Commercial electricity in the Oncor zone.

If your business is in Dallas, Fort Worth, or anywhere across the wider Metroplex, your electricity bill has two very different halves: the regulated cost of delivering power to your meter, and the competitive cost of the power itself. Understanding where the line sits is the difference between shopping offers well and being misled by a low headline rate. Here's how the Oncor zone actually works.

What Oncor does — and what it doesn't

Oncor is the TDSP (transmission and distribution service provider) for most of North and Central Texas. It owns and operates the poles, wires, substations, and meters that physically deliver electricity in its territory, and it's responsible for outages, restoration, and grid reliability. What Oncor does not do is set your rate or send you a competitive bill — that's your retail electricity provider (REP), a separate company you choose on the open market.

This split is the heart of the deregulated Texas market. Oncor delivers the same electrons no matter which REP you sign with, so switching suppliers never touches your reliability or your service. It only changes who sells you the energy and at what price.

What Oncor delivery charges mean for your bill

Oncor's delivery and capacity charges are set by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT), not by your supplier — and they're identical across every REP serving the zone. That has a practical consequence most buyers miss: the delivery component is not where you save money, and it's not what separates one supplier's offer from another. Two suppliers quoting the same Oncor account carry the exact same wires charges underneath.

Where commercial buyers actually save is the supply side — the energy price, the supplier's margin, and the contract clauses. So the cleanest way to compare offers is to strip the Oncor pass-through out of every quote and rank suppliers on supply cost and terms alone.

What's specific about the Oncor territory

Oncor carries the largest urban load in ERCOT, and that shapes the market a commercial buyer walks into:

• Deep supplier competition. Almost every retail supplier active in Texas serves the Oncor zone, which tends to compress margins — good news if you run a real competitive process, wasted if you don't shop.
• Meaningful spreads on mid-sized accounts. Commercial and industrial accounts in the roughly 500 kW–2 MW range often see a wide gap between the cheapest and the average offer, so the comparison is worth doing carefully.
• Summer 4CP exposure. DFW's hot-afternoon peaks regularly land in ERCOT's four coincident-peak (4CP) intervals, which drive transmission charges for larger accounts — load-shifting and curtailment pay back faster here than in milder zones.

How to compare commercial offers in the Oncor zone

Because every REP shares the same Oncor delivery charges, a clean comparison comes down to normalizing everything else:

• Strip delivery. Pull the Oncor pass-through out of each offer so suppliers are ranked on margin and supply cost, not the wires charges they all share.
• Normalize the specs. Match term length, bandwidth, swing tolerance, and pass-through language across every bidder — apples-to-apples is the only honest comparison.
• Anchor to ERCOT. Reconcile each offer back to the ERCOT forward curve at the moment you lock, so you know whether a bid is genuinely sharp or just average.

Outages and reliability

If your power goes out, you call Oncor, not your retail provider — only the TDSP can dispatch line crews. Oncor's outage line is 888-313-4747, and that's true regardless of which REP bills you. Your supplier can help with billing questions, but it has no role in physically restoring service.