Cooling a Dallas house

Two charges on the same bill

A Dallas electric bill is really two separate charges stapled together, and untangling them explains most of what the total does across a summer. One charge comes from Oncor, the regulated utility that owns the poles, wires, and meters across most of North Texas and delivers electricity to a home regardless of which company a household buys its power from; Oncor does not sell electricity at all, only delivers it, and its delivery rates are set through a tariff approved by the Public Utility Commission of Texas rather than negotiated by a household. The other charge comes from a retail electric provider, the company a Texas resident actually chooses and signs a plan with, covering the electricity itself. Both show up on the same monthly bill, and both move independently of each other.

What Oncor's own tariff charges to deliver it

Oncor's own posted 2025 rate schedule breaks its residential delivery charge into a fixed monthly piece and a per-kilowatt-hour piece. The fixed piece held steady all year at $4.23 a month, a $1.43 customer charge plus a $2.80 metering charge, before any electricity is counted^[1]. The volumetric piece moved with the season: at a household using 1,000 kilowatt-hours in a month, Oncor's own summary puts the total per-kilowatt-hour delivery charge at $0.055 in July and August 2025, rising to $0.060 in September and October 2025 as the transmission cost recovery factor stepped up^[1]. None of that is the retail electric provider's price for the electricity itself. It is strictly the cost of getting that electricity to the meter, set by tariff rather than by competition between providers.

That per-kilowatt-hour figure does not simply track the outdoor temperature the way a household's total usage does. Oncor's own 2025 schedule shows the same total delivery charge at 1,000 kilowatt-hours running $0.057 in January and February, dropping to $0.054 in March and April, holding at $0.055 from May through August, then stepping up to $0.060 in September and October^[1]. The delivery charge resets on the tariff's own cycle, mostly a transmission cost recovery factor that changes twice a year, rather than on a thermostat. A summer delivery charge runs higher mainly because more kilowatt-hours pass through the meter in July and August, not because the per-kilowatt-hour delivery rate itself is built to spike with the heat.

What the rest of the bill is built from

The larger share of a Texas electric bill comes from the retail electric provider's own generation and service charge, and the federal government's own tracking gives a sense of scale. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's most recent published figure puts the average Texas residential electricity price at 15.94 cents per kilowatt-hour in June 2026, up from 15.26 cents per kilowatt-hour in June 2025^[2]. Set against Oncor's own delivery charge of just over five cents per kilowatt-hour at 1,000 kilowatt-hours of summer usage^[1], delivery accounts for a little over a third of what a Texas residential customer pays overall, with the remaining share going to the retail electric provider's own generation and service charges rather than to Oncor at all.

A full year's average, and why a summer month runs past it

The Energy Information Administration also tracks a full-year average bill by state. For 2024, the most recent complete year in that dataset, the average Texas residential customer used 1,096 kilowatt-hours a month at an average price of 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour, for an average monthly bill of $163.72^[3]. That figure blends every month of the year, the mild ones and the punishing ones together, and the Energy Information Administration does not publish a Texas-specific summer-only average, so the honest way to read the annual number is as a floor rather than a forecast. A Dallas household's actual July or August bill runs higher than that year-round figure, because air conditioning load concentrates almost entirely in those months, but by how much depends on the size, age, and insulation of the specific house rather than a single citywide multiplier.

Why the grid itself worked harder this summer

The cost of cooling a Dallas house is downstream of a bigger fact: the state's grid carried more electricity this summer than it ever had before. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the grid covering most of the state including Dallas, set a new hourly peak load record of 91.1 gigawatts on July 22, 2026, 6 percent above the previous record of 85.5 gigawatts set on August 10, 2023, with the peak hour met mostly by natural gas at 48 percent of generation and solar at 32 percent^[4]. A peak like that is driven overwhelmingly by air conditioning coming on at once across millions of homes during a heat wave, which is the direct link between the temperature outside a Dallas house and the price on the meter reading it.

The temperatures behind that load are themselves on the record. The National Weather Service's 1991-2020 climate normals for DFW Airport put the average high at 95.6 degrees in July and 95.8 degrees in August, with just over 20 days a year on average reaching 100 degrees or higher^[5], the same baseline heat that shapes when Dallas residents move their day outdoors, described in more detail in the Compass's own coverage of surviving a Dallas summer. Every degree above that normal range asks more of an air conditioner, which asks more of the grid, which is exactly the load ERCOT recorded breaking its own record in the same summer this article was written.

A grid that keeps growing, not just a hot summer

The July 2026 record was not an isolated spike. A separate Energy Information Administration report from October 2025 projected that ERCOT's overall demand would grow 14 percent between 2025 and 2026^[6], a pace the grid has been meeting largely by adding solar and battery capacity rather than natural gas alone. Wind and solar together supplied 36 percent of ERCOT's electricity across the first nine months of 2025, and utility-scale solar output that year ran 50 percent above 2024 and nearly four times its 2021 level^[6].

Batteries have started filling the gap solar leaves once the sun goes down, supplying an average of 4 gigawatts during the 8 p.m. hour across summer 2025 by storing daytime solar output for release at the evening peak^[6]. The July 2026 record peak itself arrived earlier, at 6 p.m. while the sun was still high, and was met by a mix of natural gas and solar rather than gas alone^[4]. None of that changes what a Dallas household pays directly; the fuel mix behind a kilowatt-hour is set at the grid level, not chosen by a resident. It does mean the record load described above sits inside a longer growth curve rather than a single unusual summer, which is the kind of context a bill by itself never carries.