National Grid Says Utility Price Appropriately Listed on N.Y. Power to Choose

New York's electric utilities should be able to continue posting their charges for commodity supply service on the Power to Choose website, as, "[t]his information helps consumers to make informed decisions regarding their choice of electric commodity supply," National Grid said in opposing a petition from the Retail Energy Supply Association.

As only noted in Matters, RESA has asked the Commission to remove the utility commodity rates from the Power to Choose site, citing the confusing nature of the rates (3/28). RESA noted that in some cases, utility rates are from the prior month, or only reflect estimates of the current month's rate, due to the nature of default service pricing and lack of a monthly rate which is known ahead of time.

However, National Grid noted that the prices that ESCOs report are prices available as of the first of the month, and are not necessarily the prices that customers will pay for that month. Therefore, "[t]he prices reported by both ESCOs and utilities are meant to be illustrative prices of the day of posting only, and are not a guarantee that that price will be available for the rest of that month," National Grid said.

"Given that both ESCO and utility prices posted are only a 'snapshot' and may change after posting to the website, this is not a basis for utilities alone to not be able to post prices," National Grid added.

National Grid said that it is not opposed to establishing some general uniform standards for utility electric commodity price reporting, and suggested a working group to address such issues.