Usually when someone tells you that something is free, there's a hidden cost somewhere. When it comes to electric plans it's no different.
Our friends at TXU are at it again. They have resurrected the Energy Free Nights plan that gives you "free" electricity for 9 hours every night. Here's why TXU says you'll want this plan: get a cool nights sleep on their dime, track all the free electricity you're getting using their mobile app, and finally because Free Nights customers got 40% of their electricity free in 2015.
Energy Choice Experts thinks this sounds a little too good, so we decided to see how this plan would stack up against a simple, straight-forward plan without "free" electricity. We used one of our own customer profiles and plotted the monthly cost of TXU's plan versus the ECE recommended plan below.
What we found was that TXU's plan was 55% higher and would actually cost our customer over $600 more per year!
In this example, the customer would have received 45% of his electricity for free compared to the 40% mentioned by TXU for their customers in 2015. However, the cost of electricity during the other 55% of the time was 2.77 times higher than the flat rate on the other plan we compared it against.
So why would a customer choose this plan? Maybe they think they can shift some extra load into the nighttime hours to take more advantage of the "free" period. Well, considering that the largest consumers of electricity, the A/C and refrigerator, can't really be shut down completely during the day (unless you want a 100 degree house to cool down when you get home in the summer) it's not likely that you could make this plan work to your benefit.
Energy Choice Experts is here to keep our customers from falling for these gimmicks. Provide us with your usage and we'll give you the straight answer on your Lowest Annual Cost Energy Plan for a one-time fee of $35 ....a lot less than paying someone like TXU an extra $600 for "free" electricity!