DEFG Releases 2011 ABACCUS Ranking of Retail Choice States

Distributed Energy Financial Group LLC this morning released its 2011 Annual Baseline Assessment of Choice in Canada and the United States (ABACCUS).

The 2011 state retail choice rankings do not contain any major surprises on the residential or commercial side. Texas, naturally, leads both the residential and commercial rankings.

Rankings, including a comparison to the prior-year rank, are available here (residential on the first tab, commercial on the second).

While not surprising, notable is that, for residential choice, Connecticut jumped back up to the fifth spot. Connecticut had been 7th in 2009, but fell to 12th in the 2010 rankings, largely due to new weightings in 2010 which placed a greater emphasis on the absolute market size. In 2010, this allowed less developed retail markets with simply larger volumes (namely Ohio) to be ranked ahead of Connecticut, which was and remains second only to Texas in percentage of residential accounts switched.

More notable is that Connecticut was ranked fifth in 2011 despite absolute market size remaining constant at a 4% weighting of the ABACCUS residential score. New metrics added for 2011 included "Consumer Access to Price Comparisons," weighted at 2%, and "Consumer Education & Awareness," weighted at 1%.

The ABACCUS report recommends, among other things, that, "The goal of retail electricity restructuring is to promote individual consumer choice in the selection of electric products and services." (emphasis added).

Mandated capacity purchases, such as the compulsory three-year forward commitment under the Reliability Pricing Model, are clearly inconsistent with such individual consumer choice.

The full ABACCUS report can be found on DEFG's website (free registration required)

Aside from providing an overview of choice and recapping recent developments, the report also discusses results from several recent DEFG surveys on choice and other end-user topics in the electric industry (see 9/2).