Energy companies in Texas: the electricity market, the industry's size and the companies that run it

This report is for Texans working out who supplies their electricity, for job seekers and analysts mapping the state's energy employers, and for B2B sellers whose customers are utilities, power producers, retail providers or oil and gas companies. Oil and gas get their own reports, linked below; this one centers on power.

How electricity is sold in Texas

The grid operator, ERCOT, runs the main Texas grid, which EIA says covers about 75% of the state's land area, 90% of its electric load and 27 million customers. Who sells you power depends on who owns the lines at your address:

Customers here are accounts, not people. NRG's 2025 10-K describes the boundary: competitive retail serves most of the ERCOT load, except areas served by city utilities and co-ops that haven't opted into competition. The four investor-owned utilities in the last row sell and deliver power themselves, all on grids outside ERCOT.

In the competitive areas, a delivery company owns the wires and bills the REP, not you:

Lubbock's city utility is on the list because EIA reports it as a delivery company for competing REPs. Oncor's 10-K says its distribution customers were more than 100 REPs at the end of 2025.

The largest retail providers

EIA reports each REP by legal entity, so one parent's brands show up separately. These are the ten with the most Texas homes in 2025:

Size tells you who's big, not who's cheap or good. What you pay depends on the plan, and the commission's rule 16 TAC §25.475 makes every REP publish an Electricity Facts Label with the average price at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kWh and any cancellation fee. The Office of Public Utility Counsel points shoppers to the commission's Power to Choose website (powertochoose.org).

The commission's complaint records, published on the Texas Open Data Portal, are the best check on a provider's record. In 2025 they show 3,990 complaints about 63 different REPs and 2,025 about delivery companies. Billing led the REP complaints (1,906), followed by provision of service (860), disconnection (735) and slamming, a switch you didn't authorize (375). Delivery complaints were mostly about service quality (775) and meters (647).

The Texas energy industry in Census data

County Business Patterns 2023 counts establishments in electric power generation, transmission and distribution (NAICS 2211), oil and gas extraction (211) and pipeline transportation (486):

The Census Bureau flagged the employee and payroll totals as high-noise, meaning the noise it adds for confidentiality moved them by 5% or more. The pipeline segment carries the flag:

That's 3,059 establishments with 1 to 19 employees, 705 with 20 to 99 and 170 with 100 or more; the last band is the total less the smaller ones, since two large cells aren't published. Average pay is payroll divided by employees, our calculation. CBP counts establishments with paid employees, not companies, and leaves out the self-employed and head offices filed under management of companies.

Power plants

EIA's 2025 generator survey (Form EIA-860, final data released September 10, 2026) lists 1,023 Texas plants with 195,966 MW of nameplate capacity: 42.4% natural gas, 22.4% wind, 15.7% solar, 8.5% coal, 7.2% batteries and 2.6% nuclear. In generation rather than capacity, EIA's state profile puts 2024 at 51% natural gas, 22% wind and about 12% coal.

The largest single plants are NRG's W A Parish in Fort Bend County (4,008 MW) and the South Texas Project nuclear plant in Matagorda County (2,709 MW). Harris County has more capacity than any other county, 10,251 MW at 81 plants.

Where the public energy companies are based

EDGAR lists 89 SEC-registered listed companies in these industries with a Texas business address, a count that includes a few waste firms swept in by the utility code range. More than half are in the Houston area, with Dallas-Fort Worth second and Midland third. The largest, from their latest 10-Ks:

Houston's list runs much deeper, with EOG, Occidental, Cheniere, Targa, Kinder Morgan and CenterPoint; see energy companies in Houston. Producers and refiners are in the report on oil and gas companies in Texas, and midstream operators in pipeline companies in Texas.

Selling to Texas energy companies

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

Caprock Outage Systems (caprock.example) sells outage management software to small utilities. Of Texas's 67 co-ops and 72 city utilities, 64 serve 10,000 or more customers: 49 co-ops and 15 city utilities. Each has a general manager and an operations or engineering lead, so the list is about 128 people. Co-ops buy slowly and compare notes, so one reference customer matters more than volume; a 5% reply rate gives about 6 conversations, and two pilots would make a strong year. Bebop finds and researches each utility in a list like this and drafts the opening email, and the guide to building a prospect list covers the groundwork.

Subject: Outage calls at [co-op name] during [recent storm]

Hi [first name],

[Co-op name] serves about [number] members across [counties], and [recent storm] put [number] of them out for [duration].

Co-ops your size often still take outage reports by phone. Our system maps calls to the feeder and gives crews a restoration order without new hardware.

Would a 20-minute look at how [neighboring co-op] uses it be worth your time on [day]?

[Your name]

Next step: for a city-level view, start with energy companies in Houston, where the state's largest cluster of energy head offices sits.