Retail Auction Supporter Esty Stepping Down as Head of Connecticut DEEP

Daniel Esty announced that he is stepping down as Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to return to a tenured professorship at Yale University.

During his time at DEEP, Esty had been a proponent of auctioning off retail electric customers on Standard Service to competitive retail suppliers.

Such a proposal was included in DEEP's 2013 comprehensive energy strategy, but did not win legislative approval last year.

At a September National Energy Marketers Association conference, Esty said that a "core theme" of DEEP's policy is consumer choice, and that choice is "fundamental" to Gov. Malloy's vision for the energy market. Esty noted that Standard Service customers "did systemically less well" than competitive retail supply customers in terms of generation costs over the past few years, as the default service structure lagged savings available from the retail market