Dive Brief:

• A report funded by investor-owned utilities in Texas recommends that the state's transmission and distribution (T&D) power companies partner with retail electric providers (REPs) to administer energy efficiency programs, rather than providing them to consumers themselves.
• The report points to a REP-administered efficiency program at CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric, which yielded thousands of equipment improvements.
• Retail providers in Texas' competitive markets provided the services as sign-up bonuses to new customers, as retention incentives and as a bonus to high-value customers.

Dive Insight:

When it comes to energy efficiency, the Lone Star state says partnering is the way to go.

The Evaluation, Measurement and Verification collaborative, a group funded by Texas IOUs to study efficiency programs, has issued a report recommending the states' utilities partner with retail providers on mandated efficiency programs. The idea is to broaden the reach of efficiency, and the report glows with comments by REPs on a program adminitered by CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric: "Almost too good to be true;" and "There shouldn't be a reason a REP would not want to participate."

According to ECM, the CenterPoint program resulted in more than 6,000 tuneups to residential and commerical cooling systems in 2014, but the Houston-based T&D utility was the only one in the state that allowed REPs to participate in its efficiency offerings. 

In Texas' competitive market, where retail providers can struggle to differentiate themselves, the efficiency offerings can be used to entice new customers or convince existing customers to stick around. The efficiency report on the REP offerings finds they were most often used as enticements (also in part due to service area restrictions), though some were also offered to high-volume customers.

Providers in Texas are getting increasingly creative in order to woo customers. Reliant Energy was forced to rework an app which didn't meet customer expectations, for instance, but wound up with a superior interface that allows for bill pay, energy monitoring and outage updates.