Commercial electricity in the CenterPoint zone.

No Texas metro buys commercial power quite like Houston. The same region anchors the petrochemical corridor, the Texas Medical Center, and the busiest port complex in the country — and all of it sits in the CenterPoint delivery zone. For a business in Harris County, electricity is rarely a rounding error, and the CenterPoint side of the bill is part of why. Here's what to understand.

What CenterPoint does — and what it doesn't

CenterPoint is the TDSP for greater Houston and the upper Gulf Coast. It owns and maintains the poles, wires, and meters, and it's responsible for outages and restoration across the region. It does not set your energy price — it charges a regulated delivery fee — and it doesn't choose your supplier. You select a retail electricity provider (REP) on the open market, and that REP sets the price per kilowatt-hour you actually pay.

As with the rest of deregulated Texas, CenterPoint delivers the same power regardless of which REP you sign with. Switching suppliers changes your rate and your contract, never your reliability.

Why CenterPoint delivery charges run higher

CenterPoint's delivery and capacity charges — set by the PUCT, identical across every REP in the zone — have run higher than Oncor's in recent years, largely on the back of grid-resilience capital spending, much of it accelerated after Hurricane Beryl. The practical effect is that the same supplier offer can land several percent higher in Houston than it would for an equivalent account in DFW, purely because of the delivery side.

That makes the delivery-versus-supply distinction even more important here. You can't negotiate the CenterPoint charges down, so the entire savings opportunity lives in the supply-side line items — and the higher delivery base is all the more reason not to let a confusing headline rate hide a weak supply offer.

What's specific about the CenterPoint territory

The Gulf Coast load mix gives this zone a character of its own:

• Higher all-in cost than DFW. Because delivery runs higher, an identical supplier quote can finish 5–10% above the Oncor equivalent — benchmark against the zone, not a Texas average.
• Aggressive 4CP outcomes. Dense, summer-peaked coastal load means the four ERCOT coincident-peak intervals bite hard, so demand response and on-site generation tend to pay back quickly.
• Heavy industrial corridor. Refining, petrochemicals, port logistics, and healthcare dominate — and some of those sub-sectors run unusually flat, around-the-clock loads that are ideal candidates for longer fixed contracts.

How to compare commercial offers in the CenterPoint zone

The method is the same as anywhere in deregulated Texas, but the stakes are higher because of the delivery base:

• Strip delivery. Remove the CenterPoint pass-through from every offer so suppliers are ranked on what they actually control.
• Normalize the specs. Match term, bandwidth, swing tolerance, and pass-through language across bidders before you compare a single number.
• Account for 4CP. For larger accounts, model your transmission and 4CP exposure explicitly — in this zone it can move the real cost more than a fraction of a cent on the energy rate.

Outages and reliability

For an outage, call CenterPoint at 800-332-7143 — not your retail provider. Only the TDSP can dispatch crews and restore service, and that's true no matter which REP sends your bill. After Beryl, CenterPoint's restoration performance has been under heavy public scrutiny, but the chain of responsibility is unchanged: reliability is the TDSP's job, pricing is your supplier's.