Working paper

Pathways to Meeting Growing Electricity Demand Through Expanding Customer Choice: A Review of Emerging Hybrid Power Choice Policies and Practices  

State policies determine the degree to which commercial and industrial electricity customers can choose specified power supplies in the United States. Policies that enable customer choice have helped customers to manage electricity costs and achieve sustainability objectives. Customer choice could also mitigate the risk of increasing electricity demand leading to higher retail electricity prices. Here, we explore how state-level policies have resulted in varying degrees of power choice in the United States. We focus on 18 states in the western and southeastern U.S. without wholesale power markets or retail electricity competition. These states have implemented hybrid policies such as utility green tariffs and direct access provisions that grant customer choice to subsets of commercial and industrial customers. We explore how these hybrid choice policies have expanded power choice and helped commercial and industrial customers to manage costs and achieve sustainability objectives. We posit that expanded customer choice could complement other measures to mitigate potential impacts from rapidly increasing electricity demand on retail electricity prices.