News Stories

Parties file initial comments on the Proposal for Publication (“PFP”) to repeal and replace 16 Tex. Admin. Code (“TAC”) § 25.88, relating to Retail Market Performance Measure Reporting, issued by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (“Commission”).

As reported previously, a Staff Proposal for Publication was issued on November 6, 2025 seeking comments on staff’s proposed rules.  Below are highlights from parties filed comments:

Coalition of Competitive Retailers – Retail Market Performance Measures 

“The current Retail Market Performance Measures are more than sufficient to monitor the competitive retail market, and the proposed measures and new Rule 25.88 will not meaningfully assist with market monitoring. The proposal would require additional information that is “interesting” rather than “important” and would result in an unnecessary burden and significant additional costs for REPS, particularly those offering prepaid electric service”

Other consideration in implementation of PURA §39.168 and its amendment to §25.88 – “The only customer-specific information required to be included in the new electric industry report is “customer demand.” However, the proposed new rule adds nothing to the customer demand information already filed with, or available to, the Commission. Demand information from REPs is already available to the Commission through the monthly EIA-861M report to the Federal Energy Information Administration.”

“The Proposal for Publication contends that the proposed rule and performance measures would “streamline” the reporting of competitive retail market data to the Commission by REPs. Instead, there will be no streamlining for these commenters. Instead, there will be significant additional burdens imposed, and additional costs to pay, for compliance.”

Proposed §25.88(b)(2) – “Currently §25.88 requires Retail Market Performance Measure Reports to be filed within 45 days following the end of the preceding calendar quarterly reporting period. The proposed rule would reduce the current 45-day period to just 30 days. Compressing the report filing timeframe by one-third would create significant costs and challenges, especially with respect to the data pertaining to customers on prepaid plans whose customer balances and service status can change multiple times per day.”

“If the Commission adopts the proposed additional reporting requirements, then it should certainly not lower the 45-day window to just 30 days. Post-paid reconnections will have to be reported according to the five (5) different timeframes set out in 16 TAC §25.498(n). Another proposal is for all reporting data to be broken down by month rather than by calendar quarter as currently done for the Technical Performance Measures report. These new requirements will considerably increase the time and expense for reporting to the Commission for no suggested benefit to the Commission or the public. And to further require these reports to be made within a significantly shorter timeframe seems punitive. Failure to timely file an accurate report can result in administrative penalties, or even the suspension or revocation of a REP’s certificate. This makes compliance a high-stakes issue, requiring dedicated resources. As such, if the present Rule 25.88 is repealed and replaced, the Commission should at least leave the 45-day reporting window as it exists in the current rule.”

Disconnection for non-pay, reconnection requirement – “The Commission should remove references to a “two-hour reconnection requirement” from the Proposal.  Currently, 16 TAC §25.498(j)(4) specifies that a REP serving pre-paid customers must submit the reconnection request within one hour of the reconnection requirements’ being fulfilled. The proposed Technical Performance Measures Report requirements seem to replace that one hour reconnection request and would instead ask for the number of reconnections that were completed within 2 hours. The problem with this proposal is that only the TDU controls the meter and the time it takes to reconnect service. So, if there is a delay by the TDU, it could appear that a REP did not meet this perceived obligation. The Technical Performance Measures Report should not require any different time period from that in Rule 25.498(i)(4).” 

Disconnection for Non-pay, Critical Care and Chronic Care Customers – “By separating the terms critical care residential customers and chronic condition residential customers, a reader could reasonably believe that data must be separately reported for each of the two types of customers. Any proposed requirement to extract or report separate data on these categories would necessitate significant system redesign and the creation of new data fields. REPs do not currently separate this data, and there is no good reason to do so since the requirements of 16 TAC §25.498(k) treats critical care and chronic care customers the same.”

“If the Instructions for Retail Performance Measures Report are adopted, chronic care and critical care customers should not be separated and instead combined so that the bolded words above would read: “critical care or chronic condition residential customers.”

Disconnection for Non-Pay – “The proposed prepaid disconnection reporting requirements impose a disproportionate and operationally impractical burden on REPs that offer prepaid plans. Unlike postpaid customers who typically face a single disconnection risk point each monthly billing cycle-prepaid customers must maintain a positive balance every day to avoid interruption of service. As a result, a single prepaid account may experience multiple automated disconnect events within a single month, each driven by real-time balance fluctuations rather than traditional non-payment behavior.”

“The proposed rule and schedules would require REPs to track, extract, and report each of these events individually for prepaid customers, which is fundamentally different from the far more limited reporting required with respect to post-paid customers. Implementing such granular reporting would require significant system redesign, new data fields, new tracking logic, and ongoing increases in data processing and storage.”

Texas Association For Marketer (TEAM) – Report Due Date
“TEAM recommends that the deadline for filing a Report remain unchanged. A Report filed by a REP is required to include the sales data reported monthly to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The form used to report the monthly data, Form 861M, is due to the EIA by the last day of the month following the reporting month. For example, Form 861M for the month of July is due on August 31.”

Confidential Information – “Because the Report is a quarterly compliance filing made using a form prescribed by the Commission and includes competitively sensitive information, the considerations regarding the filing of confidential materials are different than the considerations in a contested case proceeding or proceeding where the data is not already known to be competitively sensitive.  Accordingly, TEAM recommends revising proposed 16 TAC § 25.88(b)(3) to exempt REPs from making a redacted filing such that the public portion of the Report would include the confidential filing memorandum but not a redacted copy of the Report.”

Retail Sales By Premise Type – “TEAM respectfully requests that the new requirements under proposed Schedule A, Part 2: Retail Sales by Premise Type not be added to the required reporting. Requiring REPs to present sales information by the four customer classes used in the Commission rule addressing POLR service and broken down by transmission and distribution utility (TDU) service territory would impose an additional regulatory burden (especially for those REPs serving all POLR customer classes in multiple TDU service territories) with an unclear benefit over the existing reporting.”

Retail Electric Provider Affiliations – “The information required by Schedule A, Part 3: Retail Electric Provider Affiliates is information about all affiliates of a REP and not just those affiliates that are also REPs. This is beyond the scope of PURA § 39.168, which requires a REP to provide information about the annual retail sales of its affiliates and any other information the Commission requires relating to affiliations between retail electric providers. TEAM recommends limiting this schedule to a listing of all affiliates of a REP that also hold a REP certificate issued by the Commission. TEAM further recommends that Schedule A, Part 3 include a box a REP can check if the list of affiliates was the same for each month of the reporting period. This will eliminate the need to file three Excel sheets containing identical information.”

Vistra – Staff proposed rule sufficient to monitor the competitive Texas REP market?
“The three Retail Market Performance Measures provided by the Commission exceed what is needed to sufficiently monitor the competitive Texas retail electricity market. To implement PURA §39.168,2 the Commission must only require a REP to provide “(1) its annual retail sales in the state (2) the annual retail sales of its affiliates by number of customers, kilowatts per hour sold, and revenue from kilowatts per hour sold by customer class, and (3) any other information the commission requires relating to affiliations between retail electric providers.” 

“In the spirit of the TREO directives, Vistra encourages the Commission to avoid creating inefficiencies, redundancies, and unnecessary form/information gathering in this rulemaking. The only incremental information required by PURA §39.168 that goes beyond what is already provided in all the reports listed above amounts to one piece of new information: affiliations between REPs. This information is not typically confidential and can be easily provided in the format requested under Schedule A, Part 3.”

Protecting confidential and proprietary information – “Protecting confidential and proprietary information is critical. Imposing additional state level reporting obligations risks duplicating existing datasets without producing material new insights for the Commission. Moreover, REPs operate in a fully competitive market where customer counts, load breakdowns, portfolio characteristics, and segment-level trends are highly sensitive commercial information. Expanding mandatory disclosures increases the risk that proprietary or competitively valuable data could be exposed either directly, inadvertently, or through inference. Such exposure would undermine the confidentiality protections that competitive companies rely on, and impose additional costs for the Commission, the Office of the Attorney General, and REPs subject to the proposed reporting requirements as they will expend resource defending against disclosure of confidential information to unaffiliated third parties that may request it through public information disclosure requests.”

30-day deadline should be kept at 45 days – “Vistra recommends maintaining the existing 45-day deadline under existing 16 TAC § 25.88(c)(2) and editing (b)(2) in the Proposal for Publication:

1. b) Filing requirements. Using forms prescribed by the commission, a reporting entity must report activities as required by this section. (2) The report must be filed no later than the 30*h 45th day following the end of the preceding quarterly reporting period. Quarterly periods begin on January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1.

Joint Utilities’ Initial Comments – The Joint Utilities include Oncor, Texas-New Mexico Power and AEP Texas. 

“[T]he Joint Commenters believe the Retail Market Performance Measures and their associated schedule parts in the proposed filing package included with the PFP are sufficient to monitor the competitive Texas retail electricity market.”

Meter reads performed by the TDU for the purpose of a standard switch – Joint Utilities note that “there is a reference to § 25.88 in current rule § 25.474(p)(3), which states: “[al TDU shall file performance reports with the commission as part of the information filed under §25.88… [these reports shall show by month the number and percentages of actual and estimated meter reads for the purpose of switches, and whether that month’s performance was in compliance with [16 TAC § 25.474(p)(1)].” While § 25.474 is not within the scope of this rulemaking, the Joint Commenters note that this requirement in § 25.474(p)(3) is not fulfilled within the amended § 25.88 filing package provided with the PFP in this rulemaking. This is because the reports to be filed by TDUs under proposed, amended § 25.88 do not require TDUs to show by month the number and percentages of actual and estimated meter read for the purpose of switches or whether each month’ s performance was in compliance with the requirements in § 25.474(p)(1) to perform actual meter reads for a certain percentage of meter reads for standard switch purposes. Therefore, the Joint Commenters respectfully request that the Commission provide clarity around the § 25.474(p)(3) requirement once § 25.88 is adopted and clarity on the intended interaction between the reports required under these two rules. In the meantime, the Joint Commenters will continue to meet the reporting requirements under §§ 25.88 and 25.474 going forward.”

In terms of the effective date – “the Joint Commenters respectfully  request that the requirements under amended § 25.88 take effect starting with the second quarterly report due in 2026 (i.e., the report submission due 30 days after the end of the April-June quarterly period, or by July 30,2026) to allow sufficient time for personnel training on the new requirements and for updating internal technical processes to ensure compliance with the amended requirements.”

CenterPoint’s Initial Comments – “CenterPoint Energy believes the Retail Market Performance Measures, and their associated schedule parts, provided by the Commission in the filing package are sufficient to monitor the competitive Texas retail electricity market.”

“CenterPoint Energy has added redlined explanatory notes in the Schedule C, Part 1 and Schedule C, Part 2 tabs of the attached Quarterly Retail Performance Measures Form, to clarify the transactions that should be included and excluded from the quarterly reports.”

“CenterPoint Energy also respectfully recommends that the Commission order approving this revised rule provide that applicable entities under the new §25.88 rule begin the new Quarterly Retail Performance Measures Form reports starting with the first quarter that commences after the effective date of the new §25.88 rule.”

Staff Proposal for Publication  (11/06/2025)
56736
(Review Of § 25.88 Relating To Retail Market Performance Measure Reporting)