AUBURN — Provider Power, parent company to Electricity Maine, will be sold to a Houston-based power utility for $28 million, company officials announced on Friday.

Kevin Dean, owner and president of the Auburn company, said the business will be sold to Spark Energy Inc.

“This is a good day for the people of Maine,” Dean said Friday night. “Spark Energy is a national company with 750,000 customers and they plan on keeping everybody here and creating more jobs.”

Spark Energy announced the purchase agreement in a quarterly earnings report, saying that Provider Power has roughly 125,000 customers primarily in Maine and New Hampshire.

Dean on Friday described the deal as nothing but a win for both Provider Power customers and employees.

“It’s an opportunity for us to offer all the customers gas and electricity. Right now, we can only offer them electricity,” Dean said. “(Spark Energy) also has access to four or five different suppliers, and so it’s an opportunity for us to grow. It was a great acquisition. It will be good for everybody.”

Provider Power was launched in 2011 and was described in company literature as the largest residential electricity supply company in northern New England. Dean owns the company with Emile Clavet, of Lewiston.

According to the Spark Energy earnings report, part of the $28 million would be payable to Provider Power at closing and the remainder will be paid through monthly installments over the next year.

Electricity rates for Provider Power customers are not expected to change. Additionally, Dean said, all current employees will remain in their jobs. He said the sale has already been announced to Provider Power employees.

“Everybody’s excited,” Dean said. “It’ll be awesome.”

As a competitive energy provider, known as a CEP, Electricity Maine supplies electricity to Mainers who sign up for their service. All Mainers have had the right to choose their power supplier since 2000, when state law restructured the electric utility industry and prohibited major utilities such as Central Maine Power and Bangor Hydro from both supplying and delivering electricity. Those utilities would deliver power, but someone else — a CEP — would supply it.

In spring 2011, 11 years after the electric industry was restructured, 0.5 percent of CMP’s residential customers got their electricity from CEPs, while about 84 percent of CMP’s large customers did.

Then, Electricity Maine opened for business.

Dean and business partner Clavet owned more than 20 businesses and used CEPs to power them for years. They got great deals on the electricity that ran their offices, but they had trouble finding a similarly great deal to power their houses. So the pair, along with then-business partners Kirk Nadeau and Peter Whitney, created Electricity Maine and devoted it to residential and small-business consumers.

In January of this year, a New Hampshire jury ruled against the companies after a seven-day trial over trade secrets.

In a unanimous ruling, the Rockingham County Superior Court jury returned an award of roughly $550,000 for damages.

The jury ruled that the defendants stole trade secrets and conspired to harm the plaintiff’s businesses by misappropriating customer contracts and accounts, said Christopher Carter, a Concord, N.H., attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the suit.

The plaintiffs — Halifax-American Energy Company, Freedom Logistics, Resident Power Natural Gas & Electric Solutions and PNE Energy Supply — are a family of New Hampshire-based companies of energy suppliers and brokers. Although the defendants are based in Maine, they are competitors in the energy market, Carter said.

At the time, the defendants’ attorney, Andru Volinsky, who has offices in Portland and Manchester, N.H., said the case was far from over, despite the jury’s verdict, which he characterized as “fairly inconsistent.”

“I don’t think anyone should take this as a reflection on their business practices,” he said. “The last word has not yet been spoken.”