Estimate a Full Year of Texas Electricity Use From a Few Bills
Most plan shoppers open a comparison tool with one number — last month’s kWh — and rank everything at that single point. That works if your usage is flat. In Texas it isn’t. Air conditioning can push July and August toward 1.5× a mild spring month on the statewide residential average. A plan that looks cheapest at 800 kWh can look expensive once you price a real summer path. Our city pages include an estimator for that gap.
What the tool does
- On any city page, click Estimate full year from partial bills.
- Enter the kWh from bills you actually have into the correct calendar months (one month is enough; more is better).
- We de-seasonalize those months against a multi-year Texas residential shape from EIA data, rebuild a 12-month kWh path, and re-rank every plan by estimated 12-month cost — summing the same bill math we already use at 500 / 1,000 / 2,000 kWh, month by month.
- In annual mode, each row gets a Monthly button: a table of estimated kWh, monthly $, and running total so you can see cash-flow spikes (often July–August) before you enroll.
Months you typed stay exact. Only blanks are filled from the curve.
Why a statewide curve is still useful
EIA publishes monthly residential sales and customer counts by state. Dividing sales by customers gives average kWh per customer; averaging several years of those months produces an index (mean month = 1.0). Texas’s index is summer-heavy. Your house will sit above or below the average level (pool, EV, insulation, thermostat), but the shape — which months run hot — is a strong prior when you only have a fragment of history.
It is not your smart meter, not TDU-specific, and not a weather forecast. Treat it as a structured guess that beats pretending every month equals last month.
How to get a better estimate
- Include a summer month if you have one. A lone March understates annual use in Texas more than a lone August overstates it relative to the mean.
- Match calendar months. Putting a July bill in the “Jan” row breaks the de-seasonalize step.
- Apartment vs large home: the curve scales your level; you still set the level with your real kWh.
- After annual rank, open Monthly on the top two or three plans. A cheaper year with a brutal August may not fit a fixed budget even if the 12-month total wins.
What it still can’t model
Bill-credit cliffs, free-nights windows, and true time-of-use depend on when you use power inside the month, not only how many kWh. We still apply each month’s total through the published average-price points on the EFL — the same approximation as the monthly slider, repeated twelve times. Prepaid disconnect risk and deposits are separate issues; see no-deposit / prepaid and the renters guide if cash at move-in is the constraint.
Bottom line
If you only have a few bills, don’t rank plans as if every month were identical. Enter what you have, let the Texas residential seasonality fill the gaps, sort by estimated annual dollars, then use Monthly to check cash flow. When you have a full twelve months of real kWh later, re-run with all boxes filled — the curve becomes a small correction instead of the main story.