In July 2024, the city-owned electric utility in Georgetown recorded two disconnections for nonpayment for every 10,000 residential accounts it served. In Garland, outside Dallas, the city-owned utility recorded 250, data shows.
Same state, same month. Neither utility was covered by the state rule that restricts cutting off power during a heat advisory.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC—which regulates the state’s electricity market—rules bar a retail electric provider from disconnecting a customer for nonpayment in any county where the National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory, or has issued one on either of the two preceding days. The rules, according to an agency spokesperson, “specifically apply to retail electric providers in the ERCOT region.” Municipal utilities and electric cooperatives answer to city councils and member boards instead. Asked whether the commission tracks what those utilities do, the agency said in a statement: “The PUCT does not collect or maintain disconnection data from municipally owned utilities or electric cooperatives.”
But for the first time, federal data makes that patchwork visible. In April, the U.S. Energy Information Administration released its first federal count of residential electricity shutoffs broken out utility by utility. Texas recorded more than 3 million residential disconnections in 2024, more than any other state. The survey counts disconnection events rather than distinct households, and one account can be shut off more than once in a year.
Among the utilities the heat rule does not reach, the range is extraordinary.
Measured against each utility’s average monthly shutoff rate from March through May, Georgetown’s midsummer rate fell 98 percent, from 1.44 disconnections per 100 accounts to 0.03. San Antonio’s CPS Energy fell 94 percent. Austin Energy, 61 percent. Denton, 58 percent.
Garland’s fell 17 percent. Greenville’s fell 4 percent. Bryan’s rose 14 percent. In Castroville, west of San Antonio, it rose 62 percent, and its July figure of 3.89 per 100 accounts is the highest single month of any municipal utility in the cleaned dataset, though on a base of only about 1,285 accounts.
The warnings did not stop. The federal survey counts final notices, the formal warnings utilities send to customers behind on their bills, separately from the disconnections themselves. Across Texas municipal utilities in the cleaned federal data, the average monthly final-notice rate rose about 10 percent between spring and mid-summer, from 4.3 per 100 accounts in March through May to 4.7 in July and August, while the disconnection rate fell 66 percent over the same stretch. The two measures moved in opposite directions. Fewer shutoffs in July and August did not come with fewer warnings, and no state rule required these utilities to ease off during the hottest months of the year.
Comparing same-month totals, disconnections equaled 32 percent of the final notices these utilities sent in March, 7.7 percent in August and 31.2 percent in October. The data does not link a particular notice to a particular shutoff, and a warning sent in one month may not produce a disconnection in that month.
One explanation for a summer lull would be timing rather than restraint. Utilities often wait until a customer is more than 90 days behind before cutting service, so mild spring bills would show up as low summer disconnection numbers. Jonathan Kim, research and communications manager the Energy and Policy Institute, which analyzed the federal data, said the rising notice figures cut against that. The Pattern, he said, “undermines the ‘low bill’ hypothesis somewhat.”
At CPS Energy the gap was stark. In July it reported 33,000 final notices and 404 disconnections.
CPS has a written policy that would seem to explain that pattern. Its terms of service say it will not disconnect residential service on a weekend or during an extreme weather emergency, and in summer will not disconnect while a heat advisory is active anywhere in its service area, or for two calendar days after it lifts. That closely tracks what the commission requires of retail electric providers, and on weekends CPS’s ban is unconditional whereas the state rule allows disconnection if staff are on hand to take payment. None of it is required: the commission’s rule does not apply to CPS Energy.
“Municipal utilities often have extreme weather policies or practices of their own, however, and these can be more or less protective than those required of regulated utilities,” said David Konisky, co-director of the Energy Justice Lab, which tracks disconnections nationally. “One consequence of this patchwork of policies is a lack of clarity for customers.”
The annual totals broken down by ownership type complicate that local picture. In 2024, utilities classified as investor-owned in Texas recorded 33.3 disconnections for every 100 residential accounts, according to an Observer analysis of the same cleaned data. Municipal utilities recorded 11.8. Cooperatives, 10.1. Nationally, the order runs the other way: municipals lead at 13.7, cooperatives at 10.2, investor-owned utilities at 9.1.
Two of Texas’ largest power companies account for roughly 92 percent of the state’s investor-owned disconnections, and neither sells electricity to the customers those figures cover. CenterPoint Energy recorded 954,139 disconnections against about 2.5 million accounts, a rate of roughly 38 per 100, though that annual total covers only 11 months because its July figure is blank. Oncor recorded 1,241,425 against about 3.5 million accounts, or almost 34 per 100.
Often, neither company made the decision. Across the state’s competitive market, the company that owns the wires does not sell the power. A retail provider holds the account and sends the bill. When a customer falls behind, the retailer asks the delivery utility to disconnect, and the delivery utility carries it out, which it can do remotely through a smart meter. The federal survey records the company that executed the order, not the one that placed it.
“We unfortunately do not have disconnection data for the retail energy providers who are often the ones ordering these disconnections,” said Jonathan Kim, research and communications manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that focuses on retail energy markets. He called the Texas investor-owned rate “an indictment of energy affordability and consumer protections in Texas.”
There is a second problem with the protection, and it is not unique to Texas. Disconnections here fall through the summer and peak in October.
“Disconnections tend to be lower in the summer months, when heat-based utility disconnection protections are in place, and higher in the fall months, after disconnection protections are removed,” said Sanya Carley, who co-directs the Energy Justice Lab with Konisky. “We assume this phenomenon is due to households acquiring arrearages during periods of protection and then being immediately at risk of disconnection once the protections end.” The lab observed the same phenomenon after pandemic-era state moratoria expired, she said, with significant spikes once they lifted.
If that holds, a heat advisory does not erase what a customer owes. It delays the disconnection while the unpaid balance keeps growing.
What arrives later is not necessarily milder. “Even if utility disconnects occur after the peak summer heat, they can result in inadequate or dangerous indoor temperatures,” said Michael Depland, communications director of Texas Housers, a housing research and advocacy group. Losing service also affects a household’s ability to refrigerate food or medication, he said, and unpaid balances can draw late fees or be sent to outside debt collectors.
Karen Lusson, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and author of a July report on disconnections during extreme heat, said legislatures should require all utilities, cooperatives and municipal utilities included, to follow both temperature-based and calendar-based prohibitions. Short of that: “Public utility commissions can send letters to these non-regulated entities and encourage them to abide by the same rules as regulated public utilities.”
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