Houston, We Have a Review Problem: The Search for Transparent Energy Ratings

People in Texas have a lot of options when it’s time to shop for electricity. You can chase the cheapest rate, lock in a long-term contract, go renewable, or prioritize customer service. But no matter what you’re looking for, it usually ends the same way: you’re left with a short list of companies offering nearly identical rates, trying to figure out which one is actually the best.

To break the tie, most people rely on reviews. However, when you look for reviews online, you find too many contradictions. A comparison website might show 2,000 reviews with a 5-star rating, while Yelp tells you a completely different story. Google might show something else entirely.

Eventually, you end up trusting one of these sources. You sign up for a company with great reviews, only to find out later that they charge you for everything, including credit card fees, autopay penalties, and hidden one time fees. Maybe their customer service wasn't as good as the reviews claimed. Or worst of all, they tricked you into enrolling in a Bill Credit plan, and now that you want to exit, the cancellation fees are too high to leave.

This isn’t just bad luck. It’s a structural issue in the Texas energy market. A small group of comparison sites dominates search results, and their rankings tend to favor companies they have commercial partnerships with, often presenting them as “better reviewed” than they actually are.

In this article, we are going to analyze why the current review system is broken, clear up the misunderstood data, and explain how Clear Energy Facts gives the user the final word.

First, it is important to clarify a difficult approach to shopping. Does the review matter, or should you simply stick with the cheapest plan regardless of the company?

Our position at Clear Energy Facts is clear: They matter, but they should not be the first driver of your decision.

Think of a review analysis as a tie-breaker.

But this leads to the most important question of this article: Which reviews are trustable?

Currently, the "Trust Indicators" in Texas are flawed. Here are the three main issues we see in the market:

Pick a well-known energy provider and look at their reviews on Google or Bing. You will likely find a comparison website showing that company has a rating above 4 stars with more than 10,000 reviews.

But click on it. You will notice that the majority of these reviews are old, very old. Probably more than 80% of these reviews are from 3+ years ago.

You don’t need data from 2018. In three years, a company has more than enough time to completely turn around its business, for better or for worse. We need reviews for the last year to see how the company is actually performing today. Old reviews are irrelevant.

2 - The "Polarized" Review Loop (Google, Yelp, BBB)

The second problem is how consumers react when writing reviews. You can test this yourself: most reviews on these platforms fall into two categories—Too Good or Terrible.

Sometimes, a company's rating feels like a measure of how much budget they have to alleviate bad reviews, rather than how good they actually are.

We have found that the PUCT (Public Utility Commission of Texas) score is a decent metric for overall complaints. It compares companies based on their number of customers, which is fair.

However, it has a major flaw: The PUCT score only applies to companies that post plans on Power to Choose.

If a company doesn’t post any plans on Power to Choose, they won’t have a score displayed. It doesn't mean they don't have complaints; it just isn't quantified there. This creates a loophole: if a company has a very bad month of complaints and wants to avoid bad publicity, they can simply remove their plans from Power to Choose. Suddenly, you have no data to compare.

All the indicators mentioned above lean heavily on "Customer Service." But they fail to accurately compare the other important aspects of your electricity plan:

These questions are difficult to answer if you rely only on stars. That is where the Clear Energy Facts Review Methodology comes into play.

In order to answer the question above, the most important thing you need is data. And we have it. We collect information on almost every company providing service in Texas. By analyzing the EFL (Electricity Facts Label) alongside customer service data, we present a new kind of rating system:

We compare all the offers from a company against the market and build a ranking. Better Rate = Higher Score. We do this with an "apples-to-apples" comparison. That is why companies that focus on True Fixed Rates usually score higher than companies that rely on Bill Credits. This score tells you instantly if the provider is competitively priced or not.

Is this company offering you the best rate possible, or do you have to hunt for it? After analyzing thousands of plans, we found a pattern where companies route users to different rates depending on the source. Very few companies offer the same deals on their own website that they offer on Power to Choose or via Google Sponsor pages.

With our Transparency Rating, we are rewarding companies that break away from these standard market practices. We give higher scores to providers that offer a transparent way to always find their best rate, ensuring you get the same fair deal no matter where you find them.

The majority of customers don’t fully read the EFL, and they especially don’t read the Terms of Service. There are often fees buried there that catch people by surprise—credit card processing fees, phone payment fees, non-autopay penalties, etc. At Clear Energy Facts, we flag these. We include any "uncommon" fees in our rating so you aren't surprised by your first bill.

We believe that a company with a low cancellation fee is a confident company. They know their customers will be happy and won't want to switch. That is why we rate providers with fair exit fees higher, rewarding companies that offer you flexibility rather than relying on high penalties to keep your business.

Finally, we tackle the "Old Data" problem. We combine the PUCT score with context (explaining why a score might be missing) and then analyze Google Reviews within a 1-year window. We look for current trends: Are there recent autopay glitches? Are there disconnection issues this month? If a company has 4.9 stars overall, but the last 6 months are negative, our review reflects the reality of today, not 2018.


The Final Word

The customer rating and review system is becoming part of our core at Clear Energy Facts. By weighting transparency and rate stability just as heavily as customer service, we aim to give Texans the only review that actually lowers their bill.