Growth in Pennsylvania Shopping Craters as State Hits 2 Million Milestone, Questions Arise on Sustainability of Current Default Supplier Model

During the first week of February, Pennsylvania officially surpassed two million electric customers on competitive supply, according to the February 6 migration report from the PUC.

Link to 2/6/13 Weekly Migration Report

Matters has also developed a comparison of the migration levels from the 1/30/13 Report to the 2/6/13 Report.

Link to Matters' Comparison of Weekly Migration

Ironically, such a milestone came in the same week that saw a significant, across-the-board slowdown in the growth of migration to competitive supply. The growth in shopping customers from the PUC's 1/30 migration report to the 2/6 migration report is the lowest Matters can recall in the current growth environment, and is even lower than holiday-shortened weeks where switches are not completed due to meter reading schedules.

Specifically, aside from PPL, each of the utilities saw anemic residential shopping growth for the most recent week, compared to recent growth levels. The weekly net growth in residential shoppers at each utility from about January 30 to about February 6 (reporting date varies slightly by utility) was as follows:

Duquesne Light       202 
Met-Ed                60 
PECO                 535 
Penelec              351 
Penn Power           254 
PPL                1,286 
West Penn Power      287

Depending on service area, these numbers are one-half to two-thirds lower than the average weekly growth seen recently.

Shopping growth numbers can vary greatly week to week, so for now, we won't hit the panic button just yet.

However, should this trend continue, or if several distribution utilities start seeing a net decline in shopping (certain utilities have already seen weekly shopping losses occasionally, but not across-the-board at all utilities), which may occur as declining gross new shoppers can no longer offset normal shopper attrition due to move-outs and the placement of new customers automatically onto default service, it raises new questions regarding the PUC's still-unfinal "end state" retail market design, which would change little in terms of market design on a permanent basis, and would likely not lead to a fundamental shift in current shopping patterns which, as indicated from this week's stats, may be reaching a saturation point (at only 30%-44% of residential customers shopping depending on service area) under the utility-as-default-supplier model.