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New report rates best electric companies and renewable energy plans

energy plans

Choose Texas Power has ranked its top electric providers, most affordable green energy providers and more. Photo via unspalsh.

Choose Texas Power—a marketplace that allows users to view and compare electricity plans, providers and rates in the state—has compiled its Best Texas Electric Companies report.

The data-driven list considers pricing, providers and consumer trends, and rates for companies listed on its marketplace. The report was updated earlier this month.

Choose Texas Power rated the Texas energy companies using its proprietary data and online reviews, and gave each company a score from zero to five based on customer service, accessibility and plan variety.

Houston-based Express Energy tied for first place on the list with DFW-based TXU Energy, 4Change Energy and Veteran Energy. Eight other Houston-area companies made the 10. The companies all received a rating of 5 out of 5.

The full list includes:

  • Houston-based Gexa Energy (4.9)
  • Irving-based TriEagle Energy (4.9)
  • Houston-based Frontier Utilities (4.8)
  • Spring-based Atlantex Power (4.6)
  • Houston-based Rhythm Energy (4.6)
  • Houston-based Green Mountain Energy (4.5)
  • Houston-based Reliant Energy (4.3)
  • Houston-based Direct Energy (4.2)
  • Houston-based APG&E Energy (4.2)
  • Houston-based Discount Power (4)
  • Plano-based Cirro Energy (4)
  • Fort Worth-based Payless Power (3.9)

Choose Texas Power also broke down the best companies for specific customer needs.

  • Best for affordable green energy: Gexa Energy
  • Best for 100% renewable energy: Rhythm Energy
  • Green energy plans for low usage: Green Mountain Energy
  • Best for smart home upgrades: Discount Power
  • Best for straightforward energy plans: TriEagle Energy
  • Best for plan variety: TXU Energy
  • Best for simple contract terms: Express Energy

Find the full report here.

From Your Site Articles
Silambam Houston will use the funding to create the Green Mountain Energy Sun Club Sustainability Pavilion. Photo courtesy of Green Mountain

Houston organization grants funding to local arts center to make sustainable updates to facilities

solar-powered spotlight

Green Mountain Energy Sun Club has supplied a grant of nearly $103,000 to a local Indian arts center to make sustainable improvements to its facilities.

Silambam Houston will use the grant to help with the installation of a rooftop solar array and a new pavilion at its Pearland dance studio, which will be called The Green Mountain Energy Sun Club Sustainability Pavilion. The venue will serve as an outdoor gathering space for events at the facility.

“At Green Mountain Energy, we recognize that our choices can have a profound impact on our environment,” Mark Parsons, Green Mountain Energy vice president, says in a news release. “We’re proud to support the rich and diverse culture of the Indian community, and we’re glad to help Silambam take the next step toward a more sustainable future.”

The 14.58 kW solar structure is expected to offset 100 percent of the building’s energy needs, which would save the organization more than $4,000 per year for the next 25 years. Sun Club has donated more than $14 million for 164 projects across Texas and the Northeast since it was founded in 2022.

Silambam is an Indian classical arts organization with an arts academy program that serves 180 students each week with more than 20 teaching artists on staff. The professional dance company has more than 20 dancers that regularly perform at Houston venues like Miller Outdoor Theater where they will perform next on June 7.

“We are thrilled to be able to weave sustainable practices into our arts programming, while also giving back to the community,” founder and executive artistic director of Silambam Dr. Lavanya Rajagopalan said in a news release. “The annual savings from this project will allow us to increase artist pay, provide tuition waivers for economically disadvantaged students, and/or provide free or pay-what-you-can access to our ArtStream Concerts, all while benefiting the environment.”

Silambam Houston will use the grant to help with the installation of a rooftop solar array and a new pavilion at its Pearland dance studio. Photo courtesy of Green Mountain

Discovery Green's Earth Day event generated more than 3,800 pounds of garbage — and over 90 percent of it was diverted from landfills. Photo courtesy of Discovery Green

Houston organization celebrates zero waste goal

earth day win

Discovery Green celebrated Earth Day with a major milestone this year — achieving it’s Zero Waste goal.

The nonprofit, along with Citizens’ Environmental Coalition and Houston Public Works, are announced that the 2024 Green Mountain Energy Earth Day, which generated more than 3,800 pounds of garbage, diverted the majority of that waste from landfills. "Zero Waste," as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency, is successfully diverting at least 90 percent of waste from the landfill.

On Earth Day, Discovery Green composted 2,200 pounds of waste and recycled 1,300 pounds of trash.

“Part of Discovery Green Conservancy’s mission is to serve as a village green for our city and be a source of health and happiness for all. Our goal is to sustain an exceptional environment for nature and people,” Discover Green President Kathryn Lott says in a news release. “We are beyond thrilled to have achieved Zero Waste certification.”

The achievement was made possible by volunteers from the University of Houston – Downtown.

Steve Stelzer, president of Citizens’ Environmental Coalition’s board of directors, acknowledged how rare the achievement is in a public space in a major city like Houston.

“Discovery Green Conservancy stepped up and made a commitment to weigh, measure and record everything. They should be congratulated to have done this at this scale,” Stelzer adds. “The Conservancy said they were going to do it and they did. It’s an amazing accomplishment.”

The 2024 event included:

  • 31,000 visitors in attendance
  • 60 + exhibitors
  • 100 + volunteers
  • 12 artists
    • 9 chalk artists
    • Donkeeboy and Donkeemom
    • Mark Bradford
  • 25 Mark Bradford artworks made of scrap presented in partnership with Houston First
  • 4 short films shown
  • 3,836.7 pounds of waste collected during Green Mountain Energy Earth Day
A Houston nonprofit's farm will soon be completely off-grid, running its entire operation on sustainable resources. Photo courtesy of Hope Farms

Houston nonprofit flips switch on solar panel project thanks to sustainability grant

shine on

A Houston-area farm is one step closer to operating completely off-grid thanks to new solar panels installed with funding provided by a grant.

In a step towards a greener future, Hope Farms, a 7-acre farm operated by a Houston nonprofit organization, Recipe for Success Foundation, unveiled 18 new solar panels on Tuesday. This significant move is part of a collective effort to completely transition the farm to solar power, demonstrating its commitment to sustainability.

“The industry (solar power) itself is intimidating to people,” Gracie Cavner, founder and CEO of Hope Farms and Recipe for Success, tells EnergyCapital. “Part of our work is to inspire people to replicate what we're doing. We want to show that things aren't as hard as you think they are.”

The nonprofit organization is recognized in Houston for its work in addressing childhood obesity, with a long held mission of demystifying the common misconceptions around healthy eating. It is now tackling another challenge: dispelling the myth that solar power implementation is difficult. Hope Farms' latest initiative will not only further its energy independence, it will also show that adopting renewable energy, similar to embracing healthy food choices, is a feasible option.

The 18 solar panels will power the farm's composting toilet facility and all of the electricity used in its barn, which acts as its market stand and kitchen. Its next green phase is fast approaching and will implement solar panels on top of its flower studio, where the farm's internet and security systems reside. Its final phase will install a water well pump.

“We really did a lot of direct learning,” Cavner said. “We worked directly with solar engineers, not somebody with a company that benefited from us making one decision or another. I feel like more people would have solar if they realized they could do that.”

This is not the first green step Hope Farms has taken thanks to a Green Mountain Energy Sun Club grant, and certainly not the last. Last year, the farm cut the ribbons to its rainwater capture system that now saves roughly 95,000 gallons of water per year by capitalizing on the city’s abundant rainfall.

Since the farms beginning in 2016, it has relied on solar, even when it was only fields lit by a few lights. Soon, Hope Farms will be completely off-grid, running its entire operation on sustainable resources.

“With this expansion, I feel like it’s going to be taking the rock out of the middle of the river,” Cavner said. “It’s going to open up this train and make it easier for anybody to jump in and do it. The first step is kicking the door open and making more people want to pursue it.”

Hope Farms installed 18 solar panels and already has plans to add more. Photo courtesy of Hope Farms

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Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub to retire, Reuters reports

retirement plans

Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental (Oxy), is set to retire this year, Reuters first reported Thursday.

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the oil and gas giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as chief operating officer and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Reuters reports that a firm date for her retirement has not been set. Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, is expected to replace Hollub in the CEO role.

Oxy is leading a number of energy transition projects.

It's subsidiary 1PointFive is developing a $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area that is slated to be the largest facility of its kind in the world. Known as STRATOS, it's designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.

The company shared recently that Phase 1 of the project is expected to go online in Q2, with Phase 2 ramping up through the remainder of 2026.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos last year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” she added.

Oxy was one of the first to set ambitious net-zero goals. In a 2020 interview during CERAWeek, Hollub outlined Oxy's future as a “carbon management company.”

“Ultimately, I don’t know how many years from now, Occidental becomes a carbon management company, and our oil and gas would be a support business unit for the management of that carbon. We would be not only using [CO2] in oil reservoirs [but] capturing it for sequestration as well,” Hollub said.

Oxy opened its Oxy Innovation Center in the Ion last year, focused on advancing low-carbon technology. It also operates Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others.

Hertha Metals named world's  No. 1 most innovative manufacturing co. of 2026

top innovators

Led by Conroe-based Hertha Metals, five organizations in the Houston area earned shoutouts on Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026.

Hertha Metals ranked No. 1 in the manufacturing category.

Last year, Hertha unveiled a single-step process for steelmaking that it says is cheaper, more energy-efficient and just as scalable as traditional steel manufacturing. It started testing the process in 2024 at a one-metric-ton-per-day pilot plant.

At the same time, Hertha announced more than $17 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Breakthrough Energy, Clean Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Pear VC.

“We’re not just reinventing steelmaking; we’re redefining what’s possible in materials, manufacturing, and national resilience,” Laureen Meroueh, founder and CEO of Hertha, said at the time.

Meroueh was also recently named to Inc. Magazine's 2026 Female Founders 500 list.

Hertha, founded in 2022, says traditional steelmaking relies on an outdated, coal-based multistep process that is costly, and contributes up to 9 percent of industrial energy use and 10 percent of global carbon emissions.

By contrast, Hertha’s method converts low-grade iron ore into molten steel or high-purity iron in one step. The company says its process is 30 percent more energy-efficient than traditional steelmaking and costs less than producing steel in China.

Last year, Hertha said it planned to break ground in 2026 on a plant capable of producing more than 9,000 metric tons of steel per year. In its next phase, the company plans to operate at 500,000 metric tons of steel production per year.

Here are Fast Company’s rankings for the four other Houston-area organizations:

  • Houston-based Vaulted Deep, No. 3 in catchall “other” category.
  • XGS Energy, No. 7 in the energy category. XGS’ proprietary solid-state geothermal system uses thermally conductive materials to deliver affordable energy anywhere hot rock is located. While Fast Company lists Houston as XGS’ headquarters, and the company has a major presence in the city, XGS is based in Palo Alto, California.
  • Houston-based residential real estate brokerage Epique Realty, No. 10 in the business services category. Epique, which bills itself as the industry’s first AI brokerage, provides a free AI toolkit for real estate agents to enhance marketing, streamline content creation, and improve engagement with clients and prospects.
  • Texas A&M University’s Nanostructured Materials Lab in College Station. The lab studies nano-structured materials to make materials lighter for the aerospace industry, improve energy storage, and enable the creation of “smart” textiles.

CERAWeek crowns winners of 2026 clean tech pitch competition

top teams

Twelve teams from around the country, including several from Houston, took home top honors at this year's Energy Venture Day and Pitch Competition at CERAWeek.

The fast-paced event, held March 25, put on by Rice Alliance, Houston Energy Transition Initiative and TEX-E, invited 36 industry startups and five Texas-based student teams focused on driving efficiency and advancements in the energy transition to present 3.5-minute pitches before investors and industry partners during CERAWeek's Agora program.

The competition is a qualifying event for the Startup World Cup, where teams compete for a $1 million investment prize.

PolyJoule won in the Track C competition and was named the overall winner of the pitch event. The Boston-based company will go on to compete in the Startup World Cup held this fall in San Francisco.

PolyJoule was spun out of MIT and is developing conductive polymer battery technology for energy storage.

Rice University's Resonant Thermal Systems won the second-place prize and $15,000 in the student track, known as TEX-E. The team's STREED solution converts high-salinity water into fresh water while recovering valuable minerals.

Teams from the University of Texas won first and second place in the TEX-E competition, bringing home $25,000 and $10,000, respectively. The student winners were:

Companies that pitched in the three industry tracts competed for non-monetary awards. Here are the companies named "most-promising" by the judges:

Track A | Industrial Efficiency & Decarbonization

Track B | Advanced Manufacturing, Materials, & Other Advanced Technologies

  • First: Licube, based in Houston
  • Second: ZettaJoule, based in Houston and Maryland
  • Third: Oleo

Track C | Innovations for Traditional Energy, Electricity, & the Grid

The teams at this year's Energy Venture Day have collectively raised $707 million in funding, according to Rice. They represent six countries and 12 states. See the full list of companies and investor groups that participated here.

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