Texas Power Outages by TDU: Who Fixes the Wires (and Who to Call)

Updated 2026-07-22

When the lights go out in deregulated Texas, the company on your bill is almost never the company that can turn them back on. Your retail electric provider (REP) sells you energy. Your transmission and distribution utility (TDU) owns the poles, wires, and meters. Outages are a TDU problem. Calling the wrong number wastes the first ten minutes of every storm night.

The split that confuses everyone

Texas unbundled the industry so you can shop REPs on price and contract terms. Reliability — storm restoration, downed lines, meter issues, new service poles — stays with the TDU assigned to your address. You cannot pick a “more reliable” REP. Two neighbors on the same street with different REPs share the same wires and the same outage map. That is why our comparison tables rank plans by estimated bill, not by uptime: uptime is not a retail product here.

If you are still sorting out who bills you versus who delivers power, start with setting up electricity when you move and how to read a Texas bill (the TDU line item is right there).

Major TDUs on this site

Our city pages map to the TDU that serves each sample ZIP. The big names:

• Oncor Electric Delivery — Dallas–Fort Worth metro and a large North / Central Texas footprint (Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano, Waco, Tyler, Midland, Round Rock, and many others on our list).
• CenterPoint Energy — Greater Houston and nearby suburbs (Houston, Sugar Land, Katy, The Woodlands, Pasadena, Galveston in our data, and more).
• AEP Texas Central — South Texas corridor including Corpus Christi, Laredo, McAllen, Harlingen, Victoria.
• AEP Texas North — West / North patches such as Abilene and San Angelo.
• Texas-New Mexico Power (TNMP) — Smaller pockets including League City and Texas City in our city set.
• Lubbock Power & Light — Lubbock (retail choice exists there under a different history than classic ERCOT unbundling — still: outages go to the wires company, not your plan brand).

Multi-utility edge cities can sit on more than one TDU depending on exact address — Galveston and Wichita Falls are the ones where our tables expose a TDU picker. Always trust the TDU name on your bill over a city-level guess.

Who to call (and who not to)

1. Life-threatening emergency (downed line, fire, gas smell with electrical hazard): call 911 first, then the TDU emergency line.
2. Outage / flickering / no power to the whole neighborhood: report to your TDU outage map or phone line — not the REP chat bot on your app.
3. Only your house is dark, neighbors are fine: check breakers and any upstream disconnect; then still use the TDU path if the meter or drop looks wrong. Your REP cannot re-fuse a transformer.
4. Billing, rate, contract, deposit: that is the REP. Outage ETAs from a REP agent are second-hand at best.

Save both numbers the day you enroll — REP for money, TDU for electrons. Storm night is a bad time to dig through a welcome PDF.

Where outage maps usually live

Each TDU publishes a public outage map and a report-outage flow (web + often SMS/phone). Search the TDU name plus “outage map” from a phone that still has data, or bookmark it while the power is on:

• Oncor — outage map / report tools on oncor.com
• CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric — centerpointenergy.com outage center
• AEP Texas — aeptexas.com outage information
• TNMP — tnmp.com outage resources
• Lubbock Power & Light — lpandl.com outage updates

URLs move; the pattern does not: TDU domain → Outage. City open-data portals and local news trackers are secondary. Your report still needs to hit the TDU system to dispatch a crew.

What actually drives restoration order

Crews generally restore in a public-safety sequence, not a “who pays the highest retail rate” sequence:

• Hazards and critical facilities (hospitals, emergency services)
• Substations and feeders that re-light the most customers per hour
• Neighborhood laterals and individual services last

That is why a single-home outage can lag a whole-feeder repair even if you reported first. Estimated restore times on maps are operational guesses — useful, not contracts. During ice storms and hurricanes, mutual-aid crews from other states extend capacity; your REP logo still does not appear on those trucks.

Prep that matters more than your plan choice

• Know your TDU before hurricane season — screenshot the outage page login/report flow; store the phone number offline.
• Medical dependency: if anyone relies on powered equipment, ask both your REP and TDU about critical-care registries and backup plans early — registries help prioritization conversations; they are not a guarantee of uninterrupted power.
• Food and heat/cool: standard emergency kit math beats arguing with a holdover rate mid-outage.
• Whole-home generators and transfer switches are building decisions, not retail-plan features. Portable generators need correct outdoor setup — backfeeding a panel without a transfer switch can kill linemen.
• Rooftop solar without storage usually shuts down on grid loss for anti-islanding safety. Batteries or hybrid inverters change that — see solar buyback plans for the bill side, and treat backup as a separate hardware conversation.

Does a “better” electricity plan reduce outages?

No. Fixed vs. variable, prepaid vs. postpaid, free nights, green RECs — none of that rewires your feeder. Choose plans for bill math: estimated cost at your kWh, contract length, and fees on the EFL. Choose TDUs… you don’t. If reliability is the anxiety, invest in prep and (if you own the place) backup hardware — not a pricier REP brand.

After the lights return

Check the fridge, reset clocks, and glance at the bill cycle later — multi-day outages can distort a month’s kWh and make bill-credit thresholds look weird. If usage cratered because you were dark for a week, a credit cliff can still bite; that is a plan-design issue covered in our bill-credit trap guide, not proof the TDU “owes you” a retail refund. Delivery charges and storm riders are regulated TDU/PUCT territory; retail energy refunds are not how outage compensation usually works for ordinary residential blips.

Bottom line

Outages run on the TDU layer: Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, TNMP, LP&L, and a few others depending on address. Report there, track maps there, complain about wire safety there. Use your REP for rates, switches, and deposits — and use this site to rank those REPs by what you would actually pay. When the next derecho or Gulf storm hits, the households that do best already know which number is which.