Whole-Home Standby Power in Stephenville, TX

Three utilities file Erath County service territory with the U.S. Energy Information Administration: Oncor Electric Delivery, United Cooperative Services and Texas-New Mexico Power. Inside town it is usually Oncor, in the deregulated market, so a retail provider bills you and Oncor restores you. Out on the county roads it is often United, where you are a member rather than a customer and there is no retail plan to shop. United keeps an office here, which is a clue to how much of this county sits on its lines.

Not since April 2000, when Erath County Electric Cooperative consolidated with Johnson County Electric Cooperative to form United Cooperative Services. Plenty of people here still say ECEC, and everyone knows what they mean, but the entity itself became United a quarter of a century ago. It now serves 14 counties with roughly 110,000 meters and nearly 9,300 miles of energized line, run out of Burleson with a member office in this city.

Because United was a member of Brazos Electric, the wholesale supplier that filed Chapter 11 in March 2021 after ERCOT invoiced it $2.1 billion for the storm week. United’s share settled at roughly $440 million and was securitized as $451 million in bonds sold in December 2022. Members began repaying it in January 2023 through a line item called the Power Cost Recovery Factor, initially 1.17 cents per kilowatt hour, spread over about 28 years. A generator does not remove that charge; it changes what happens the next time the line comes down.

It changes the priorities. Only 44.3 percent of housing units in this city are owner-occupied, the lowest share anywhere in our service area, and the detached-house share is the lowest too at 57.3 percent, which is what a university town looks like in a data table. For rental and small multifamily work, the conversation is usually about protecting the building rather than the comfort of a specific tenant: freeze protection, sump and lift pumps, life-safety lighting, and a transfer switch arrangement that does not depend on anyone being home.

Almost certainly propane. Only two communities in the entire county have an investor-owned gas distribution utility: this city and Dublin, both on Atmos Mid-Tex. County-wide, just 16.7 percent of households heat with piped gas while 7 percent burn bottled propane and 74.8 percent heat with electricity. Where your driveway ends decides what your generator burns, and outside the certificated area it is a tank, sized for a multi-day run rather than for a barbecue season.

Yes, and it is a different design conversation. A dairy that loses power loses the milking parlour, the vacuum system and the bulk tank cooling, which turns an outage into a direct financial loss rather than an inconvenience. The USDA counted 58,000 milk cows in this county in 2023. Those installations get scoped like commercial work: transfer switch selection, prioritized circuits, and honest talk about what the machine will and will not carry.