Save money on electricity in Connecticut

Finally!

While this ridiculous thing they called "deregulation" passed in 1996... for some reason, you'd have been hard pressed to find anything that could've passed as "competition" for at least five years or more. And even when the first "competitor" offered competitively-priced electricity... I suspect most people were still unaware of it.

Personally, I knew of it in '03/04... but only because I follow this energy stuff so much.

The sole competitor (to CL&P) that I knew was called Levco... though it had at least one other name, Dominion. I switched to them about four years ago.

Then about two years ago I left Levco... not that I really wanted to leave them. They were cheaper than CL&P and their bill (for generation services) was simply a part of my CL&P bill (for transmission services). But due to a shortcoming in the CL&P billing system, the regulators decided that if I wanted to switch to clean electricity, I had to return to CL&P for their more expensive generation services. Anyway...

The end to this unnecessarily expensive situation is finally in sight. I've been informed that as of October of this year... CL&P is supposed to have their new billing system in place. Therefore, it will then be possible to both participate in the clean electricity program and purchase competitively-priced electricity generation services. To me, that's great news. Because in my effort to increase the use of clean electricity, I've been paying an unnecessarily high rate to CL&P for generation.

And now that I see the end in sight, I've decided to switch back to competitively-priced electricity... and I'll sign back up for clean electricity as soon as it's available... but in the meantime, I need to start saving some money.

But where can I find a helpful list of electricity generation providers?

I'd suggest starting here to find the cheapest rate. Then click the button that applies... and for most of you, I imagine that'll be the CL&P residential button. Then make sure you see the embedded scroll down window. It's at the bottom of that embedded window (as of today) where you will find the cheapest price of residential electricity in Cheshire.

The company is Public Power & Utility, Inc. And I'll probably switch to them within the next few days.

But so you know... this is not an endorsement. I have no idea if they're good or not. I'm just looking at this in strict commodity terms... like buying gas.

Furthermore, based on my understanding of this whole electric deregulation... similar to gasoline prices... the possibility of price volatility now exists. That is... suppliers may now increase and decrease prices... and I'm not sure how much (if any) notice they must give you, the customer... so that does make this a bit of a gamble from the perspective of the consumer. Nonetheless, for the time being... I'm going to take advantage of it and save a few bucks every month... I need to do everything I can at this point.

Hope that's helpful!

Tim White