Energy companies in San Antonio: why CPS Energy is your provider, plus solar, power plants and the local industry

This report is for San Antonio households and businesses sorting out who supplies their power, for anyone researching rooftop solar or energy jobs in the area, and for B2B sellers whose customers are the region's utilities and plant operators.

Why most San Antonio homes can't pick a provider

CPS Energy, which says it was acquired by the City of San Antonio in 1942, is a city-owned utility that sells and delivers electricity itself; EIA's 2025 utility survey (Form EIA-861) reports it that way, with 986,641 electricity customers. NRG's 2025 10-K describes the boundary of the Texas retail market: competitive providers serve most of the ERCOT grid, except areas served by city utilities and co-ops that haven't opted into competition. San Antonio is one of those areas.

The Public Utility Commission's complaint records show it plainly. In 2025, Bexar County customers filed 3 complaints about retail electric providers, compared with 1,002 in Harris County and 512 in Dallas County. If an online ad offers you a cheaper plan, check first whether it can serve your address at all.

Who serves your address

EIA's service territory file lists these utilities in the metro's core counties. Customer counts are each utility's whole system:

Smaller utilities serve parts of the outer counties too, among them Medina Electric Cooperative, Central Texas Electric Cooperative and the cities of Castroville, Hondo and Floresville.

EIA reports every utility in the table except AEP Texas Central as selling power directly. Only on AEP Texas Central's lines, in parts of four outer counties, do you shop among retail providers. CPS Energy also sells natural gas, and says it serves San Antonio and portions of seven adjoining counties.

Rooftop solar in San Antonio

Many people searching for San Antonio energy companies want a solar installer. The installers themselves are construction and electrical contractors, so they aren't in the energy counts below, but the utility side is in EIA's data. CPS Energy reported 48,818 residential solar installations on net metering in 2025, with 414 MW of capacity, and 49,816 installations in all. Pedernales reported 13,584 residential installations, Guadalupe Valley 4,517 and New Braunfels Utilities 1,361. Before you sign with an installer, ask your utility for its interconnection and net metering terms, because they decide what your exported power is worth.

San Antonio's energy industry in Census data

County Business Patterns 2023 counts electric power, oil and gas extraction and pipeline establishments (NAICS 2211, 211 and 486) in the San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX Metro Area (CBSA 41700):

The Census Bureau published employee and payroll totals but flagged them as high-noise (its confidentiality noise changed them by 5% or more):

Electric power payroll works out to $106,228 per employee, our calculation; extraction payroll is a high-noise figure. By size, 75 establishments have 1 to 4 employees and 19 have 5 to 9; the Census Bureau doesn't publish the larger size classes here.

Those rows add to 106 of the metro's 122; the rest sit in county cells the Census Bureau doesn't publish. Other county employee counts are high-noise figures. These are establishments with paid employees, not companies; self-employed people aren't counted. Oilfield services and refining are outside these codes and are covered in oil and gas companies in San Antonio, including the Eagle Ford yards in Atascosa County.

CPS Energy's plants, here and elsewhere

EIA's 2025 generator survey (Form EIA-860, final data released September 10, 2026) lists 43 plants in the metro with 7,794 MW: 64.7% natural gas, 24.4% coal, 9.2% batteries and 1.5% solar. CPS Energy operates 5,447 MW of it.

Across Texas, CPS Energy operates 9,580 MW, more than any operator except Vistra's Luminant, including the two largest plants near Corpus Christi and the Topaz plant in Texas City. For a city utility, it's one of the state's biggest generators.

Public companies

No SEC-listed company in the oil and gas production or utility codes has a metro San Antonio address on EDGAR. The city's largest energy company is the refiner Valero, whose head office greater:SATX, the regional economic development group, lists among San Antonio's corporate headquarters alongside USAA and H-E-B; it's profiled in the oil and gas report linked above. CPS Energy, as a city utility, has no shares.

Selling to San Antonio's utilities

The buyers here are a handful of public power and co-op utilities rather than a market of retail providers. As general guidance, city-owned utilities and co-ops tend to buy large contracts through formal bids and smaller ones through operations managers, and they talk to each other, so one good reference spreads.

Illustrative example. The seller and its rates are invented; utility names and counts are from EIA-861.

Medina River Line Clearance (medinariver.example) trims trees along distribution lines. Its market is the eight utilities in the table that sell power directly, from CPS Energy to the City of Boerne. With a vegetation or operations manager and a purchasing contact at each, that's 16 people. For CPS Energy the work is watching for solicitations and registering as a supplier; for the co-ops and smaller city utilities, it's a direct conversation about storm season and a pilot circuit. Bebop can research each utility and draft the openers, and the guide to warm introductions helps where a reference from one co-op can open the next.

Subject: Clearance on [co-op name]'s [feeder or area] lines

Hi [first name],

[Co-op name] serves about [number] members in [counties], and [recent storm] took out [number] meters for [duration].

We clear distribution lines for co-ops in [region] and can start with one circuit so you can judge the work before a full contract.

Would a site walk on [day] with your line superintendent be useful?

[Your name]

Next step: see how the rest of the state's market works, retail choice included, in energy companies in Texas.