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PrintCrude oil dropped and gasoline prices followed.
The price of natural gas - the fuel used to generate the majority of Texas' electricity - has fallen, as well.
But unlike plummeting gasoline prices, electricity rates have fallen at a much slower pace than natural gas prices.
Natural gas prices are less than half of what they where at the beginning of July.
In that same time frame, 11 retail plans from eight companies that serve the Rio Grande Valley dropped their rates an average of 17 percent since July.
"You would not expect a dollar-for-dollar match," said Terry Hadley, spokesman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas. "Fuel is just one component of what electricity costs."
The retailer also has to pay whatever company generates its electricity, if that company does not generate its own.
Companies also have to pay AEP Texas, which is regulated by the state to maintain retail transmission lines - affecting more than 900,000 electric customers from the Valley into the Texas Panhandle.
Most retail companies have long-term contracts with electricity generators that help keep prices steady. If a company is stuck in long-term contracts that may be higher than the current price for natural gas, those costs are usually passed on to the consumer.
CPL Retail Energy has not cut its rates in the wake of lower natural gas prices, said Lisa Dornan, a company spokeswoman. The company last raised its variable rate plan by 6 percent in May - a time when the retailer saw its fuel costs jump by 20 percent, she said.
That increase was the first time the company had raised its rates since January 2007 - an effort to pass stable prices on to its customers, Dornan said. Whether CPL's rate will drop depends on what its competitors do, she said.
"That's always our thought process, is balancing the business and balancing customer needs," Dornan said. "The reality is that we can't outprice ourselves either."
Nueces Power Cooperative, a Robstown-based electricity provider that sells retail plans in the Rio Grande Valley, said its retail rates jumped by three cents a kilowatt hour - more than 16 percent - this summer.
One of Nueces Power's primary generators went offline for several weeks in June and the company had to purchase from the spot market, said Frank Wilson, who manages Nueces' competitive retail sales.
Prices on that market saw unprecedented spikes so high that in May and June that a handful of retailers went out of business.
"If you don't have a contract and you need power, doggone it, they're going to give it to you - whatever the price is," Wilson said.
The co-op has since dropped the increase, Wilson said.
"We are basically back at our pre-summer peak rate," he said.
The Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, which regulates the spot market, installed new emergency measures in June that capped how much retailers could be charged on the spot market. Those measures seem to have quelled the extreme price spikes, said Dan Jones, the independent market monitor for ERCOT.
But retailers generally keep their cards close when it comes to disclosing how much - or little - the company pays for the electricity it sells, Hadley said.
"The Public Utility Commission doesn't know (and) the customer doesn't know what a provider is actually paying for electricity," he said. "You only have their offer to go on."(Source: Themonitor)
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