question, and our tool answers that one too: it prices every currently advertised fixed-rate offer in each Texas market against the CPS tariff, on the same electricity use. It will tell you plainly when a competitive offer beats CPS, because in several markets the typical advertised offer does — and a tool that could only produce one answer would not be worth using.
The distance between those two answers is the point. What the market advertises to someone shopping today is not what it delivered to everyone over a full year.
The part nobody is quoting you
If San Antonio households save money on electricity but the city loses the $492,160,673 a year CPS pays into the General Fund — 29.88% of everything it has to spend — that money does not disappear. It gets made up somewhere: property taxes, sales taxes, or fewer services.
And because public safety is 62.04% of General Fund spending — $609,081,560 for police and $397,685,356 for fire — a revenue cut lands there by arithmetic, not by choice.
This is decided in Austin, not San Antonio
Restructuring a municipally owned utility takes an act of the Texas Legislature. Your state representative and state senator will vote on it. They are the people to talk to.