County service area · home county
Backup Power Across Palo Pinto County, TX
Nine hundred and eighty-six square miles, five electric utilities, six towns with a gas line and roughly forty acres of county for every housing unit in it. This is where our shop is, and it is the hardest county on the map to generalize about.
The defining fact
Five different companies own wire in this county
Two of them are delivery utilities in the competitive retail market. Three are member-owned cooperatives where there is no retail provider to shop. All five file territory here with the federal government.
| Utility | Type | Retail choice | 2021 minutes off | 2024 minutes off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oncor Electric Delivery | Delivery utility | Yes | 558.8 | 532.5 |
| United Cooperative Services | Cooperative | No | 811.3 | 111.8 |
| Tri-County Electric Cooperative | Cooperative | No | 1,907.9 | 134.6 |
| Fort Belknap Electric Cooperative | Cooperative | No | — | — |
| Texas-New Mexico Power | Delivery utility | Yes | 203.7 | — |
Average annual minutes without power per customer, including major event days, as filed with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Cooperatives report under IEEE 1366 and the delivery utilities under a different standard, so read these as directional rather than as a like-for-like comparison. Texas-New Mexico Power’s 2024 figure is dominated by events outside North Texas and is left out here on purpose.
The 2021 column is Winter Storm Uri. A Tri-County member averaged close to 32 hours without power that year and a United member 13.5 hours, against 9.3 hours for an Oncor customer. Those are not indictments of anybody. They are what happens when a utility maintains long, thinly loaded lines: United runs nearly 9,300 miles of energized line to about 105,000 customers, roughly eleven customers per mile.
Restoration everywhere follows the same order, transmission first, then main feeders, then tap lines, then individual services. On a county road with two meters on a mile of line, you are structurally at the end of that list. That is the honest case for standby power out here, and it does not require anyone to predict the next statewide event. What answers it is a permanent system with an automatic transfer switch, not something you wheel out of a shed.
Fuel
Six towns have a gas utility. The rest of the county has a tank.
Mineral Wells
Texas Gas Service, 3,687 residential consumers. The one place in the county where a natural gas tie-in is the default recommendation.
Possum Kingdom Lake
126 residential consumers on the Railroad Commission’s registry for the entire lake. Everything else out there is propane.
Graford
Texas Gas Service, 106 residential consumers, in the fastest-growing town in the county.
Palo Pinto
Texas Gas Service, 58 residential consumers. The county seat, population around 173.
Strawn and Gordon
Atmos Energy Mid-Tex, 193 and 205 residential consumers respectively. Do not confuse these with the Texas Gas Service towns.
Everywhere else
No investor-owned gas utility of any kind, including Santo and every unincorporated stretch between the towns.
County-wide, 31.2 percent of households heat with piped gas, 8.1 percent with bottled propane and 57.5 percent with electricity. That propane share is more than seven times the Tarrant County rate. Practically, it means most of the systems we design here are LP-fueled, and tank sizing, regulator selection and cold-weather vaporization are engineering decisions rather than delivery logistics. A 500-gallon tank is a common starting point for a 22 kW unit running a house for several days.
The lake
Possum Kingdom is a propane lake with a rental economy on it
And most of what is written about it online is roughly sixteen years out of date.
The 2010 change nobody updated
The Brazos River Authority sold its lakefront leases to private investors on 22 October 2010 for $52 million, affecting 1,537 residential leaseholders and 19 business owners, who could continue leasing or buy the land at 2008 assessed value. Most lakefront property is now deeded, and the old prohibition on subletting and short-term rentals no longer binds it. That turned a lease lake into a rental market.
The Authority still owns and operates the reservoir itself through Morris Sheppard Dam, completed in 1941, 2,700 feet long and 190 feet high, impounding what the Authority puts at 16,716 surface acres and 219 miles of shoreline.
What that means for the system
Lakefront property out here is typically on cooperative power, on septic, and sometimes on a private well. United Cooperative Services keeps a member office at the lake, which tells you who owns most of that wire. The Railroad Commission records 126 residential natural gas customers for the whole of Possum Kingdom Lake, so the fuel question answers itself.
So the design brief is specific: an LP machine, a tank sized for days rather than hours, a pad clear of the drainfield and the bank, and remote monitoring, because the owner of a rental or a second home is frequently nowhere near the property when the fault light comes on.
The other new arrival is Palo Pinto Mountains State Park, which opened to the public on 1 March 2026 near Strawn: 4,871 acres of former ranchland, a 90-acre lake, more than sixteen miles of trail, and the first new state park in North Texas in over 25 years. It has been hitting capacity on weekends. A county of 30,000 people that just gained a metro-scale visitor attraction is a county about to gain cabins, short-term rentals and small hospitality businesses, and every one of them has a reason to look at commercial standby power.
Property character
Forty acres of county per housing unit
A county the size of a metropolitan area with the population of a suburb, growing entirely because people are moving into it.
Roughly nine times the Tarrant County rate. It changes the service entrance, the pad and the transfer-switch approach.
The highest ownership rate we see anywhere, on 15,206 housing units with a median year built of 1979.
The county is the TCEQ authorized agent. On-site sewage is the norm, and the drainfield decides where a pad can sit.
More deaths than births, and the county still grew 6.4 percent, entirely on 1,964 net domestic in-migrants.
The towns growing fastest are the lake towns: Graford up 8.5 percent between 2020 and 2024, Mingus 6.6, Mineral Wells 5.9, Gordon 5.8, Strawn 5.4. Water outside the municipal systems comes from small suppliers like Santo Special Utility District, Palo Pinto Water Supply Corporation, Lake Palo Pinto Area Water Supply Corporation and Sturdivant Progress, or from a private well. On a well, the pump is both the first thing that stops and the largest starting load in the sizing calculation.
What we do here
Across the county we live in
Standby Generator Installation
LP systems for lake houses, ranches and acreage, and gas tie-ins where a utility actually exists.
See detailsGenerator Sizing
Well pumps, septic aerators, two compressors and a shop. The load list, not the floor plan.
See detailsCommercial Generators
Short-term rentals, marinas, clinics, churches and small facilities across the county.
See detailsGenerator Maintenance
Especially where the owner is not there most weeks. First full year included on new installs.
See detailsGenerator Repair
Generac, Kohler, Briggs & Stratton, Cummins, Champion and Honeywell, including inherited units.
See detailsElectrical Panel Upgrades
Service capacity for houses and manufactured homes that have grown their loads over decades.
See detailsSolar Installation
Grid-tied solar designed around what you want backed up rather than only what you want offset.
See detailsMaintenance Plans
Annual and bi-annual plans for properties you cannot check on every week.
See details
Nearby
Places in and around this county
- Santo, TXOur home base, in the southeast corner, with no gas utility of any kind.
- Mineral Wells, TXThe largest city, on Texas Gas Service, with the oldest housing stock we work on.
- Millsap, TXAcross the Parker County line, close enough that the two counties blur.
- Stephenville, TXSouth in Erath County, where Santo, Gordon and Strawn ISDs also reach.
- Erath County, TXThe neighboring county, and the most electricity-dependent one we serve.
- Parker County, TXEast, with three electric regimes instead of five.
Common questions
Palo Pinto County questions
Utilities, the lake, propane and permits, in the order they come up on the phone.
Five electric utilities in one county? Which one is mine?
Oncor Electric Delivery, United Cooperative Services, Tri-County Electric Cooperative, Fort Belknap Electric Cooperative and Texas-New Mexico Power all file service territory in this county with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Oncor and TNMP are delivery utilities in the competitive market, so a retail provider bills you. The other three are member-owned cooperatives with no retail choice at all. Out here the answer genuinely can change from one side of a county road to the other, so we read your bill instead of guessing.
Can I get natural gas at the lake?
Almost certainly not. The Railroad Commission of Texas records 126 residential natural gas consumers for the whole of Possum Kingdom Lake. Whatever the housing count around that shoreline is, it is not 126. The lake runs on propane, which means every standby system we design out there is an LP machine with a tank sized for a multi-day outage rather than a weekend. Elsewhere in the county, Texas Gas Service serves Mineral Wells, Graford and the town of Palo Pinto, and Atmos serves Strawn and Gordon. That is the complete list.
I rent my lake house out. Does that change the system?
It changes the priorities and usually the monitoring. Since the Brazos River Authority sold the lakefront leases in October 2010, most of that property is deeded rather than leased, and short-term rentals are no longer prohibited by the old lease terms. If a house earns income, an outage costs money and reputation rather than comfort, and you are frequently not there to see it. We specify remote monitoring and a maintenance schedule accordingly, so a fault light gets noticed by somebody before a guest does.
Why is Winter Storm Uri still showing up on my electric bill?
If you are a United Cooperative Services member, it is. Uri drove Brazos Electric, the wholesale supplier to sixteen member cooperatives, into Chapter 11 on a $2.1 billion ERCOT invoice. United’s share settled at roughly $440 million and was securitized as $451 million in bonds sold in December 2022, recovered from members through a Power Cost Recovery Factor that began at 1.17 cents per kilowatt hour in January 2023 and runs about 28 years. A generator does not remove that line. It changes what the next event costs you personally.
Do I need a permit out in the county?
Palo Pinto County does not issue building permits in its unincorporated areas, so an install out here runs on the National Electrical Code, the manufacturer’s installation instructions and contractor licensing rather than a county plan review. Septic is the exception: the county is the TCEQ-designated authorized agent for on-site sewage facilities and issued 133 new authorizations in 2025 and 153 in 2024. Inside Mineral Wells there is a documented city process, covered on that city’s page.
Can you install a generator at a manufactured home?
Yes, and it comes up here far more than in the metroplex. Manufactured housing accounts for 16.2 percent of housing units in this county, roughly nine times the Tarrant County rate. The differences are practical rather than exotic: the service entrance arrangement, where the transfer switch can be mounted, how the pad is set relative to the skirting and the tie-downs, and the route the fuel line takes. We look at all of that on the site visit and tell you plainly if something needs to change first.
Related
Keep reading
- Standby Generator InstallationDesign, permits, pad, transfer switch, fuel and live load testing.
- Generator MaintenanceScheduled service, which matters most on a property you are not at every week.
- Commercial GeneratorsStandby power for rentals, small facilities and working properties.
- SantoWhere we are based, and a community the gas registry has never listed.
- Mineral WellsThe one town in the county where a gas tie-in is the default.
- Maintenance PlansAnnual and bi-annual service across the county.
Two ways to start
Which one are you?
Need a generator
We start with what has to keep running at your property — the well, the AC, the freezer, the shop — and size the system around it. You get a written proposal with the equipment, the electrical work and the site prep all in one number.
Already own one
Repair, diagnostics and scheduled maintenance for Generac, Kohler and Briggs & Stratton systems — including units another company installed. Tell us the brand and what it is doing and we will bring the right parts.