Benefits of Competition

As electric competition takes hold, you will be able to choose from among competing electricity suppliers, pick companies that appeal to you in terms of price and renewable energy, and participate in new programs that help you save energy and lower your electric bill.

As electric competition opens doors to new options and innovations, your electric service in the not-too-distant future may be vastly different than it is today.

Remember telephone service 20 years ago? One company provided everything: local and long distance service — and the phones, too. You had no choices.

Today, companies line up to offer you more choices of calling plans and phones than you ever could have imagined. The technology innovations driven by a competitive market brought us phones that can fit in the palm of our hands, connect us to the Internet, take photographs and even hold our personal music collections.

Something similar is about to happen with electricity. Clean, renewable energy. Time-of-use pricing. Customer-owned generation. Smart meters and smart grids. Super-efficient appliances. All these and more will be helped by competition.

Competition will change the way we think about electricity service; 20 years from now, the idea of electric service from one company with no choices will be as antiquated as vinyl records and black-and-white television.

Why don’t I have all these choices already?
Pennsylvania has had electric competition since the 1990s, but the benefits for individual consumers have been limited because of controls on utility rates since then. Rate caps have kept us tied to the old, government-regulated world of electricity.

Some Pennsylvania utilities already have moved to competition. Customers of those companies have more choices. For example, more than 20 percent of Duquesne Light’s customers in the Pittsburgh area have chosen other companies to supply their electricity.