I figured that something was up when Simple Power removed all of their plans from Power To Choose sometime last week or over the weekend. So today I wasn’t surprised when a trip to the Simple Power website redirected to a page at Cirro Energy with the following message:
We appreciate your business as a valued Simple Power customer, and want to share some exciting news. Simple Power customers are now part of Cirro Energy, a Dominion Resources company. Your service is about to get even better with the backing of a Fortune 200 company that has been serving electric customers for over 100 years.
Rest assured, there will be no changes to your current contract and there is nothing you need to do at this time.
Cirro Energy has been operating in the Texas electricity market pretty much since it first deregulated in 2001. Cirro is based out of Richardson, Texas and they have a strong brand awareness in the Dallas area. Additionally their parent company, Dominion Resources, is a huge energy generation and transportation company that operates in the middle part of America.
I’m not certain exactly how many customers Cirro Energy is adding from their purchase of Simple Power, but it is a fairly substantial number. More and more it seems like the bigger Texas electricty providers are purchasing and absorbing some of their competition in the retail electricity markets. A couple months back, Spark Energy purchased the customer book of Abacus energy after they ran into financial trouble due to the harsh winter storm that engulfed the state and its’ effect on electricity prices.
Customers who had a contract with Simple Power should keep in mind that in Texas, they have electric choice. That means that just because Cirro Energy has purchased the customers and contracts, customers will still likely have the chance to select a different electricity provider if they don’t want to go forward with Cirro.