Customer Choice, an Electrical Farce

Well, it's January and my "customer choice" electricity supplier option is just about up. "Customer Choice" was supposed to reduce electricity costs by making the purchase of electricity competitive. What a joke.

Let's face it. No power company wants to give up its customers, so why make it easy for someone to choose another supplier? Mine sure didn't about a year ago when we went through our first "customer choice" pilot program.

You have no idea what I'm talking about do you? I'm talking about a pilot program in Pennsylvania, "Customer Choice," which lets people choose among several electricity suppliers. Customers get to shop around for the best deal on electricity, although the electricity still gets delivered by the same utility you had in the first place. The only problem was, nobody made that free choice easy.

Thinking that anything that saves money was worth a try, I signed up for the pilot program. My electric company, to which I pay a small fortune each month, accepted me and 127,000 other people in the pilot program. It then sent me a list of 24 electricity suppliers and their phone numbers so I could shop by telephone for the best deal. Here is what I found out from the 18 who either (1) were not my current supplier, (2) listed a duplicate phone number, or (3) didn't have an 800 number.

Of these 18 suppliers, 8 did not offer residential service. Two didn't answer the telephone. One put me on hold for two days. One offered me my current rate per kilowatt hour, less ten percent. Two offered .0072 less than my current rate and four wouldn't quote a rate on the phone. I didn't bother to call four others.

So, "customer choice" looked to me like two companies, the two that offered .0072 less than my current supplier. Because I use a lot of electricity in an all-electric house, it looked like I could save as much as $325 a year. I was sure it wouldn't be that much after all the hidden costs got deducted, but it seemed like it was worth a try. With whatever I saved by choosing a new energy supplier, I could sign up for Internet access with my television cable company, which was also trying to resell me my current phone company's service for 5 percent less on phone calls, while charging $40 more a month for the Internet cable access. It sounded like a loss to me. I'm going back to school for a degree in finance so I can understand all this.

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