Client Infographic: Waste in the Texas Energy Market

Waste in the Texas Energy Market from ChooseEnergy.com is a new infographic by InfoNewt and designer Jeremy Yingling.  This one tells the story of how much money is NOT being saved by households that don’t take advantage of lower pricing since Texas has a deregulated electricity market.

As the economy struggles to recover and households continue to cut back on spending, one of the easiest ways to save money might just be in your electric bill. In these tough economic times, consumers realize the importance of watching how every penny is spent. Today we look at the “Waste in the Texas Energy Market” and how pennies can certainly add up quickly to improve consumer finances.

Following the Infographic Release Strategy from InfoNewt, ChooseEnergy also did a great job setting up a dedicated landing page and custom URL for the infographic.  All of their links then drive traffic to this single page.  So the company blog post, Twitter feed and Facebook posts provide additional descriptions and links to this landing page.

While highlighting the fact that the Texas energy market is the 11^th largest in the world, the infographic also shows that 48% of the electricity consumed is from residential use.  So what’s the big deal?  On average Texas residents pay about 11.5 cents per kWh for their home electric use when they could be paying 8.5 cents per kWh.   Doesn’t sound like much does it?  Well, those 3 pennies can add up fast and they add up to $3.7 billion for the Texas consumer market.

You can follow ChooseEnergy on Twitter at @texas_electric

Comments

[Bilsko]

It is a good looking infographic, but I have one nitpick:

The title and the content don't really line up. The data isn't really about "waste" in the market; its about the foregone savings that consumers could capture by switching to 3rd party commodity purchases for electricity...but that's not really 'waste', per se. When talking about waste in the context of energy - electricity in particular - typically the conversation is around generation inefficiencies or transmisison and distribution losses (delivering the power from big plants to end users).

As an aside, its not entirely clear that if every residential customer switched to 3rd party purchasing that the savings would materialize in the long run. Even though Texas is a deregulated market, the DisCos (Distribution utilities) are regulated and have a guaranteed rate of return. I might very well be mistaken on this, but I think they count the expected revenues from Standard Offer of Service (SoS) sales towards that guaranteed return. The SoS sales are that 11.5c that the infographic is talking about. If everyone switches to 3rd party purchases and the utility has to make their SoS more competitive to keep that revenue stream, then i suspect the 3c will show up elsewhere on the Distribution Bill.

[Jerry N.]

I believe the entire graphic outlay and progression is very informational and relays the point it is trying to get across. The people of Texas now have a choice of energy provider due to deregulation. But if they ignore that choice and continue to overpay an average of 3 cents extra per kilowatt hour of electricity used, that is indeed an incredible waste of money. So I believe that the title is very appropriate. Especially when the infographic display shows us that it is equivalent to $450 per household annually, and an aggregate of 3.7 billion dollars per year to Texan residents. For emphasis, it then shows the value of that sum of money by giving some comparisons of what can be done with sums less than 3.7 billion. I find that astounding.

Jerry

[Wesley]

Wow. I find the graphic VERY IMPRESSIVE. I wish I had it for MY business! :-)
As a person in this industry I appreciate the message in the graphic. Nicely done.
Wesley at http://www.roundrockelectricity.com