Shopping for household energy has revived in Maryland, thanks to a drop in wholesale prices, frustration about BGE's winter heating bills and worries about even higher electricity prices to come.
Residential users who dump BGE's or Pepco's standard electricity package could save $20 a month this summer by buying energy instead from merchants such as Washington Gas Energy Services or a program being rolled out by several chambers of commerce. Natural gas prices have plunged, too. (I'll write more about them in Wednesday's paper.)
The electricity savings aren't huge, but there's no reason not to take them. Until policymakers fix flawed wholesale markets and increase Central Maryland's kilowatt supply, it's at least temporary self-help. There has also never been a better time to buy nonpolluting, wind-generated electricity, which has become cheaper than BGE's standard price for the first time.
If you're mad about the sticker price from BGE and its suppliers, start shopping around.
Thanks to deregulation, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. and Pepco no longer own generators but buy power in the wholesale market.
The idea behind deregulation was that independent vendors would buy their own kilowatts, undercut the utility's "standard offer" price and resell them to BGE or Pepco customers. (BGE or Pepco is always your utility, but the suppliers sending juice through their wires can change.)
While this has worked for business customers, the residential deals have rarely been any good. Thanks to state regulations, however, BGE and Pepco locked up much of their 2009 and 2010 supply at very high, 2008 prices. BGE's standard price for summer will be even worse than the prices causing pain this winter. So now independents are buying at recession-depressed levels and making better offers.
"The market now is just tremendous," said Richard Anderson, managing principal for Columbia-based CQI Associates, which is reselling household electricity through chambers of commerce. "We're seeing prices go even lower. And I think we're going to be seeing this, I would say, for six to eight months."
It's not that tremendous for consumers. Mid-Atlantic-wide juice prices (for July delivery) have fallen by more than half from last summer's peaks and 30 percent from their average the past few years.
