Electric Choice Works Best When You Stop Choosing

In Pennsylvania’s electricity market, doing nothing can count as shopping. Fail to respond when your supplier contract expires and you can find yourself in a new contract, with new prices and new terms. The customer has demonstrated a sophisticated preference by not opening the mail.

Spotlight PA reports that FirstEnergy wants regulators to change this arrangement. Instead of rolling a silent customer into another supplier contract, it would return them to the utility’s default service unless they actively choose otherwise. Suppliers object that this disrespects the customer’s last clear choice. Apparently a decision to try an introductory deal can speak fluently on your behalf long after the deal has ended.

The financial results suggest that this is an expensive form of representation. FirstEnergy’s filings put its residential shoppers’ combined extra cost at almost $82 million in 2025, even after counting customers who saved. Suppliers challenged the data; the administrative judges rejected those objections. Some people do willingly pay more for renewable power or a longer fixed price. That possibility is doing considerable work for a system that also lets a fixed-price contract become a variable one through silence.

Now follow the money after the bill arrives. Under another program, FirstEnergy buys suppliers’ customer accounts before collecting payment. The supplier gets paid. If the household cannot pay, the utility’s ratepayers ultimately absorb the uncollectible debt. This market has found a reliable customer for unreliable bills: everybody else.

FirstEnergy wants to limit that benefit to suppliers charging no more than its default rate when a customer signs up. Suppliers call that an unlawful price cap. A Town Square Energy witness warned that having to bear full credit risk could drive suppliers to cut their offerings or leave Pennsylvania. Their freedom to compete apparently depends on being spared one of competition’s less charming details: getting paid by the person who bought the product.

This is no declaration that utilities are charitable institutions. Spotlight PA distinguishes their criticized delivery profits from electricity supply, whose cost they must pass through without a markup. Nor have these proposals become rules. Administrative judges recommended them, but the commission can reject or change them; approved changes would initially cover FirstEnergy customers, starting next June.

The revealing defense comes from a former commissioner, now a consultant for a major supplier. Explaining the original renewal rule, he said regulators wanted customers to keep shopping. They accomplished that by allowing shopping to continue without further participation by the shopper. The supplier chooses the next terms, the silent customer inherits them, and the neighbors can inherit the unpaid balance. Everyone gets a role. Only one of them needs to make another decision.